A pickerel lies in wait.

July 6.

July 6, 2012

In selecting a site in the country, let a lane near your house, grass-grown, cross a sizable brook where is a watering-place. 

I see a pickerel in the brook showing his whitish greedy upper lips projecting over the lower. How well concealed he is! He is generally of the color of the muddy bottom or the decayed leaves and wood that compose it, and the longitudinal white stripe on his back and the transverse ones on his sides are the color of the yellowish sand here and there exposed. He heads upstream and keeps his body perfectly motionless, however rapid the current, chiefly by the motion of his narrow pectoral fins, though also by the waving of his other fins and tail as much as necessary, which a frog might mistake for that of weeds. Thus, concealed by his color and stillness, like a stake, he lies in wait for frogs or minnows. Now a frog leaps in, and he darts forward three or four feet.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 6, 1852

See July 12, 1854 ("There is a constant motion of the pectoral fins and also a waving motion of the ventrals, apparently to resist the stream, and a slight waving of the anal, apparently to preserve its direction. It darts off at last by a strong sculling motion of its tail.")See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Pickerel