Update for 77074HEADmain

1 files changed, 3488 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/77074-0.txt b/77074-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9905d08
--- /dev/null
+++ b/77074-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,3488 @@
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77074 ***
+
+
+                                THE RUN
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+                                The Run
+
+                                JOHN HAY
+
+                       Doubleday & Company, Inc.
+                         Garden City, New York
+                                  1959
+
+
+
+
+        _Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 59-11598_
+
+                  _Copyright © 1959 by John Hay_
+                       _All Rights Reserved_
+             _Printed in the United States of America_
+                          _First Edition_
+
+
+
+
+                        To my father and mother:
+                          Clarence Leonard Hay
+                                  and
+                           Alice Appleton Hay
+
+
+
+
+                               FOREWORD
+
+
+This book mirrors an attempt to go farther afield, from one man’s
+center. Its writing represented a kind of migration in itself. We all
+undertake them, whether we like it or not, near or far. To follow on
+the track of fish, birds, or any other animals, might be both discovery
+and repetition, because it might mean to go exhaustively into the
+nature of being alive. The alewives helped to open the world for me,
+although the outcome of their circling was always beyond knowing.
+
+Above all this book is about one race which has an equal status with
+us in the great motions of this planet. Men may be highest, or so men
+say, but they cannot be complete without granting equal dignity to the
+unsurpassed uniqueness of other forms of life. One ought to be able to
+say: “Here is a life not mine. I am enriched.”
+
+Not a great deal has been written specifically about alewives, but the
+three published works I found most useful as an introduction were:
+_Fishes of the Gulf of Maine_, by Bigelow and Schroeder,
+published by the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service; _A Report on
+the Alewife Fisheries of Massachusetts_, by David Belding,
+published by the Massachusetts Department of Conservation in 1921; and
+_Factors Influencing the Migration of Anadromous Fishes_,
+by Gerald Collins, Fishery Bulletin No. 73 of the Fish and Wildlife
+Service. I also received some helpful information from the Fisheries
+Research Board of Canada; and the Department of Sea and Shore Fisheries
+of the State of Maine, as well as its Department of Inland Fisheries
+and Game. Maine has been undertaking an important research and
+educational program with a view to rehabilitating the alewife fisheries.
+
+I am greatly indebted to Hal Turner of Woods Hole, Dr. David Belding
+of Welfleet, and John Burns of the Massachusetts Department of Natural
+Resources, Division of Marine Fisheries, for answering my questions so
+readily and courteously; and of course, much thanks to Harry Alexander.
+He guards a good run.
+
+
+
+
+                               CONTENTS
+
+
+       Foreword                         5
+
+     I  Waiting Weather                  9
+
+    II  Arrival                         19
+
+   III  Dried Fish: an Informal History 27
+
+    IV  The Reproductive Urge           45
+
+     V  The Nature of an Alewife        53
+
+    VI  Puzzles and Speculations        63
+
+   VII  Port of Entry                   75
+
+  VIII  The Common Night                83
+
+    IX  The Hunt                        89
+
+     X  Transition: Salt and Fresh      99
+
+    XI  Up the Valley                  111
+
+   XII  The Imperfect Ladder           121
+
+  XIII  Persistence                    129
+
+   XIV  Spawning: the Dance            141
+
+    XV  The Return                     151
+
+   XVI  The Young Follow After         161
+
+   XVII  The Power of Fragility        175
+
+  XVIII  Going Out                     183
+
+
+
+
+                                   I
+
+                            Waiting Weather
+
+
+It was in March, in comparative ignorance about their lives and habits,
+that I started looking for the alewives. This is the time of year when
+a few forerunners usually come in from the sea, in spite of the cold
+airs and waters that still grip the narrow land of Cape Cod. I had
+seen these migrant fish before, during a previous season, but from the
+road, so to speak. I had never followed them as if they challenged
+communication.
+
+The place I started from was the Herring Run in the town of Brewster,
+part of a little migratory inland route by which the alewives travel up
+from Cape Cod Bay to the inland ponds where they spawn. At the Herring
+Run the waters of Stony Brook pour down from an outlet north of these
+ponds--three of them, all interconnected: Walkers, Upper Mill, and
+Lower Mill. The flow then goes over a one-and-a-half-mile stretch,
+first over the fishway, a series of concrete ladders and resting pools
+built through rocks and high land, the area of the Herring Run, then
+through a valley of abandoned cranberry bogs bounded by low hills; and
+finally it elbows through tidal marshes to Paine’s Creek, its mouth
+on Cape Cod Bay. This little river was called Sauquatuckett by the
+Indians and was subsequently known as the Setuckett River, Mill Brook,
+and Winslow’s Brook. At its falling headwaters the first water mill in
+this region was built, and one of the later mill buildings is still
+standing--it has an old water wheel that is still in working order and
+is used to grind corn as a tourist attraction. By the time the mass of
+tourists arrive the alewife migration, aside from the “fry,” hatched in
+the ponds and returning to salt water, has about run its course. They
+can still take pictures of the old mill in July or August, but they
+have probably missed a more vital antiquity.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The initial facts about the migration are these: each year, close
+in time to the vernal equinox when the sun crosses the equator and
+day and night are of equal length, this member of the herring family
+begins to enter innumerable inlets and tidal estuaries down the
+length of the Atlantic coast, from Newfoundland to the Carolinas.
+Scientifically known as _Pomolobus pseudoharengus_ (also, under an
+older classification, _Alosa pseudoharengus_, along with species
+of shad), the alewife is an “anadromous” fish, meaning that like the
+salmon and shad, but unlike its relative the sea herring, it grows in
+salt water but leaves it as a three- or four-year-old adult, to spawn
+in fresh. A “catadromous” fish, like the eel, does just the opposite,
+growing up in fresh water and spawning in the sea.
+
+The alewives, I learned, were due to come in from the Bay when the
+temperature of the brackish water that flowed into it was warmer than
+that of the salt water. In fact, a local resident had already noticed
+a group of eight or ten alewives of apparently large size that had
+appeared in the brook a few days before. Their arrival was a token
+that the land, though still cold, was warming up more quickly than the
+sea--just about the time a few male red-winged blackbirds showed up
+too, in advance of housekeeping. But if some began their migration in
+March, the first big run was not likely to come until the middle of
+April or later, depending on how long and cold a winter it had been.
+During an exceptionally cold season the alewives might not appear in
+volume until the first days in May. Where were they now, and what were
+they doing? Schooling somewhere offshore, and waiting to move in?
+
+I stood on the beach and the sea still looked and felt and smelled
+as raw and cold as winter--iron-gray, massive, keeping its
+counsels--although, as I understood it in an incomplete way, the waters
+were undergoing seasonal adjustments at varying depths in the shallow
+coastal areas. Spring changes would begin to take effect. Perhaps I
+knew them, smelled them, on the sea wind. I was impatient. I wondered
+what specific combination of length of life, biological responses,
+currents, tides, the composition of the sea water, might impel one
+roving school of fish to leave the sea and start inland.
+
+March, that season of the whole air hesitating and blowing back and
+forth, the circuit of the compass, especially in low-wooded seaside
+lands, is a time of hesitation, preparation, and violence. It is
+waiting weather.
+
+The tempo had changed--it was late in February I had felt it. The
+winter fist began to unclench a little. Before another day of frost,
+sleet, or wet snow, spring rain might bucket down in the evening,
+or freak lightning might crack the sky. The days were gray and raw
+more often than not, but when the sun shone it was sheer grace. One
+night there were wands of light shuddering against great, shimmering,
+flushed curtains on the sky wall over Cape Cod Bay--being the legendary
+northern lights, grandly named aurora borealis. The following day was
+cold, dull, and obdurate again.
+
+Then when the temperature began to ease up occasionally from the
+thirties to the forties, as March went on, a surprise snowstorm came
+howling in. Poles snapped; wires broke, and the resulting power
+failures lasted for several days, during which some people rediscovered
+fate. The radio, before communication was entirely cut, sounded off
+about the inexorable as cars and trains were stopped and men died after
+shoveling snow. In that whole weather always cast beyond complaint or
+prediction, this storm only represented a temporary arrest. Our primal
+agent the sun still had the season’s growth in hand, more various than
+fate; which is not to minimize the tragedies along the way. Some days
+after the storm I found four or five male bluebirds in spring plumage
+all huddled dead in the bottom of a birdhouse--a pathetic brilliance.
+The entrance had probably been blocked by wet snow after they had taken
+refuge there.
+
+As the growing sunlight played a steady tune, so the alewives, perhaps
+less affected by local storms than we, were due to come in, if only in
+small numbers. Where were they? I stopped by the Herring Run where the
+brook was full of loud cold water, but empty of fish. All the same,
+Harry Alexander, the alewife warden, was there, giving a display of
+public confidence. He had taken up his annual stance on Stony Brook
+Road, which bridges the run, and with a truculent punch of his lips
+against his pipestem, he made ready for the coming season.
+
+In a world era, this is a local man. He has the cast and sense of place
+about him and some of its accumulated age. I have seen it in other
+men who have spent their lives in the same country environment. He is
+heavy, ruddy, thickset--an old boat in a Cape port. During his tenure
+on the alewives committee he seems to have developed a proprietary
+attitude about the run which probably exceeds his authority, but very
+few people object.
+
+He certainly makes more of the job than the small wages he gets from
+the town; and in years past the alewives have had a defender in him
+at Town Meeting, when discussion came up about the amount of money
+allotted to the Herring Brook. From a naturalist’s point of view, he
+can hardly be said to have much sentiment in him about these fish as
+part of the living community. Too many of them would stink the place
+up, or so he affirms. I remember him at a hearing, speaking to a public
+official in this wise, “Ever see my brook? Our brook, I mean. No dirty,
+stinking mess up there!”
+
+So, in his special way, he keeps the area clean, and is the herring’s
+defender and interpreter. I think he likes to conceive of himself as
+a kind of rascal. To those who ask him about the fish he is liable
+to dispense information that is an outrage to the innocent. Two
+Connecticut schoolteachers were once directed to the run, and came
+away saying the alewives were often so plentiful that the Cape Codders
+shingled their houses with them. (This is part of what he has called
+“My fight with the public.”)
+
+So, a “Cape Cod character,” personification of an old locality ... but
+I don’t think he would like me to write too well of his character.
