fallclimber

The fallclimber is, depending on your point of view, either a fish that went wrong or something that always intended to be this. Van's description is: like salmon. He said it with the air of a man completing a sentence he found mildly unsatisfactory. The body shape is right — elongated, tapered, built for moving through current. The surface is not. The skin is replaced, at every point you would expect skin, by overlapping plates in the same tones as the stone it is currently climbing: grey-green at the weir face, ash-white where the mortar has been replaced, nearly black where the bioluminescent moss grows thickest. What appear to be fins are not fins. They are limbs, jointed in three places, ending in hook-tips curved with a precision that speaks less of evolution and more of intent.

I watched them for some time. Six or seven of them on the face of the upper Loxley weir — the count is not reliable, because they move in a way that makes you uncertain whether you are counting the same individual twice. Working independently, at intervals, pausing wherever they found a hold and moving when they did not. The scrape of hook-tips working into mortar cracks is audible above the river noise. Each one moves with the deliberateness of something that has done this many times and sees no reason to do it differently. At the top of the weir, they go over the lip and are gone. I have not been able to establish where they go. I am not confident I have looked carefully enough.

They do not initiate contact. I was standing at the base of the apron for perhaps twenty minutes and was noticed once — the nearest specimen, about a metre up the face, turned its head briefly in my direction. Eyes the colour of deep water, no obvious pupils. Then it turned back and continued. I was not assessed as a threat. I was registered as irrelevant, which amounts to the same thing until it does not. The fallclimber responds to noise, sudden movement, and anything that falls into the water near the apron pool. It does not defend territory in any way you can predict, which is worse than territorial behaviour in every practical respect, because territorial behaviour at least communicates an edge.

The organic network's entry notes ascending behaviour consistent with migratory patterns analogous to salmon and sea trout. Van has not contradicted this. He has also declined to elaborate on it, which is his way of indicating that the entry is not wrong so much as incomplete. I have observed that fallclimber arrivals at the upper Loxley weir correlate with the presence of Lonik in the Wisewood above. Whether the one causes the other, or both are responding to something further upstream, is not established. Van wrote one note on the subject. It said: irrelevant to current work.

Field note, Van Hallam: ascending behaviour terminates at the weir lip. Subsequent location unknown. Do not attempt to follow.

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