I mentioned last week the red carp in the waterfall pond, and I have also shown them previously, though this has all been in passing, since I was concentrating on the fecund white fish. But I should talk about them today in detail, though this will be with some sorrow for of the ten I got way back last June there are now only four left.

I had put four of them in the waterfall pond, which is covered by netting all the time since the fish in it, deep though the pond is, can easily be prey not just to birds but to the ghastly polecat who prowls there, and whose droppings I have sometimes found on the edge. But sometimes I forget to replace it, after I have fed the fish in the mornings, or when I open it while I walk in the evenings to see how they are getting on.

But it was not because of that that one of them died. When I got back from the cottage a couple of weeks back, Kavi told me that one of them had been found dead in the water. He was duly buried in the rose garden on the balcony. Unfortunately one of the four catfish which I had put in the upstairs tank with the white fish had vanished, how we could not tell, for it was unlikely that a predator had been able to reach in. Perhaps the tank had overflowed for the heavy rain and he had floundered on the balcony and then been taken away.

#t the end of the first week in Octobert may have been because of that that, having survived there happily for three months and more, one of them went missing

The other six carp were distributed in June into three ponds, the yellow tub which had once had flourishing lotuses, though now only leaves remain; the waterfall pond since the last red fish there had been moved to the upright tank; and to the pond under the ehala tree to join the two white gourami, or rather large pink ones as they had by now become.

The two in the lotus pond frolicked happily, together with the two white and the two grey gourami there, but then one vanished and then the other. I presume that was a predator, for fish have gone from there before, notably the mate of what I had been told was the white gourami who still remains, very different from the pink ones, and perhaps in fact of a different species. He had seemed traumatized for weeks, which is why I thought his mate had been spirited away, but he now appears all the time.

The first picture shows him with the two pink fish and also, dimly seen at the left, just next to a pink one, one of the two grey gourami that remain there.

The second picture is of the red carp while they were there, the first picture showing just the one, faintly discernible towards the top. The next I think shows both of them, one of them clearly, the other under the water on the right.

The fourth picture is of the dead carp, and the fifth another intimation of mortality, the first of the angel babies of last October to die in the tank where they were born, in the middle of September, also buried beneath roses.