+That day as I lingered at the run he gave me a lowering look. What was
+I interested in the fish for? Well, if I’d take the information from
+him, we could make ourselves a pile of money by selling the story to
+_Collier’s_ magazine. Did I ever hear about the Indians
+shooting these fish from the trees?
+
+Facts, Harry. Facts.
+
+“Well, naow, I’ll tell you. With the shore wind blowing on the long
+flats out there and the water ruffling up like that, the fish don’t
+come in much. But they’ll be along. Yes-yes.”
+
+So was there nothing to do but take tentative steps and wait? The
+scene, the place, the weather--an emergent weather in me perhaps--was
+more compelling than that. The wind blowing, brook roaring, sun shafts
+through the steely sky, all urged an opening. I walked down to the
+south side of the road, by the tall lilacs, under high willows and
+maple trees. Here the waters of the brook divide between the concrete
+fishway and a side or “waste” stream which rejoins the other some fifty
+feet farther on, dropping precipitously over rocks that foam with water
+too high for the migrating fish to leap.
+
+I walked down a path at the edge of this narrow waste stream. Where the
+water was running swiftly, lithely, between the high rock foundations
+of the road on one side and a low dirt bank with grass hummocks on the
+other, I saw the brown head of a muskrat leading across the stream not
+more than twenty feet away. The sleek, dark little animal swam over
+to a stone across from me and sat there eating something with quick,
+legerdemain little gestures, a fast shuttling between its paws and
+its whiskered face. Apparently it couldn’t see me. The east wind was
+blowing across us, and the fresh waters were roaring. Then it stopped
+and nosed back into the stream, swimming across to a tussock not more
+than twelve feet from where I stood. It plucked out, quickly, a sizable
+bunch of grass and swam back with it to the same eating place and
+chewed it up. Then it returned to the shallow water, swimming close
+to the bottom, where I could plainly see it going easily against the
+current with its two hind legs stretched out, propelling it, and the
+long flat tail acting as a scull.
+
+It emerged to disappear in a few rock crevices and then came out,
+its glossy, questioning head sniffing for danger before it dropped
+down again. Finally it swam out of sight into the cruel brilliance of
+sun-reflecting waters that ran full out, full tilt. Pools of plenty
+were continually releasing and boiling as if they were the strength and
+source of all motion.
+
+The muskrat’s eyes were black as rock recesses and its pelt as dark
+and glistening as a mud bank. It was at home, with all its food around
+it--grass, minnows, salamanders, fresh-water mussels--in an adaptation,
+a closeness to the place, arrived at through both random and inevitable
+forces. It knew its small world and needed no outside instruments to
+set its course by. I might wonder about the next event, the coming
+storms, but here was this animal swimming away as if it said, “Come on
+in. The universal water’s fine.”--in a stream as yet too cold for me.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+                                  II
+
+                                Arrival
+
+
+A week or so later, early in April, I finally saw my first alewife of
+the season. It had the brook to itself where I caught sight of it--a
+cloudy form running upcurrent--and when I went closer I could see it
+probing the rippling, beating waters, with all that fish articulation
+of separate fins together, fanning slightly, waving, threading, and
+steering, the fixed eyes staring on, its whole body weaving with the
+flow. It is a surprisingly large fish, seen for the first time in a
+narrow stream. Its length may be anywhere between ten and thirteen
+inches, and it has a heavy look for those who are used to sunfish and
+minnows.
+
+An alewife was no novelty to me, but this one seemed to decide the
+year’s direction. It started things out. I saw it for the first time,
+as child or genius does who finds some whole deep image in the air,
+or radiant clarity in the water. I had the feeling too that I was
+looking at a professional from an old water world, a new agent of old
+assurance, deserving profound respect. After all, it had been coming
+back here thousands of years before me, in the migrant history of its
+race, and by this time must have mastered its passage. And as a natural
+event, a part of the spring’s development, it seemed to announce that
+bud scales on shrubs and trees would start to crack and fall away to
+let the inner shoots out that unfold as leaves and feed on the sun. It
+said that flies and wasps and spiders would come out of winter hiding
+and sleeping, that the song sparrows would begin to sing in the willows
+and viburnum bushes along the banks of Stony Brook.
+
+There is something exciting and strange about the sudden appearance of
+new life in the spring, coming from another region, another climate.
+The terns or plovers that appear along the shore bring an unknown
+experience with them. They seem to start in or to assemble according
+to some tremendous demand which is in no way restricted to seasonal
+lags. They recur; they are recognizable; and yet they bring in endless
+tides and vivid journeys, being a part of that remarkable projection
+of nature in which a multitude of lives use their skill in navigation,
+their plumage, their scales, fins, and various senses, their particular
+drives toward fulfillment.
+
+Migration is universal. That which prompts animals to emerge from their
+burrows, or to start moving over the ocean floor, to fly north, to
+swim into brackish or fresh water from salt, or even, like a ladybird
+beetle, to move a short distance from a forest floor to a meadow, must
+have a world-wide energy to it, with lines of communication that
+reach everywhere ahead and invite the human drive for knowledge. But
+in a strict sense there are two accepted definitions of migration for
+the animals. There is return migration, of which the alewives provide
+an example. Fish or birds in this category travel seasonally from one
+area to another, usually coming back to some home region after varying
+lapses of time. Otherwise, there is emigration, in which animals leave
+their home base but never come back again, lemmings and locusts being
+good examples. Both definitions, I should think, can prove that home
+stretches farther than we know.
+
+Why had this pioneer of an alewife, and the others that had come
+before it, arrived so soon? It is possible that they had migrated up
+Stony Brook before. All mature alewives--a majority seem to be four
+years old--are moved by sexual development and swim inshore when the
+temperature of the fresh or brackish water has turned warmer than the
+salt water from whence they came. The earliest comers often appear to
+be larger in size. This suggests, at least, that they may be older and
+that they have spawned in that run before. The latest to come seem to
+be the smallest, and therefore the youngest. Alewives, like other fish,
+seem to have a tendency to keep growing, though there may be a maximum
+size reached in their fifth or sixth year. The only conclusive way to
+tell their age is by microscopic examination of their scales, which
+reflect each spawning year and its physical changes.
+
+Work done by Keith Havey on alewives in Maine shows a minimum of
+alewives spawning at three years of age and the largest number in the
+four- or five-year-old range. No scales were found which reflected more
+than two spawnings. As to size, he gives a sampling of their length in
+inches which graduates up from 11.25 inches in the three-year-old fish
+to 11.80 in the four-year-olds, 12.35 in five-year-olds, and 12.80 in
+the six. The female alewife, incidentally, is a little larger than the
+male.
+
+Possibly then, these early alewives at Stony Brook were the oldest,
+and because of that they might have been the most practiced at finding
+their way. I am told that, with new fish ladders, observers have
+noticed the earliest arrivals seeking and passing through them more
+readily on the second year after construction than on the first, which
+leads to the belief that they have been through before. Age may improve
+the alewife in prowess, though it is a fish of crowds, and not one to
+strike out much on its own. The “homing instinct,” still unfathomed,
+but about which I will try to say more later on, brings them back to
+their streams of origin with almost united force.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+So my lone alewife marked the greatness it preceded, though it was
+early, in early and still undecided weather. At first the sleet,
+hail, flurries of wet snow came in profusion, stabbing between the
+sunshine, as though nature, before making its next terms known, was
+full of passionate unease. Then wings of warm rain would beat in over
+the Cape, to slash and curve and follow along trees and houses, through
+inland ponds, across the ridges and hollows, and the wind poured behind
+in great gusts, trying, it seemed, to shake a tight world loose.
+Underneath the struggling air many things waited for more chances in
+the sun, but under the stars, on foggy evenings or bright days, the
+singing of peepers in pools, ponds, or boggy land would swell and widen
+everywhere.
+
+Then as the month kept advancing, that which came out began to stay,
+and to expand, in variety, flexibility, and strength. The wheels of
+the world seemed to turn more brightly. I felt a suggestion in each
+changing tree, in the loosening ground, the kinetic light and air, of
+new unfoldings, kaleidoscopic discoveries. The formality, and power in
+the coming on of spring surprised me, as if it had never come before.
+
+More winds began to blow from the southwest, the prevailing wind during
+late spring and summer. Yellow fingertips of bloom showed on the
+whip-long branches of the forsythias. The temperature edged toward the
+fifties, and there were deep new meetings between the moles and the
+worms. One day many tree swallows began to flit and dive low around
+the Herring Run. They skimmed along the surface of the water, then
+sailed up again. Their bellies were as white as a frog’s or horned
+pout’s, dark wings and tails trimly cut, backs almost a tropical blue
+in the light above the water, reflecting green at some angles, or a
+green-blue-purple the color of mackerel. Their flight dipped with the
+up and down flying insects they were chasing. When some insect, unseen
+to me, spiraled straight up along the banks, a swallow would leave its
+water gliding, twist suddenly, beating its wings, and almost spiral
+after.
+
+That original source of energy the sun, which men might still worship
+in good faith, was bringing out new facets to shine abroad. The web of
+life was stretching to its light. Birds, insects, plants, and fish were
+beginning to move to its changing measure; though if some days were
+warm with a budding, fringing, easing expectation, others were still
+raw, wet, and contracting, bringing winter back to flesh and fiber. We
+kept looking for the alewives. Cars would slow up at the Herring Run.
+The drivers peered down to see the curving, dark forms of a few fish
+holding up against the current. Then they drove on. Or they got out,
+saw nothing, and went away in disappointment. But suddenly one morning
+toward the middle of April the crowd of alewives had so increased as to
+cause an inescapable excitement in the vicinity. The water was thick
+with fish, their fins showing on the surface. It was almost as it had
+been a hundred years before when the whole population would cry out at
+their coming, “The herring are running!”
+
+
+
+
+                                  III
+
+                              Dried Fish:
+
+                          An Informal History
+
+
+“The herring are running!” must have been a great cry once, for men,
+women, and children over the whole Cape. There was a deep meaning in
+this seasonal event, since the fish were a part of the local livelihood
+the year around. Nowadays, so far as commerce is concerned, the
+alewives lack their former importance. In Massachusetts, although they
+come into a number of streams and rivers few alewives are taken for the
+market. I understand that in recent years only the runs at Brewster and
+Middleboro have been open for commercial use, the fishing rights having
+been sold to the highest bidder.
