R.I.P., Old Sneaky

I had a fish for a while. He was fat and orange, and he lived at my house before I did. I don't even know how old he was. I don't know if he was put in the pond by the people who lived here before us, or the people before them. He emerged from hibernation this spring, and impressed me with... well, with his ability to hibernate, and I called him Old Sneaky.

I didn't see much of him the first couple of months. He spent a lot of time hiding in the cinder blocks in the unknown depths (3 feet) of the pond. The water was green and murky, and the pump didn't work, but I checked every day, and never saw him float up dead. Sometimes I'd catch an orange flash when the sun was at a good angle, and I knew that he was just fine, and that his ecosystem was balanced enough.

We took in two refugee goldfish from a friend's preschool at the end of May. I was afraid they wouldn't survive in the uncultivated outdoor conditions - or that Sneaky, some ten times their size, would make a delicious snack out of them. To my surprise, the three formed a little gang. Social creatures, apparently.

The white one with the red spot on his head stayed close to Sneaky's side, while the all-orange one was usually a few inches behind. They ate the algae, and terrorized the tadpoles, and they seemed happy (as far as I could tell about non-mammals). They doubled in size, though they were still considerably smaller than Sneaky. And since the water didn't stink, I pretty much left things alone, just topping it off with the hose anytime I could see that a couple inches had evaporated.

The Fourth of July set in motion the turning of the fate of the fish. Would that I ever had gotten a cover for the little pond, that cover for which I was measuring the day I discovered Sneaky. Cleaning up the yard on the fifth of July, I realized that fallen soot had turned the pond from green to grayish-green, and that it was very likely some firework debris had landed there as well, and that sounded unhealthy for even the bad-assest of fish. That was when I resolved to clean the pond.

Hans and I spent two days on that, which was a day more than I'd imagined the project would take. We lost the two smaller fish to the un-aerated holding tank. Sneaky was just starting to look sluggish when we deemed the pond "clean enough." Once returned to his newly-sanitized home, pump working, water bubbling prettily over a slope of rocks (and the Saint Francis statue), he picked up his old pace.

The little ones must have socialized him - now he made sure to swim near the top when he felt approaching footsteps. I planned to get him a new friend or two. We also started feeding him fishypellets, to make up for the lack of algae. He would watch us drop a few on the water's surface, approach slowly, then make a sort of an upward pounce, sucking the pellet into his mouth and descending with it. I talked to him when I visited, called him "Sneaky McSneakerson" and "Sneakalicious." For the first time, I thought a non-mammal might make a good pet after all.

But this week, in the blistering heat, the algae overtook the pond beneath the surface. It choked the pump, which quit again. Hans had been outside early this morning, and the pump was working. I left earlier than usual, without even visiting the pond. Even if I'd known it had stopped, I probably would have credited Sneaky with being a tough enough critter to survive for a few hours while I took care of other things. I hate to think of the agony his final hour must have been.

Hans saw him first, and broke the news to me when I got home. I didn't really believe him. When I first found Sneaky, his alive-ness startled me, even though that orange glimmer was a foot down. Tonight, I know for an empirically observed fact: dead fish float. Their scales dry out above the water, and they don't shine like they did in their reflective dance.

After I had viewed the departed, Hans scooped him up in the net -- how he hated that net! Catching him for the pond-cleaning took the better part of an hour -- and gave him an ecologically useful burial in the compost bin. We will drain the pond this weekend, and cover it for the rest of the year. Maybe we'll try a couple new fish in the spring, or maybe we'll just have aquatic plants.

Goodbye, Old Sneaky. May your scales shimmer in the Deep Beyond.