“Come. See what your type has never come to see.” And with that, Bull turned, revealing his
size. He was as big as Andy's father, and slippery. Andy had to hold tight to stop from slipping off the
Bull's pectoral fin. Andy was pulled along next to long cone shaped head of Bull. His head was slightly
flattened, out of which bulged a grapefruit sized eye the pupil surrounded by a halo of gold. The bull's
scales caught the faintest hint of moonlight as he swam. Each scale glimmered an olive green,
lightening as they moved towards his belly, which shown like the moon above.
“I am the last Bull. Once, years and years ago when I was born, the rivers swelled with Bulls.
The pikeminnows were the masters of the river. Now, only a few eggs survive each year. Those that do
survive are stunted. Once when the river ran thick with food and silt, a growing pikeminnow would
grow so fast they would worry about splitting open. Now those times are past. Not one of the new ones
has growth half to of my size.”
“Our young are fostered by eddies. Since the Wall was built by your kind, nothing has been the
same. Now the back waters, the nurseries which grew bulls, have almost disappeared. Soon after the
Wall, the Others invaded. Your kind calls them the trout or suckers, but to the Pikeminnow they are the
robbers and tyrants. Once we ruled the river. That is no longer. The robbers and tyrants have taken it as
their own, and now the river suffers under their blight.”
The old Bull's voice was deep, reverberating across the river floor and through the filamentous
green chlorophyta as he continued, “When I was young we fed upon the weak and unfit of the lower
fishes. We took the ones too slow, too unhealthy, or too unlucky to escape our jaws. Only the fittest
survived and under our maintenance the lower fishes and the species below them thrived. Since the
Wall and the invasion by the Others our habitat has suffered. They eat everything, or not enough. The
lower fishes are the vict ims of this invasion. Their populations have been been thrown askew, and
because of this the whole river habitat has suffered.”
After which, the bull became quiet and stopped swimming. Suddenly, and remarkably for the
first time since being in the river, Andy became nervous. His stomach began to churn.