+
+For all that, it still seems a live, high, and social morning when
+you wake to the gabbling of gulls in the distance and know that the
+alewives have finally arrived. The sun spreads down new warmth. There
+are cool sweeps of breeze, broad runs of blue in sky and sea past the
+gray and white houses, with those silver hordes starting to enter
+inland veins in a bold reminder of perpetuity.
+
+This season the rights to fish the stream had been bought from the
+town by a firm that wanted them for lobster bait. On the eighteenth
+day of the month a big red truck had pulled alongside the seining pool
+and the old mill. Three men were down in the pool, with their rubber
+boots on, putting a wide net in place. It was rimmed with cork floats
+and roped at the center to a hoist fixed to a small dock on the bank. A
+little wire gate was closed at the stream entrance on the upper side of
+the pool, so that the fish could go no farther. The run was officially
+on; and until it thinned out two months ahead, the fish would be hauled
+from the pool four days a week, thrown into barrels, and trucked away
+to be sold as lobster bait.
+
+A sign was posted at Stony Brook, reading: “No herring may be taken
+or molested in Stony Brook on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays in
+accordance with state law. Residents of Brewster are entitled without
+charge to one dozen herring daily on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays,
+and Thursdays during the open season, and should obtain them from J.
+B. Salvadore, Jr., who has purchased the Herring Fishery Rights for
+this year, or may take them from the brook on these days if he is not
+present.” It was signed by the selectmen of the town of Brewster.
+
+On the down side of the road a bunch of children were celebrating the
+coming of the fish. The alewives, crowding, resting, circling, and
+slipping up through the pools and falls of the fishway--their bodies a
+fretted-lavender brown in the bubbling waters--were now fair game for
+the inland world they had come back to. Three boys were competing for
+a crab net they were dipping into the water, scooping after the fish,
+and as often as not heaving it up empty. One of them was professionally
+pinching the belly sides of a fat, gleaming alewife to see if it was
+a female and would emit some of its roe. Then he flung it back into
+the water with furious energy; and it slapped hard when it hit, and he
+cheered.
+
+Were they under the law, these predators? Well, this play, or hunt,
+this spring jubilation had been going on for several hundred years.
+
+“Let the kids play around there, I say,” said Herring Harry. “We were
+kids too. We didn’t start out old.”
+
+In barer, colder, perhaps simpler days, days when men lived closer to
+their natural surroundings and were more dependent on them than they
+think they are now, the alewives meant food and revenue, an abundance
+returning to your own back yard. They came under the heading of useful
+acquaintances. But now the roe, or fish eggs, is the only part of the
+alewife that is highly considered locally. It is a very bony fish
+and most people reject the idea of eating it, forgetting the days of
+“good salt herring” when the children ate them on sticks like candy.
+So the Brewster resident gets his allotment for the roe, to be fried
+in butter. An ambitious gardener can bury the rest under his corn
+plantings to serve as fertilizer, if the cats permit, though it is
+still a very good way to make corn grow tall in unreceptive soil. A
+hundred years ago or more, when it was done extensively, it resulted
+in rich yields. I have heard that one acre set with a thousand fish
+would produce three times as much corn as an acre without them. It
+is a practice that we inherit from the Indians, although the Indian
+agriculturist was likely to be plagued by wolves instead of cats.
+
+Cape Codders, even so comparatively short a time ago as fifty or sixty
+years, would not have liked to hear this farming method belittled.
+Some of them may even have regarded it with delight. I recently talked
+with a man who was a boy in the 1890’s and remembers walking behind a
+wagonload of “very dead” fish in a field made ready for corn. A man in
+the wagon pitched out a forkful of herring into each prepared hole as
+they creaked along, while another, walking behind, shoved dirt over
+them and planted the seed. He can remember a relative cocking a keen
+ear one night and saying, “Listen! You can hear it growing. By God,
+when their feet hit that stinking mess don’t they start up and go!”
+
+Although to know them may have been to understand their worth, I find
+one early writer, Marshall McDonald Douglass, in his _North
+America_, 1740, who does not give the tribe much credit.
+“Alewives,” he says, “by some of the country people are called
+Herrings. They are of the Herring tribe but much larger than the true
+Herring. They are a very mean, dry and insipid fish. Some of them are
+cured in the manner of white Herrings and sent to the sugar islands for
+the slaves, but because of their bad quality they are not in request:
+in some places they are used to manure the land. They are very plenty,
+and come up the rivers and brooks into ponds in the spring.” None the
+less, they used to be smoked or pickled in brine and shipped out in
+barrels to the West Indies, and whether or not the quality was bad the
+demand was enough to make the trade in them into one of great volume,
+part in fact of the famous swap for molasses, later turned into New
+England rum, which was so important in our early history.
+
+Before I try to defend these fish against any further imputations, I
+should explain their name. “Herrin’” is the name and pronunciation on
+Cape Cod. I don’t call them alewives just to defy such Cape Codders
+as might be fussy about it, but to differentiate them from their more
+famous cousins the sea herring, which spawn in salt water. Cape Cod
+has its alewives committees, and it may be that the fish were called
+alewives here before they were called herrin’.
+
+You can still read statements to the effect that the original name
+“alewife” is a corruption of the Indian word “aloofe,” which meant bony
+fish. In 1871 a gentleman named J. Hammond Trumbull tried to scotch
+this bit of etymology by pointing out--in a government publication
+on Sea Fisheries, that the Narragansett and Massachusetts Indians
+called the alewife and herring “Aumsu-og,” as had been noted by Roger
+Williams. In any case, whichever Indianism we choose, it seems more
+likely that the name stemmed from English dialect. “Allizes,” not at
+all like aloofe, was one of the names applied to it in company with the
+allice shad. To quote Mr. Trumbull again: “The modern English ‘allis’
+was in old French and old English ‘alouze’ or ‘aloose,’ nearer than
+the modern form of the name to the Latin ‘alausa.’” The latest in this
+chain of spellings is of course _Alosa_, the scientific handle now
+applied to the shad, and in some texts to the alewife.
+
+To the English colonists an alewife was also an alehouse keeper.
+_A Dictionary of Americanisms_ quotes a volume printed in
+1675 which said: “The alewife is like a herrin’, but it has a bigger
+bellie, therefore called an alewife.” (Let that quotation be of some
+comfort to the proponents of herrin’. The name has a formal heritage.)
+The writer was surely not making a direct physical analogy between a
+woman and a fish. The original alewife he probably has reference to
+is a shad, but _Pomolobus pseudoharengus_ does have a deep body
+and is heavily built forward, so perhaps a comparison with a hearty
+alewife of sixteenth- or seventeenth-century England would not be too
+far-fetched.
+
+The poet Skelton described an alewife, Eleanor Rummying by name, who
+lived in the time of Henry VIII. She brewed a “hoppy ale,” and “her
+face was wondrously wrinkled, lyke a rost pigges eare bristled with
+here”--at which point I will let the analogy go on its merry way.
+
+The alewife has had a variety of local and common names, the kind that
+indicate touch and sight, the handing on of natural meetings--the
+signposts of its contacts with man and his history on the eastern
+shores of this continent. It is known as “sawbelly,” for example,
+referring to the fine sharp little notches or teeth on the midline
+of its belly; and for the large eyes, set on each side of its small
+head, it has been called “wall-eyed herring,” “big-eyed herring,”
+or “blear-eyed herring.” It is also the “spring herring,” “branch
+herring,” “river herring,” or “fresh-water herring.”
+
+This old New England name of alewife has its modifications in “Ellwife”
+and “Ellwhop” on the Connecticut River, and there were variant
+pronunciations in other regions. In the state of Rhode Island alewives
+were called “buckies” and in Maine “cat-thrashers.” In Canada the name
+is “Gaspereau,” sometimes “Gasparot.” The term “alewife” is uncommon
+in the maritime provinces. There seem to be three Gaspereau Rivers,
+two in New Brunswick and one in Nova Scotia, in addition to a town of
+that name in New Brunswick, and a lake in Nova Scotia. Apparently the
+place name derives from the fish, and not the other way around. In its
+15th Report, for 1917, the Geographic Board of Canada says “after a
+fish,” in explaining the name of the Gaspereau River. Another Canadian
+term for alewife is “kyak” or “kyack,” which sounds like a derivation
+from northern Indians. Mr. A. H. Leim of the Biological Station at St.
+Andrews, New Brunswick, writes me that he has only heard “one or two
+fishermen call them ‘kyacks’; one of these was an old poacher on the
+Shubenacadie River in Nova Scotia who always used this name. I assume
+the word is of Indian origin.”
+
+Finally the alewife is called “grayback,” a name that distinguishes
+it from a close relative often confused with it, which is called
+the “blackback,” “blueback,” or “glut herring” (_Pomolobus
+aestivalis_). The blueback shows up in a late spring run, and seems
+to spawn in the lower reaches of a stream, instead of migrating up to
+its headwaters. It has smaller eyes than the “grayback” and as its
+name indicates its back is dark blue, instead of greenish gray, but as
+colors fade at death, this is no sure test. The two species of alewife
+can only be told apart conclusively by dissection. The lining of the
+blueback’s body cavity is black instead of pink or gray.
+
+These names are also indicative of the range of the alewife, all the
+way from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Carolinas. In the spawning
+season they come inland by way of sandy inlets, great tidal bays,
+fresh-water river mouths, or creeks only a few yards wide. Most of
+the streams by which they are still able to swim up have their local
+history of fishing alewives, either with traps, weirs, dip nets, or
+even pails. In the fisheries of Maine it is known as “alewife dipping.”
+This is an important “food fish,” even though it may never have
+approached the sea herring in numbers, nor been as famous as the cod.
+
+If the English sailor, Captain Bartholomew Gosnold, had been ashore in
+the springtime instead of on his ship when he gave the Cape its name,
+it might now be called Cape Alewife.
