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and there were some who even bit themselves, because they believed Guruk wanted it, and I was filled with pieces of fish, with gills and eyes and fins, and fish were flying in the air in an ecstatic dream of leaping up the falls of the river Spey, ye-es, it was fluttering fins and snapping jaws and plopping in the water, and Bruno let out a high-pitched, husky scream. “All together now,” he screamed, ah, he was one brawny muscle contracting, and his eyes—you should have seen them—they were bloodshot and bulging like the telescope eyes of the box fish in my blackest depths, and his little snorkle was hard as the armor on a scorpion fish, he couldn’t even remember his own name, and he was certain that Guruk was the right name, yes, if he owes me an apology, it’s for turning into a blood-filled, hate-filledshell, and was I scared; in my heart I shouted, Bruno, Bruno, but he didn’t hear me, he suddenly saw the fish you call Yorick, or whatever, this Yorick who was smaller and weaker than the other fish, I can’t understand how he made it as far as he did, and Bruno suddenly glared at him screaming with hatred, grinding his bared teeth and snorting, can you believe it? Because sud-den-ly he despised this Yorick, this disgrace to the pride inflating them all and making them strong and glorious (so they thought), and before I managed to see who or what, he pounced on him with a roar, with an open mouthful of teeth, and luckily a great big wave came along, a cold, extremely salty wave I’d been storing in my deepest cellars, and smacked him in the face, not too hard, of course, because it had orders, and it threw him back, far away from Yorick, and only then did Bruno shake himself as if remembering something, and pushed his eyes back into his head with his two hands, and a fast little waveling was already on its way to me, one you can always count on to bring you the most important news—and if you have an especially delicate mission, like returning a bouquet of violets, for instance, then this is the wave for it—and this was the one that brought me the news that Bruno had calmed down, that his muscles had stopped trembling, and a few minutes later he started to swim a human stroke in Yorick’s direction, and he saw the little fish floating in the water like a corpse thinking this was it, his end was near, at Bruno’s hand yet, and Bruno swam toward him, and I, still a little worried, was about to release another cold, extremely salty wave from a distance just in case, but there was no need after all, because Bruno stopped in front of Yorick, and started open-closing to show the little fish he no longer had anything to fear, and again his heart was filled with compassion (I want to take this opportunity to apologize to the Shetland Islanders for the sudden flood: at that moment I simply lost control). And so they faced each other, and overhead the sky was full of flying fish whose heads were barely connected to their bodies now, showing the island side, and Bruno dipped his head in and looked with open eyes at a convoy of small electric eels passing very slowly and illuminating the water below with a pale, quiet blue light, and what luck, I think now, what luck that I happened to bring them here just then, and with his head still in the water, Bruno could hear Laprik’s voice loud and clear again, and he was calming down and breathing slowly, and the clearest sign that he was himself again was the pain of the infection on both sides, above the ribs, and he finned with his handsshoreside, and Yorick finned with him, and thus, with all hell breaking loose around them, the two began to set up a proper dolgan, and moments later other fish also organized, and Bruno saw that the fish you call Napoleon hadn’t returned, and there was a different fish in his place swimming shoreside—and do me a favor, don’t name that one, you read too many animal stories—and now more fish were returning out of the darkness, some of them looked terrible, their faces were bloody and their jaws were crooked, and they came quietly to a halt there and just finned and calmed themselves down and waited for the big ning to organize, sensing that the location of the ning inside them had shifted a little, more to one side, it seemed, because nearly a quarter of the shoal was torn out and galloping with Guruk, but maybe this is what made Laprik all the stronger with those that remained. They felt him in the water and in their blood and in every gill and scale, and I listened with them and inhaled so deeply I made a mistake with the ebb tide off the coast of Spain, which I didn’t even notice till the shattered moon turned red (she does most of the work, it’s true, because I can’t be expected to handle everything), but I didn’t have the patience to listen to the angry chattering of that albino ninny, because I was so tense on account of my present to Bruno, and believe me, Neuman, if he had so much as raised a finger against Yorick, I never would have given it to him, and you should have seen how little Yorick suddenly forgot the dolgan, and swam past Bruno open-closing fast, and Bruno answered Yorick’s open-close, but didn’t understand what the fish wanted from him because their open-close can mean such a variety of things, salmon language is so meager, go know what they want, but Yorick wouldn’t come back to his place, and he stayed in front of Bruno, where he started jumping higher and higher, and