By Nancy Parshall
Maybe I should have known that a tabloid story titled, “My Glorious Days and Nights Prawn Trawling in Australia” might not mean I should hop a plane for twenty-two hours to experience it. Maybe I should have known that September is late in the prawn trawling season and the waters would have been fished thin, that the big money had already been made. Maybe I should have known that agreeing to go out to sea on a broken-down trawler, the only girl with two men, strangers, wasn’t the best idea. Maybe I should have known that once out in the Coral Sea, we wouldn’t see land again for six weeks. Maybe I should have known there would be sharks, big ones. Stinging Bearded Ghouls. Poisonous sea snakes. Riptides. A sociopathic deckhand and a horny skipper. But I didn’t know any of that. What I did know was that at twenty-four, with little money, no return plane ticket, and no friends in this foreign land, I was being offered a chance to experience another world, to experience myself in that world.
On the prawn trawler, we pulled up octopuses most nights, not tens of them, but a few, and I’d watch them after they were dumped on the sorting table. Sometimes they, like the squid, would squirt black ink, which worked in the water like a black curtain. On the table, though, the ink just sat in a puddle and the octopuses had to find other means of survival, which meant looking for an exit.
Of all the sea creatures we pulled up, I felt most attached to the octopuses, probably because they were able to communicate their distress. I saw it in the colors racing through their bodies, marbled pinks and blues, rusts and browns. I saw it in their frantic push to escape on their own. They’d slither across the table and down the side to the floor where with one of their legs, they’d feel for a way out, eventually finding a scupper, the hole where water drains from the deck. They’d send an arm through to check what was there, to feel for the water, and once they knew they’d found the path, they’d push their bodies through the tight hole.
I remember the first time I saw it happen. I said, “What should I do? This octopus is going to get stuck.”
Scotty, the deckhand, laughed. “Nope,” he said, “Watch it. It can get through holes tighter than a rat’s ass.” I turned from the table to watch the octopus send its arms through first before squeezing its jellylike body through a three-inch scupper. While watching it escape, I looked over the outside rail and for the first time, I noticed dolphins right there, swimming along next to the boat, next to me, diving in and out of the water, fins appearing and disappearing.
“There’s dolphins here,” I said as though I was announcing something Scotty didn’t know, something he’d be excited about.
“You’re just figuring that out? Sharks too.” He set down his sorting bat. “You know they follow us and come close when they hear the winch, right?” He grabbed a mackerel, came over to my side of the table, and threw it to the nearest dolphin, just like you might throw a treat to a dog. The dolphin saw it coming and reached up to make a perfect catch.
“Dolphins like mackerel best,” Scotty said. “Pitch them something else, and they’ll ignore it.” He reached for a fish that dolphins don’t like. “Watch this,” he said, and threw it just behind a dolphin’s head. The dolphin ignored it. Then he threw a mackerel behind that same dolphin’s head. It popped out of the water, doubled back, and caught it.
I’d been throwing the octopuses overboard as soon as I saw them, or at least after I’d thrown the snakes off. I wanted to get them back in the water where they’d be comfortable, where they could resume their lives, not knowing that octopuses are territorial and we’d removed them from the territory where they knew where to hide, how to be safe. I wondered how long it would take them to get to the bottom, if they’d swim down or just float, if they could shoot ink to keep predators away. I worried for them.
One night, as I reached across the sorting table for an octopus, I said, “I think it’s important to get the octopuses off first.”
“To save them?” Scotty smirked.
“Yeah. They’re traumatized. They need to get off.”
Scotty shook his head and kept sorting, pitching prawns in different buckets based on size and type, sending bycatch down the slide like chute. “You know they’re the sharks’ favorite food, right? And dolphins love them.”
I froze, my feet cemented to the floor. Without thinking, I’d been allowing the octopuses to drop straight into the path of the dolphins and sharks that were swarming the boat.
The next night while sorting prawns, I felt something moving up my leg, something I’d never felt before. An octopus we’d pulled up in the net must have made a wrong turn and missed the scupper, but how was that possible? Their eyesight is known to be incredible. Surely the octopus knew that the water was down, but she was climbing up. I reached down and gently pried her suction cups off my leg. Like a beginner might do when learning to throw a discus, I bent my knees, turned at the waist, and quickly swung back around, my arms level with my head. I sent that octopus flying as far to the side of the trawler as I could, as far from the path of the sharks and dolphins huddled up under the bycatch chute. As she sailed into the darkness, probably twenty-five feet, she spun like a frisbee with all eight limbs stretched out. A splash of moonlight marked the spot where she hit the water.
Nancy Parshall splits her time between Northwestern Michigan College, where she teaches English, and the animal rescue and sanctuary she runs with her husband. Her writing has been featured in KYSO Flash, Dunes Review, Bear River Review, Stoneboat Literary Journal, and others, and has been nominated twice for the Best of the Net awards. Her fiction chapbook Proud Flesh won the 2017 Michigan Writers chapbook competition. Nancy is currently at work on a memoir that focuses on six weeks she spent working on a prawn trawler in Northeast Australia.