+
+Though they are only part of a multitude of other lives that nurtured
+the American past, the alewives should be given high and special
+credit. William Bradford’s _Of Plymouth Plantation_
+testifies to their vital importance in the Pilgrims’ first year. After
+the _Mayflower_ left in early April of 1621, Squanto, that greatly
+helpful Indian, showed them “that in the middle of April they should
+have store enough come up the brook by which they began to build,
+and taught them how to take it, and where to get other provisions
+necessary for them.” This brook ran, as it still runs, through the
+town, so that the Plymouth inhabitants were lucky to have their supply
+of alewives close at hand--they seemed to have depended on them
+primarily for plantings, also taught them by Squanto. The fish came
+in “fat and fair” and amazingly plentiful after a lean winter full of
+apprehension. At first apparently each inhabitant took freely of the
+fish in the brook, but this seems to have resulted in “injuring the
+property of those near the place of taking.” As a result the Town
+Brook became town responsibility after a few years, and the fishing was
+regulated. The cost of a weir was distributed among the inhabitants
+and the fishing put under the charge of town officers, with fines set
+for taking alewives without permission. Innumerable fish laws were
+passed after that, from the Colony of Plymouth to the Commonwealth of
+Massachusetts. The fish ran comparatively free for a while, but through
+the progression of these laws you might watch, in town after town, the
+gradual growth of human population plus human concern for a valuable
+product. In 1709 a general law provides: “That no wears, hedges,
+fishgarths, stakes, kiddles, or other disturbance or encumbrance shall
+be set, erected or made, on or across any river, to the stopping,
+obstructing, or straitning of the natural or usual course and passage
+of the fish in their seasons, or spring of the year, without the
+approbation and allowance first had and obtained from the general
+sessions of the peace in the same county....” An Act of 1741, to
+“prevent the destruction of the fish called alewives, and other fish,”
+might indicate that the colonists were beginning to notice a decline
+in their numbers and to be apprehensive about it, although it is hard
+to judge. _A History of Barnstable County_, published in
+1890, has this to say: “Early in the last century the supply of herring
+so far exceeded the demand for fish food that the surplus was used to
+fertilize the fields, and the growing custom of using them in each
+hill of planted corn was checked in 1718, the town fathers [of Bourne]
+ordering that none should be taken in the future to ‘fish corn.’”
+
+Apparently the alewife population did start to decrease a long time
+ago. Fishermen along the Merrimack River noticed a diminishing in
+numbers as early as the mid-eighteenth century; and somewhat later they
+thought it might be due to the number of small ponds which had been
+dammed up. These ponds had access to the river and so provided spawning
+grounds. Certainly the alewives, through man’s agency, began to suffer
+great setbacks in the old use of their runs. Some of the first culprits
+were the woolen mills, and corn or grist mills such as the one at
+Brewster--they blocked up many of the runs, in spite of the fish laws.
+Then a tremendous industrial expansion put cities and factories along
+all big rivers and many large streams, adding more mill dams across
+the runs. The resulting sewage and manufacturing wastes polluted the
+waters, destroying many fish, and making some rivers completely unfit
+for migration. Extensive deforestation also resulted in the drying up
+of a number of streams and the lowering of water levels. The nineteenth
+century was a notorious plunderer.
+
+Alewives in any large number now coincide with undeveloped areas, which
+happen to be comparatively few along the Atlantic coast. As a result
+of industrialization the original heavy runs were so reduced that
+the only important, commercial runs are now in the southern part of
+the alewife range, notably the Chesapeake, or north of Rhode Island.
+Although the fish still have much less access to their ancient, natural
+routes, the existing runs are probably less carelessly protected by
+law. State laws put the responsibility of keeping the fishways clear
+on the localities through which they run, but the state supervises
+their condition, and if a run is too depleted the state can forbid the
+sale of its fishing rights. Whatever may be said about their decline
+in the long run, it is quite likely that state supervision has helped
+to increase the alewife population during comparatively recent years.
+It certainly seems to be true that the number of fish at the Brewster
+run has increased since the fish ladders were built in 1945. The new
+fishways made the rocky, often clogged stream easier of access, and
+cut down on fish mortality as they ascended. They can, in other words,
+be brought back; although there are fishermen in Maine who estimate
+that the alewife population is only a third as large as it was some
+fifty years ago, and there are those who say the decline has been even
+greater in Massachusetts.
+
+A great many of the old alewife fisheries lost their vitality because
+there was no longer any local dependence on them nor any general
+call for the product. A recent article in the _Maine Coast
+Fishermen_ said this: “A few weeks ago in Wareham, Mass., the
+local selectmen refused to auction off the fishing rights, feeling
+the bids were too low. An old timer of the town, who has watched these
+migrations since he was a boy, recalled that the alewife rights to the
+stream in question once brought as much as $12,000 a year.” In the
+smaller run at Brewster, incidentally, the bid taken during the last
+spawning season was $450.
+
+Control is still local. Where there are still good-sized runs, the
+towns appoint alewives committees, whose members are re-elected
+annually at Town Meeting. In Brewster, on a salary of some twenty-five
+dollars a year, plus small wages for time spent, it is their job to
+keep the Herring Run area neat; to post regulations; see that no
+individual gets away with more than his allotted portion of fish; and
+keep the stream free from obstruction so that the fish can proceed to
+their spawning grounds, as well as into the nets of the concessionaire.
+The town sells annual rights for the privilege of fishing the stream in
+season, four days a week. On the other days the alewives are allowed to
+go ahead and propagate their kind. The five hundred barrels or more of
+fish that have been taken yearly from Stony Brook happen to have been
+used recently for lobster bait.
+
+To some extent, incidentally, their use and commercial value depends on
+their condition and flavor. An alewife’s flesh is best when it has been
+taken directly out of salt water. The ocean flavor is progressively
+lost as the fish migrates through inland streams. So they have their
+highest value where the runs are located close to the sea, or tidal
+rivers such as the one at Damariscotta, Maine.
+
+The West Indies trade is over, as well as the days of “good salt
+herring.” The most likely place to see indications of alewife now is
+on the stupendously bountiful shelves of a chain store, in the form of
+a can with a picture of a cat on it. And the future of the alewife, in
+human hands at least, seems to depend on a wider demand for it. It is
+valued neither for sport nor edibility, but is used for cat and dog
+food, fish meal, and pickled fish, with some, as at Brewster, being
+taken for lobster bait. Apparently there is an innate prejudice among
+some New Englanders against using a traditional food fish for other
+purposes, and a belief that selling it for meal or cat food is less
+profitable. Put this down to thrift, or respect for old ways, still it
+stands against the fact that the alewife’s latest value comes from its
+status as a processed, rather than edible, food. “Reduction” is what
+they call it when the alewives are turned into fish meal, and in a
+sense perhaps they have been reduced, at least in our personal esteem.
+They now belong to a technical age with the rest of us.
+
+With modern methods of handling, packing, and transportation the old
+fisheries may have been left behind, but it should be said that,
+because of its new status in commerce, ignominious or not, the alewife
+may stand a better chance. The State of Maine, for example, has been
+undertaking thorough study of the alewives in order to find out how old
+runs can be brought back, or new ones created. They are a fish that
+are very responsive to management. When barriers are removed and open
+fishways are made, they take their opportunity.
+
+All is not well with the traditional ways, though the alewives may be
+perfectly ready to go beyond them. In the old days on Cape Cod there
+was hardly a seafaring man who did not take his salt herring aboard
+with him, and on land, after being salted, dried in the sun, and
+smoked, they were strung on sticks and sold for ten cents a stick.
+There were many smokehouses on the Cape, and in the wintertime dried
+fish hung on the barn rafters above the haylofts. I have a comment on
+those days from Mr. Alexander: “None of your First National Stores
+then,” said he. “We lived off the earth ... potatoes and smoked
+herrin’. That’s why some of us old goats lived so long.”
+
+It is hard to find smoked herring these days. It is a skill that seems
+to have almost gone; and I am told that there used to be a good deal of
+variation in the product. Smoked fish are now easier to find in Maine
+than on Cape Cod. I bought a pair recently in a small general store
+in Maine at the excessive price of fifteen cents. A dried alewife was
+handsomer than I had suspected, and the smell not unpleasant, although
+I might not say as much for a barnful. The head and eye sockets were
+encrusted with salt, and the hard thin body was colored a bronze and
+smoky gold as though heat still roamed the scales. I was reminded for
+some reason of a metal bowl I had once seen that came from the land of
+the Incas. I peeled off the scales and chawed a toast to our ancestors.
+
+
+
+
+                                  IV
+
+                         The Reproductive Urge
+
+
+The fishing operation near the old grist mill was in full swing after
+the twenty-third of April. The _Salvadore_ crew was hauling in
+their net with the aid of a winch. It was loaded with fish, enough to
+fill four or five barrels. The victims were flipping and flashing with
+a whirring violence, a high sound going up in the gray morning air, a
+beautiful iridescence in their white-silver sides. The whole dripping
+net was heavy and alive with their shivering, thrashing, and dying.
+Heads butted through the mesh and gills caught, in their frantic,
+vibrating despair ... and all for lobster bait, worth six dollars a
+barrel.
+
+The early colonists spoke of alewives coming up their streams in
+“incredible” numbers, and so it still looks, though Stony Brook, for
+one, is narrow in its upper reaches, and when the fish are forced into
+it they are crowded beyond all proportion. The inland stream, with
+its fresh-water grasses, insects, and small fish is suddenly host to
+a large and almost foreign form of life, except that they are both
+closely joined to the sea.
+
+On the whole, it had been a rainy month. The brook below the seining
+pool was roaring and foaming down. Such was the teeming crowd of
+alewives trying to swim up through the ladder, through the violently
+heavy flow, that there was a constant falling back, a silver slapping
+and flapping over the concrete rims of the pools. Farther down, where
+the waste stream tumbled over a small mountain of rocks, too high for
+the fish to jump (their limit, on a vertical leap, seems to be not much
+over two feet), there was a scene to force the heart. Always a certain
+number of fish, dividing from those that swam the main stream toward
+the ladder, would attempt the impossible at this place. Ordinarily,
+when an alewife meets obstacles in its advance upcurrent it will
+quickly go forward into it, then leap in short dashes over rocks and
+the lip of fishways. I had seen them go up without apparent rest where
+the stream falls down the inclined ladder at the pond outlet above.
+They were dancing and flipping up those waters, which were rushing and
+bubbling down, like kites in a fast wind.
+
+Yet here, for all their instinctive valiance, was the unsurmountable.
+Now, as they had done for thousands of years, they tried and failed.
+White tons of water smashed down over the rocks, but time and time
+again one fish after another made a quick dash into it and almost flew,
+hanging with vibrant velocity in the torrent until it was flung back.
+Many were exhausted and found their way back to the main stream,
+circling and swimming slowly, and a large number were smashed against
+the rocks to turn belly up and die, eaten later by young eels, or
+gulls and herons, as they were taken downstream by the current. Some
+were wedged in the rocks and could be seen there for days as the water
+gradually tore them apart until they were nothing but white shreds of
+skin.
+
+A wooden bridge crosses over Stony Brook at this point. A neighbor of
+mine, a mother of children, was standing there watching when I came up,
+and I heard her say, “Terrible!” I guessed that she knew what she saw,
+besides death and defeat. It was the drive to be, a common and terrible
+sending out, to which men are also bound in helplessness.
+
+We are astonished by this fantastic drive. “What is the point? What
+makes them take these suicidal chances? Why?” It is as if we were
+trying to get back, or down, to an explanation in ourselves that we had
+lost sight of. But somewhere in us, through this feverish, undecided
+world, we still know.
+
+Are they stupid? There is no measure in the world of nature more
+excellent than a fish. It may be comparatively low in the evolutionary
+scale of complexity, but no animal is more finely made, or better
+suited to its own medium. All the same, the unvaried blindness their
+action seemed to show would sometimes strike me as hard as did their
+ability in the water.
+
+Stony Brook was black with them. There was no open patch of stream bed
+to be seen. And with the excessive crowding, the general procession,
+so steadily insistent on its own time, was hurried up to some extent.
+Their motion became almost ponderous and tense, while individual fish
+leaped like dolphins, pewter- and gold-sided, over and through the dark
+herd. Others circled in and out or kept pace with the rest, staring
+ahead.
+
+They had a synchronized momentum of their own. If I dropped a stone in
+the middle of them, they would separate at that point and then close in
+to fill the gap. There could be no nullifying or breaking their united
+persistence. Their onwardness, their desperate dashing against the
+rocks, had its own logic--a logic which had nothing to do with hope,
+reason, or choosing another alternative. No way out, in other words.
+Slavery to the reproductive urge. These alewives are more dumb than
+sheep. If you were to press your own sympathy hard enough, you might
+feel a terrible lack of variety in them, or, paradoxically enough, of
+daring. The lidless-eyed and plunging multitude seems brutally driven,
+without a chance. This is “togetherness” with a terrible vengeance.
+
+Perhaps there is something here that we know too, as fellow animals,
+and lose sight of. At the risk of making one of those vaguely
+anthropomorphic assumptions against which the objective scientists are
+constantly warning us, I would guess that the self-motivation in this
+onward mass of fish might be compared to those human crowds that take
+action under stress, independently of the individuals that make them
+up. Suddenly a crowd, hitherto a random combination of people, takes
+on a frightening rhythm and purpose of its own. It is governed by
+laws which go back infinitely farther in the history of life than the
+immediate goal of its anger or exultation.
+
+I have explained nothing. I can only say that when I first saw these
+fish I was moved in spite of myself. Instinct is no more blind than
+wonder. To have the human attributes of mind and spirit and the race’s
+ability to control its own environment does not give me the wit to beat
+the infinitely various will of life at its own game. All I could wish
+for would be to join it.
+
+I walked on down the banks of Stony Brook, past the Herring Run area
+with its neat paths, bridges, and fish ladders, my shoes squashing in
+the mud. The stream turns a slight angle at this point, gets broader
+and shallower and begins to run through the little valley that ends
+in tidal marshes and the Bay. The alewives, for a hundred yards at
+least, were running up against the downward currents, massed almost
+stationary, not in ranks, but ordered mutuality, with a long waving
+like water grasses or kelp, and curving, twisting, swirling like their
+medium the water as they moved very gradually ahead. There was no
+indiscriminate rushing ahead. It was done to measure; but it seemed
+to me that through their unalterable persistence I saw the heaving
+of crowds of all kinds, of buffalo, cattle, sheep, or men. I had seen
+as much motion in crowds pouring out of a subway entrance or massing
+through a square. History was in their coming on, without its shouts
+and cheers. They could not speak for themselves; but who knew how deep
+the silence went?
+
+Ahead of them there was a net; behind, down the broader reaches of
+the brook, the greedy herring gulls dropped down into the water after
+them, or stood along the bank in apparently glutted satisfaction, while
+others screamed and sailed overhead. In spite of their slow gliders’
+grace and local lethargy compared with swift sea birds like the terns,
+gulls travel the rims of the world. They had always made me think of
+far-distance, voyages unending. Many of them had congregated on a bald
+hill that overlooks the run and were standing like white sentries under
+the shafts of the northern sky beyond. From far off they sometimes
+suggest rows of military crosses, and I have heard them compared to a
+field of flowers. Soldiers, flowers, graves ... all these they might
+suggest on the heights of fate, by their pure bold greed and unmatched
+design. They stood on a wide stage.
+
+
+
+
+                                   V
+
+                       The Nature of an Alewife
+
+
+The fish kept moving up. I watched them swinging back and forth with
+the current, great-eyed, sinewy, probing, weaving, their dorsal fins
+cutting the surface, their ventral fins fanning, their tails flipping
+and sculling. In the thick, interbalanced crowd there would suddenly
+be a scattered dashing, coming as quickly as cat’s-paws flicking the
+summer seas. They may have moved by “reflex” rather than conscious
+thought, but what marvelous professionals they were in that!
+
+The cold raw winds of April had heeled back, and May swung on. There
+were an increasing number of days with the wind from the southwest,
+smelling of sunny springtime. The local paper had it that the
+temperature averaged a high of 66.6 degrees Fahrenheit and a low of
+44.2 in the week between the second and the ninth of May. The following
+week the average rose a little, going to between 67.5 and 47 degrees.
+The first reported striped bass, a three-and-a-half-pounder, was caught
+on the Cape the eighth of the month.
+
+The willows that hung over the Herring Run were budding and flowering
+out, lacing and fringing with many beads, a yellow-green; and leaves of
+the red maples began to unfold, a light coppery russet color, hanging
+like limp claws--and elsewhere, on higher ridges and other roads, the
+oaks in their leafy variety of pink, yellow, gray and pale green, were
+starting their fires with tenderness. Clouds of the shad-blow’s lacy
+white blossoms came out everywhere between pitch pines and oaks, to
+last only a few days and be replaced by beach plums whose flowers burst
+out of their sheaths like popping corn.
+
+The procession, down the brook and around its bend, made other rushing
+sounds above the noise of the flow itself. The gulls in the valley were
+crying out with “ho!” and “ha!” and “yi!” The shadow of a gull flying
+high over us fell across the water and the alewives rushed to the side.
+The backs of some of them were cruelly gashed. There was a dead one on
+the bank, stiff and dry, flatly reflecting the blue in the sky like an
+unpolished knife blade.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+They were close-packed going up through the ladders, herding, slipping,
+slanting, struggling in relation to each other. I grabbed one out with
+my hands. It shuddered, was almost still for a second or two, like a
+man with his wind knocked out, then plunged in my hands and slipped
+out onto the bank. It thrashed there in the grass, a twelve-inch fish,
+with a gray-green back, and silver sides and belly that reflected the
+magnificent surfaces of May, with grass, sun, and blue sky intruding
+through the overhanging leaves and the brown earth. It shone with
+violet, yellow-green, white and brown, pink and blue. It had an
+inclusive majesty, a great natural art.
+
+Its silver scales are large, like iridescent reflecting coins: and in
+the water the alewife is able to alter the pigmentation of its skin so
+as to blend with the background. It is able to do this very quickly, so
+that it changes in color as it moves up the stream to correspond with
+a darker or lighter bottom ... part of the whole various pattern of
+adaptation which the fish show to the water around them.
+
+During the course of evolution brain development among the fishes has
+been slow. What brain power they have is closely related to their sense
+organs, concentrated on their whole bodily co-ordination; in which,
+so far as water action is concerned, they are man’s superiors. An
+alewife’s body is marvelously fitted to situation--peace or turbulence,
+light or dark, flood and ebb, ripple or rile. This inhabitant of the
+sea weaves up through the overhanging springtime, and seems a part of
+it, experienced as to its flowering.
+
+For it is a salt-water fish, as I sometimes had to remind myself
+later between the ponds and the Bay, although there is a landlocked
+variety; and as such it is part of a prodigious tribe. As a member of
+the herring family--the Clupeidae, it is related to the sea herring,
+sprats, shads, pilchards, and menhadens. The sea herring is one of
+the most important food fish in the world. In Europe whole societies
+were affected by its shifts in abundance. Loss of control over herring
+fisheries was instrumental in the breakup of the Hanseatic League.
+In 1881 Thomas Henry Huxley said: “Man, in fact, is but one of a
+vast co-operative society of herring catchers.” The yearly catch is
+enormous. One school of herring may run not into millions but billions
+of individual fish; though Huxley may have exaggerated the capacity of
+the herring population to keep its level in the face of human demands.
+
+To mention another important relative of the alewife, the common or
+American shad is also a food fish, being something of a delicacy,
+prized highly for its flesh and roe. It is a larger fish, weighing
+between six and nine pounds; but it is not so abundant as the alewife.
+
+The menhaden fishery is the largest in the country in terms of weight.
+Some 800,000,000 pounds of this fish are harvested annually from the
+Atlantic and Gulf coasts; its present fate is to be turned into fish
+meal, scrap, and oil. In addition many tons of ground-up menhaden, or
+“pogies,” are used by salt-water anglers to attract bluefish, tuna, or
+mackerel.
+
+All these herring species are similar in appearance, with silvery
+scales, easily rubbed off, thin, deep bodies, and tails quite deeply
+forked.
+
+The alewife belongs to a group of great age in the earth’s history,
+and one which has survived, for one thing, by reason of its numbers,
+and not by any skill in speed or individual pugnacity. It depends on
+the crowd rhythm for perpetuation. Its salt-water whereabouts are
+comparatively unknown, although it is thought it may not go very far
+afield; but in a run of alewives you might sense not numbers only,
+but something of the sea’s capacious demands that made these fish to
+measure. Green, gray, silver, they wear its colors, and seem built to
+nose into its space, or be carried with its moods.
+
+Are there no individuals among them? It is perhaps no term to apply
+with so manifestly united a company. In any case we are deceived if we
+try to translate ourselves, our ability to choose, our eyes for pattern
+and variation, into an animal that can see us at best as an occasional,
+strange, blurred image appearing above the bank, and to whom everything
+but the water world is unknown. In a sense we know too little, and so
+do they, to discuss the matter.
+
+Yet anyone, with a slipping, plunging alewife in his hands, knows it in
+some degree for its uniqueness. This green-backed, silver-sided water
+animal, smooth, supple, and muscular, with a sail-like fin on its back
+is definite enough. Its body is convex-sided, coming to a thin edge
+at the belly, shaped like shellfish, seeds, or Indian artifacts. From
+its undershot jaw to its tail, it is clearly a tough fish, and in our
+experience an adaptable one that knows its way.
+
+This is the “sawbelly” all right. You can very easily feel the
+serrations, or little teeth, with your fingers--it is one good way of
+telling alewives from sea herring in the dark. But the name “big-eyed”
+is perhaps most dramatically true of the alewife. Its black, round,
+shining eyes are very prominent in proportion to its small head and
+small mouth. They are large black disks like certain water-worn rocks,
+or they are great bubbles coming up from a dark depth. I fancied,
+seeing a tiny image of myself in the alewife’s eye, that I was
+reflected in a deep, impenetrable well.
+
+It is known that a fish’s eye is somewhat like ours in that it has
+a lens, an iris, a cornea, retina, and optic nerve; but that it is
+designed to see under water, which ours is not. In J. H. Norman’s
+_History of Fishes_, he writes: “The eye, as is well known,
+acts after the manner of a photographic camera, the two essential parts
+being the screen or retina at the back, and the lens at the front,
+which projects an image of the outside world on the screen. The lens
+of a land vertebrate is somewhat flat and convex on both sides, but in
+the fish it is a globular body, the extreme convexity being a necessity
+under water because the substance of the lens is not very much denser
+than the fluid medium in which the fish lives. The space between lens
+and retina is filled with a transparent jelly-like substance, the
+vitreous humor. The transparent outer wall of the eye, the cornea, is
+somewhat flatter in fishes, and the space between this and the lens
+is filled by the watery, aqueous humor. In land vertebrates the iris
+of the eye is capable of great contraction, and, acting like the
+diaphragm of a camera, regulates the amount of light allowed to enter
+the eye. In fishes it generally surrounds a rounded pupil, and has
+comparatively little power of contraction.”
+
+I should add that an alewife’s eye is somewhat fixed, and not capable
+of much movement.
+
+Back of the eyes and mouth are the gill covers that protect the gills
+underneath, which are weak and blood-filled, dark-red overlapping
+layers, like petals, four on each side. As the fish’s gill covers open
+and close, water passes over the gills, taking oxygen into the blood
+stream. The alewife’s heart, which pumps blood to the gills, is located
+directly below them.
+
+This is a plankton eater, although it will eat shrimp, small fish,
+or young eels, on occasion. It has no teeth, or such a semblance of
+tiny, weak ones, back in its mouth, that they are of little use. The
+particles of food that come through its mouth are strained through a
+device known as gill rakers, which act as sieves or filters, in the
+form of fine hairlike growths mounted on the gill arches, the bony
+structures on which the gills are also arranged.
+
+A female alewife can be recognized fairly readily by its size. On the
+average the males run from ten to eleven inches and the females from
+eleven to twelve, and the males are of course lighter. The proportion
+of males to females on the inland run seems to be about fifty-fifty.
+
+Alewives weigh anywhere between eight and ten ounces. Part of the
+weight of both sexes during their spawning migration is accounted for
+by the roe; in fact, their ovaries and testes may become so enlarged
+as to fill up a large part of their bodies. The egg sacs of the female
+vary in color from pink to yellow or yellow-orange, depending on their
+stage of development. The milt, sometimes called soft roe, of the male,
+is white and pink.
+
+To sketch a fish so generally is scarcely to know it, but even if I
+were able to give a good account of its complex skeleton down to the
+last bone, or discuss all the actions of its nervous system as known
+so far, I would not have done enough. Our bodies may have chemicals in
+common with them, but we will never know the fish.
+
+The alewife I took from the water eluded me. Cold-blooded fish,
+warm-blooded man, the water’s triumph caught by the alien air. It
+slipped my hand and knowledge. “An aquatic vertebrate?” A mystery,
+though I recognized a life that shone with vibrant persistence, one of
+nature’s particularized energies, a wild texture as old as the animal
+world, a food that was the beneficent matter of all struggle and greed.
+
+Were there more connections between us that needed exploration? How
+much fright, how much nerve-threaded darkness, how much throbbing
+electric quickness might not be receiving me in the distance of that
+fixed eye? Perhaps we strangers all meet somewhere in each other’s
+sight.
+
+
+
+
+                                  VI
+
+                       Puzzles and Speculations
+
+
+The Herring Run area, small center of commerce and history, had been my
+starting point, but I had hardly begun to follow the alewives on their
+whole migratory route between salt water and the ponds above. First
+of all I had some background of local hearsay to bring into question.
+Did the herrin’ really go all the way down to South America in the
+wintertime? Was it true that each fish returned to the stream it was
+born in? Did they come inland on their spawning journey and then die,
+like the west coast salmon? I overheard a man say, “Poor fish! All that
+work just to die!” But that was one interpretation I could dispose of
+early, having seen them go back to salt water the year before. Did they
+only come in from the Bay at night or on foggy evenings? To find out
+would take more watching and waiting than I had done so far.
+
+You might deduce this much to start with: the alewives, only a few at
+first, started to come inland in the spring when the brackish waters
+from the Stony Brook outlet were warmer than the Bay into which they
+flowed, if only by a few degrees. They responded with sensitivity to
+the temperature. If the earliest fish were the oldest, it was possible
+that the later runs also corresponded to age groups, guessing by their
+size, and that the youngest came last of all. Evidently schools of
+alewives stay together during their ocean life according to the years
+when they were spawned. Yet why, between March and June, any given
+schools would come in when they did would be hard to tell.
+
+There are places where you can watch the alewives approach, at the
+junction between tidal and inland waters. At Damariscotta, Maine, they
+swim up a wide tidal river until a fresh-water stream flows into it
+from a height above. I was told that the fish are seen massing and
+circling, sometimes for days, at this point, until by some communicated
+decision, or joint response--perhaps to pressure of numbers, combined
+with the right temperature conditions--they start going up. A cold snap
+may make them drop back to tidewater. In the same way, cold weather may
+discourage their coming in from Cape Cod Bay.
+
+You can also see them schooling in the Cape Cod Canal at the entrance
+to the Bournedale run, but not at Stony Brook where the outlet flows
+into the Bay through low sand dunes, or sand flats at low tide.
+Whatever the local topography may be, the alewives are evidently
+attracted to the warmer currents and the lack of salinity in a stream
+where it flows into salt water.
+
+In general the cause of their moving in together from the offshore
+depths is their sexual development. I have heard the speculation
+that this is affected by the increase in light at this stage of the
+season, but unfortunately know no more about it. In any case at the
+age of four, or sometimes three, they are ready to spawn, to follow
+out the new force that is in them, on an old track. Their timing, when
+to migrate, is a question of generation, a decision that has to be
+made once again in the earth’s timeless schedule. Perhaps there is a
+comparison to be made once more with the weather, in which the element
+of surprise is constant during the usual course of the season, the
+intangible variant still plaguing prediction. The turns to storm or
+sunshine have their own order in the years beyond the immediate one.
+Who knows when anything will happen? Suddenly the cicadas start to sing
+in the August trees. Why that day or hour? Because “conditions are
+just right”? Perhaps, if we could ever track down all the conditions.
+Natural acts may be repetitive, but no flight, or song, or new growth
+has ever existed before at exactly the same time, pitch, or ratio. They
+are part of the indefinite context of generation.
+
+What about the alewives during their years in the sea? Very little
+seems to be known. According to _Fishes of the Gulf of
+Maine_ by Bigelow and Schroeder: “The alewife is as gregarious
+as the herring, fish of a size congregating in schools of hundreds of
+individuals (we find record of 40,000 fish caught in one seine haul
+in Boston Harbor) and apparently a given school holds together during
+most of its sojourn in salt water. But they are sometimes caught mixed
+with menhaden, or with herring. Alewives, immature and adult, are often
+picked up in abundance in weirs here and there along the coast, and
+it is likely that the majority remains in the general vicinity of the
+fresh-water influences of the stream-mouths and estuaries from which
+they have emerged, to judge from the success of attempts to strengthen
+or restore the runs of various streams.... But it is certain that some
+of them wander far afield, for catches up to 3,000 to 4,000 pounds per
+haul were made by otter trawlers some 80 miles offshore, off Emerald
+Bank, Nova Scotia at 60 to 80 fathoms, in March 1936.”
+
+They also say, with circumspection: “It seems likely from the various
+evidence that the alewives tend to keep near the surface for the first
+year or so in salt water, and while they are inshore when older. But
+practically nothing is known of the depths to which they may descend if
+(or when) they move offshore, there being no assurance that those taken
+by trawlers were not picked up, while the trawls were being lowered or
+hauled up again.”
+
+The view that most of the alewives stay in coastal waters near the
+fresh waters where they were hatched seems to be generally accepted,
+though the proof is sometimes hard to find. They occur at various
+depths in the sea as well as considerable distances offshore. They are
+as likely to be found in deep as in shallow waters. I am told there
+are recorded views that landlocked alewives winter in the deep waters
+of Lake Ontario, and that shad, a close relative, have been found with
+near-bottom animals in their stomachs. I also have the information that
+during the summer of 1956 draggers in Passamaquoddy Bay were catching
+a large quantity of alewives and that “it looked as if they were near
+bottom.” Despite some having been picked up in weirs close to the shore
+at various times during the year, they have not commonly, if at all,
+been taken by draggers on the continental shelf except when approaching
+the shore during the spawning season. In other words their oceanic
+whereabouts have not been pinned down. All we can say, still presuming
+stocks are local along the coast, is that mature alewives move in from
+deeper waters offshore in the springtime, progressively later from
+south to north.
+
+What might seem to be a curious exception to the rule is a run in
+St. John Harbor, New Brunswick, that occurs in the dead of winter.
+Alewives are taken there in late January and early February; but I find
+that this may not be so peculiar a phenomenon as it sounds. To begin
+with, St. John Harbor is joined with the Bay of Fundy, and when the
+fish move into it they are still at sea. The reasons for their move
+at that time is not clear, but as there appears to be winter seining
+of alewives farther down the coast along the shores of neighboring
+Charlotte County, it is at least not unbelievable. The alewives then
+start through the harbor and move up the St. John River to their
+spawning grounds in the usual migratory months of April and May. I am
+told by the St. Andrews Biological Station that: “The inflow of the St.
+John River, particularly in April and May, dilutes the harbor water,
+especially at the surface. Whether it attracts alewives to the harbor
+or carries them there by deep circulation is a question.” This last
+point brings up the problem, quite beyond my powers to understand, of
+how the alewives orient themselves, how they find or are attracted to
+the waters in which they spawn. We may know very little about their
+life at sea, but their ability to find a particular stream or river may
+be an even greater mystery, which is not lessened by the probability
+that they have been there before. Whether as first-year spawners or
+repeaters the alewives seem to come back to the streams from which they
+migrated during the first summer and fall of their lives--when they
+were not more than a few inches in length. Not consistently--a certain
+amount of shifting between schools and change of locale may go on. Many
+go astray like migrating birds, or men out of crowds perhaps, but in
+general they do tend to return to their home streams. As a proof of
+this, ponds that were empty of alewives have been stocked with them,
+and the spawn returned as adults in three or four years’ time. This is
+the “parent stream” theory. With salmon it has apparently been shown
+to be a fact; although it is not so much the stream they were born
+in to which they return as the stream in which they grew up. Salmon
+eggs have been taken out of one river, moved to another, and then the
+hatched fry were tagged. They migrated to the sea and returned to spawn
+in the second river where they had their growth.
+
+So what is to account for the alewives being able to find a “parent
+stream” that might be only a few yards wide, out of all the great
+stretches of the Atlantic coastline? They left it when they were no
+more than one and two-fifths to four inches long, but somehow, growing
+up in the sea, they must always have been oriented to that home base.
+They may have stayed reasonably near by, but even so this ability is
+hard to fathom.
+
+Disregarding the question of how they arrived at that point, how could
+they tell one stream from another? They enter innumerable rivers,
+streams, inlets, some of them in close proximity. One theory has it
+that they are able to find their home waters by their characteristic
+odor, their special composition, to which they were conditioned when
+young. Even so, how did they get there? How can fish way offshore in
+waters of a consistent temperature, without any landmarks, tell which
+direction will take them to their home street? It is quite likely that
+they would be able to detect the outlet waters where they merged with
+the sea, but a stream may not reach very far, perhaps a few hundred
+yards or more at low tide, before being totally absorbed. All the way
+along the coasts, rivers and streams pour in fresh water, mixed in the
+estuaries so that it is brackish when it reaches the sea. The sea water
+increases in salinity as it gets deeper over the continental shelf. An
+alewife may detect very slight differences in salinity comparatively
+far out, but we are still not much closer to realizing how it finds its
+way.
+
+What it amounts to is that no particular factors seem to be able
+to explain this directional ability of theirs. Not the response to
+changing currents in the spring sea, not the perception by fish of
+varying pressures in salt water, or of differences in salinity,
+nor their possible ability to use the sun as a reference point in
+navigation ... none of these approaches have yet solved the great
+mystery. Do they have some special sense, some perceptiveness, about
+which we know nothing? Scientists have measured and probed their
+reactions for a long time, but so far have not found any evidence of
+a special sensory ability. Biologically, fish do have several unique
+characteristics. For example, they have an “air bladder” by means of
+which they are able to adjust themselves to changing densities in the
+water. They also possess a “lateral line” organ, consisting of a tube
+or canal under the skin filled with mucus and connected to the nervous
+system. This sense, closely associated with hearing, enables them to
+detect vibrations of a very low intensity in the water and to avoid
+obstacles, such as an approaching bank or another fish. Aside from
+that, fish can smell, they have sight, and they have a sense of touch
+and taste.
+
+These known senses are what scientists count on in investigating the
+migratory behavior of fish. They test their responses to different
+stimuli. On that basis, one of the most recent directions to be
+explored centers around the environmental factors which the fish
+are subjected to, such as currents, temperatures, the physical and
+chemical nature of the waters through which they swim. These factors
+are supposed to guide them successively on their migrations and to be
+so consistent year after year that the responsive fish return to their
+streams of origin because they never got off the track. Different
+schools, or age groups, of alewives would go to separate streams,
+because they responded differently, as Gerald B. Collins puts it in
+his study of alewives at Bournedale, “to the existing patterns of
+environmental stimuli.” Homing, from the environmentalists’ point of
+view, is neither a matter of memory nor mystery.
+
+I do not have enough knowledge behind me to discuss such a method or
+approach, but it does seem to have the advantage of comprehensiveness,
+of taking the whole journey in. It does not depend on any single factor
+to explain migratory behavior, and it provides a good long track of
+exploration, step by step.
+
+Whether the migrant fish behave as mechanically as this suggests,
+or whether the factors involved are separately either as consistent
+as they are supposed to be, or amount in the aggregate to as much as
+they should, remains to be seen. We are still in the realm of theory,
+however rationally expressed, and do not know yet how the fish find
+their destination.
+
+Can a fish judge its course by the sun, or by the circulation of the
+waters of which it is so much a part? Can we talk about a homing
+instinct, or orienting ability, in connection with it? What are we
+defining? I don’t think I beg the question by finding it pertinent that
+civilized human beings have to some extent lost their ability to find
+their way in the woods, or no longer rise and sleep with the sun, or
+that they are not aware of the changing tides. Some old directional
+knowledge may still be innate in us, though we seem to think we have no
+need of it. Our puzzle, or lack of definition, may lie with ourselves
+as much as the alewives. In any case, what we try to find out by fact
+or abstraction is already known to the fish.
+
+They are still ahead of us. So much of their motion seems to be a part
+of the race as a whole, synonymous with its great water world, that it
+is almost as if they found their way like the wind and tides, elemental
+forces that we find it hard to evaluate. We try to pin down that which
+expands immeasurably beyond us.
+
+
+
+
+                                  VII
+
+                             Port of Entry
+
+
+With a certain amount of half-determined knowledge behind me, I decided
+early one morning to follow up the question of how far the brackish
+waters of the Stony Brook outlet extended into Cape Cod Bay, and so
+went down to Paine’s Creek. This is the place where the stream, which
+has been winding through tidal marshes like a small river, ends in a
+basin where several dories are moored, then takes a last turn and long
+curve, cutting through low dunes anchored by beach grass that border
+the sands. I saw a kingfisher rising up over the creek, a green crab
+shifting along the shelving bank; and on the beach were the remains of
+a black duck, sodden, bedraggled, the feathers loaded with wet sand,
+the breastbone sticking up like the white prow of a helmet, flies
+buzzing over it--the smell of salted carrion around it.
+
+The sound of the waters along the creek is constant and musical,
+following and followed up, broadly roaring, rushing, or slipping
+lightly, as they rise, pushed back by the incoming tide, or run out
+low and easy with the ebb. At low tide these creek waters spread
+their channels and fingered rivulets some three hundred yards straight
+out over the sands, to a point where they are joined by the waters of
+Quivett Creek which has an inlet a few hundred yards upshore to the
+west. Then the one channel finds its way past a fish weir until it is
+lost in the salt waters coming in over a long bar in the distance. The
+alewives also swim into the other creek; though not in the numbers that
+run up Stony Brook, because of less access to spawning grounds beyond.
+
+The tide was well out when I started to follow, or rather taste the
+fresh water over the sands. The Brewster flats, as they are called,
+were alive with light and constantly changing where they stretched
+out on the earth’s curve. Minor investigation took place in maximum
+horizons. I walked toward the weir, or fish trap, one of three in
+the distance, long-poled stockades a quarter of a mile or so apart,
+hung with nets like veils or the peaked coifs of nuns. A silver sun
+was beginning to lift through sheets of low fog, and a cool wind blew
+across the sands. It made my ears boom with that hollow sound of deep
+marine that you hear in a shell. I saw a small flock of brant standing
+off, their heads alert for danger, ready to thrust up and go when I
+came. I approached lines of brown dunlins, red-backed sandpipers,
+sanderlings, black-bellied plovers, which stood and scurried, peeped
+and cried, flew forward into the wind for short stretches, and came
+down again.
+
+As the sun rose farther up, clouds began to be reflected in the lanes
+between the ribbed sands, and there were thousands of gulls standing in
+a silver, immeasurable distance, while those sharp, light arrows, the
+terns, flew overhead. The flats with their brown deserts, their lakes,
+and pools, and veins, were like the patterned floors, the reaches of
+the great civilizations of man. The dawn fogs blew off. I was waking up
+to an architecture of space.
+
+Now from these tidal areas the plains of the sea rove out indefinitely.
+You can get a look at the universal map without benefit of signposts,
+and the coming on of fish represents great standards of inevitability.
+
+“But look,” a scientist might say, “in this unlimited space of yours,
+the mating animal only has a tiny area to travel in; a few miles at
+sea, if in the case of the alewives, they do stay offshore, and perhaps
+two or three miles inland. They are limited in space, and limited in
+numbers accordingly.”
+
+True, but we might add that it is this limitation, in alewives at
+least, that makes increase possible. They are one of the most easily
+managed of all marine species. Clear out the obstructions in their
+way; restock a lake and river system, or pond and stream, and the fish
+return, the population rises. Alewife management depends on their
+almost relentless drive to go back where they came from. No life
+insists on its locality more strongly. Home in their case is a definite
+route, a round way, small if you like, but spinning in larger circles,
+where birth leads back to its necessity.
+
+So I walked the sea lands, following the alewives’ avenue of approach.
+Well beyond the weir I began to get in too deep to qualify as an
+investigator. I judged that the brackish water of the outlet went
+at least five hundred yards out, and probably several hundred yards
+more than that, before it flowed into the salt waters of the Bay and
+then was lost in them. It seemed, during low tide at least, that the
+alewives might detect the fresh water reasonably far out in the Bay,
+disregarding the question of how they arrived at that point.
+
+As I went back across the wind again, under the hovering, crying birds,
+and saw where the waters of the two creeks came out, that strange fish
+knowledge of where to go was still unbelievable. I imagined alewives
+coming in here, or to a shore where there were even more creek inlets
+fairly close together, and wondered whether the schools joined in
+the Bay like concentric circles and then separated, each going to
+the stream in which it grew up. I also wondered about that supposed
+chemical sense, or sense of odor, that might explain the alewife’s
+knowledge of its home stream. Would not the composition of the waters
+of any one stream change greatly at various times of the year? It must
+be very different in the hot summer, when the little alewives come
+down to salt water, from the cool months of spring when the adults
+came in. Would that not be just as important a factor as the stream’s
+difference from another close by?
+
+Two miles farther up along the shore is another inlet at the mouth
+of Sesuit Creek. Many years ago the Sesuit and Quivett inlets were
+interconnected at some point back in their tidal marshes; and before
+the roads and banks were built that now divide them there was also
+more access to several ponds in the vicinity, both large and small.
+Since the glacial ponds of Cape Cod seem to fill up and dry out in
+time, turning to wooded or grassy hollows, it is possible too that the
+alewives had even more entryways, and went even farther inland, having
+longer fresh-water routes to travel--water veins open and flowing
+everywhere. In any event, the alewife population now starting up these
+two inlets is very small compared to that of Stony Brook, which shows
+that the fish are balanced in numbers according to the relative ease
+or difficulty of getting inland to adequate spawning grounds. In part,
+it also seems to be an added proof of the parent stream theory. The
+fish know their way. For whatever reason, and whether or not they are
+entirely consistent in coming back to the exact stream, it seems to us
+that they have a remarkable sense of direction, although, for all we
+know, it may not be any more remarkable than the accuracy of the tides
+or the timing of the sun.
+
+
+
+
+                                 VIII
+
+                           The Common Night
+
+
+Did the alewives choose the night or late evening hours to come in by?
+So I had been told. By daylight evidence, the fish population increased
+at the Herring Run on the mornings following a nightly high tide. I
+had also heard that there were more alewives running during the tides
+of the full moon, in the farthest monthly reaches of ebb and flood;
+but this was a correlation that would be hard for me to make without
+more years to judge by. In the middle of May on the days just after the
+first quarter of the moon, which came on the sixteenth, the fish seemed
+to be running just about as hard as they did during the days preceding
+the full moon in April, which had appeared on the twenty-fourth.
+Judging accordingly, it seemed as though their migration had its own
+ebb and flood during those months. All this was not much better than
+impression plus hearsay, but there seemed to be some justice to the
+night tide theory, so, to begin with, I went down to the shore late one
+evening during an incoming tide to see if there might be any sign of
+the alewives.
+
+About eight o’clock, an hour before high tide, the tide was running
+strongly in at Paine’s Creek. The channel in the marshes flooded over
+its banks and marsh grasses were floating and stirring as the swaying
+waters rose around them. It was near dark. I could see some seaweed
+flinging by against the sandy bottom at the mouth of the creek, and a
+big, ghostly green eel slithered up at the edge of the bank the waves
+were licking, seemed to look up at me, looped back into the water, and
+disappeared; but it was too dark to see much more than those black
+clumps of seaweed racing by. I saw a group of gulls standing in shoal
+waters beyond the beach, where waves were rolling in hard under a
+steady northwest wind. The sun’s cauldron had dropped down, a raw,
+glistening orange-red, into the sea and back of the curved horizon,
+leaving its horizontal flush behind.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+I walked back under the lee of the sand banks bordering the curving
+creek. The tide was pulsing and roaring, its waters loping in to the
+creek which began to turn a harder, darker blue under the sky. Then I
+began to hear the innumerable soft slaps of fish breaking the surface.
+The alewives were making their entry from the sea.
+
+And the gulls proclaimed their coming. Out in the Bay, they began to
+gather by the hundreds, clambering up with a scrambled yelping and
+hollering. The last smoky, red line of sunset was disappearing and
+they hovered over it in a maddened, high, wide swarm like huge bees.
+It grew darker, and a black-crowned night heron, or “quawk,” sometimes
+“quok,” a name true to the sound it makes, flew by with rounded wings
+against a star. The gulls began to disappear, streaming faintly like
+ashes against the last fires on the sea, but still crying vastly and
+collectively toward a world of distances. And in terrible simplicity,
+the alewives were swimming toward the inland gauntlet they would have
+to run, having a title, by their common, wild, and ancient advent, to
+all great kindled things. Who will see more than that in his short
+life, with its many meetings and separations?
+
+I by an old and natural right felt a fierce water-deep wonder of the
+spirit. The beyondness in me went back to its beginnings. I thought of
+the nights on which children I have known were born, and of the voyages
+of war, leave-takings at railroad stations and at ports of embarkation,
+and of dreams in which I struggled toward new meetings and other lives.
+The wind blew through the arches of the stars, and the surfaces of the
+dipping earth, water, and sky in their lasting communion made me dizzy.
+I felt a cold inevitable grandeur, below consciousness, a swim and go
+in an uttermost wild world, past home or my life’s memory.
+
+So by this evidence the alewives came in at night, and, as a further
+discovery not to be denied, so had I. Perhaps it was the closest
+I would ever get to the non-human fish in a darkness where all
+the components of existence ran the same race. That real depth,
+fish-oriented, nakedly omnipotent, fills men when they recognize it
+with more awe than their limited worlds can encompass.
+
+As I started back, about a quarter of an hour before the full tide,
+headlights swept over where the road ended at the shore, and in a
+minute or two a couple of fishermen lurched down the sand with high
+rubber waders on, carrying their casting rods. They stood on the beach
+in the dark, one of them coaching the other in baiting his hook. I came
+up and spoke to them, hardly able to make out their faces. The older
+one, he who did the coaching, told me that they had just got a pail of
+herrin’ from the Brewster run to use as bait. They had hopes that there
+would be some bass here, the famous “stripers” chasing the alewives in.
+They brought their long rods sideways and back to sling the bait out
+into the black and silver waves. The older man spoke low words against
+the wind, and I strained to hear him. Suddenly he thought he felt what
+must be alewives nosing his line and bumping against it on their way
+by into the mouth of the inlet. Last year, he told me, he had seen
+hundreds of them dead on the flats, and the gulls, he said, had slit
+their sides open as if with knives to get the roe. The waves had begun
+to slacken off when I left, and the fishermen were still casting, but
+without much hope of a strike.
+
+
+
+
+                                  IX
+
+                               The Hunt
+
+
+For a little while I felt satisfied that I knew the alewives only
+chose to come in on the night or late evening tides, until they proved
+me wrong. I say _they_ proved me wrong because I give myself no
+credit for more than moderately ignorant perseverance in following up a
+hypothesis. The alewives did a good deal of proving and disproving for
+me. They would probably show me up again.
+
+At the beginning of the third week in May there had been a fresh run
+of fish crowding into the Herring Run, if not as heavily as those that
+came in a month before. After the migration starts there are very few
+days in either April or May when some fish are not to be seen in the
+brook waters. One man can only judge by eye plus the amount of barrels
+being hauled out as to how many there are in any period, but there may
+have been a climactical run during the week after the nineteenth of
+May when the high tides came at night. On the twenty-first I had been
+taking temperature readings, out of curiosity and to keep up with the
+advancing season. It had been around 40 degrees Fahrenheit during the
+night and rose to 47 at 7:30 A.M., 53 at 9:00 and 55 at 9:30
+as the sun’s rays heated the land. Just offshore, down the beach from
+Paine’s Creek, at around 9:30, high tide being at 9:57, the temperature
+of the salt water, more consistent than the land, was 49, and the
+reading I then took of the brackish water at the mouth of the creek was
+51.
+
+I noticed a small crew of alewives in the tea-dark channel. Had they
+come in the night before? They were schooling back and forth, as though
+getting accustomed to the waters in which they newly found themselves.
+
+The tide began to turn. The waters going out at the creek mouth were
+yellow-green. I walked along the beach, and the surface of the Bay was
+long and smooth, a blue-green stretching and easing under a light wind
+with purple patches showing above seaweed and shelving banks of peat.
+I could hear the slow, gentle, labial sounds of the lightly ebbing
+waters. There was a small school of unidentifiable minnows turning
+and slipping-in-silver just offshore. A long frieze pattern of gull
+tracks showed, where the sand was damp, crisscrossed here and there by
+the little tracks of sandpipers and plovers. This cool, seaside world
+seemed full of equipoise to me, with a searching air of freedom playing
+over.
+
+There had been several clumps of herring gulls standing in shoals in
+the creek where it flowed out into the Bay. I noticed that some of them
+had begun to fly up. Then I saw a great black-backed gull swoop at the
+water farther out, and a number of herring gulls beyond it plummeting
+down, then chasing each other over the surface. They were after fish,
+but what kind? I went off for twenty minutes to get some field glasses,
+and by the time I returned the gulls had increased by the hundreds. Big
+clouds of them were circling and moving in from up the coast, higher
+and higher like drifting paper, some of them way up in the blinding
+blue sky, but coming closer, joining the feast.
+
+I could see that the gulls were diving straight down the course of
+the Paine’s Creek waters where they went out into the Bay, and that
+the fish they flung up between them clearly had the general size and
+shape of alewives. What was going on then was a great interception.
+The fish in their deliberate way had found the mouth of the creek, and
+made their instinctive move to go in, but as the water became shallower
+during the ebb tide they were ripe prey for the birds and there was no
+turning back.
+
+The violent, reckless activity of the gulls went on all morning. In
+the way they have of riding each other: “You’ve got it. Show you can
+keep it!” they were picking up fish, dropping them, and running away
+with them again, in a scrambling frenzy. There seemed to be almost more
+excitement, more energy, spent in the chase than in the fruits of it,
+though they gobbled what they could. I could hear an over-all sound of
+struggle as their wings rushed and they yawked and screamed. This world
+seemed pantingly, gruntingly, wildly busy.
+
+The victims of this natural slaughter seemed to have moved on a little,
+with their fatal determination, but as the tide and morning ebbed the
+white, frantic crowd above them seemed to stay in the same general
+area. It was not likely that many fish managed to reach the inlet. I
+imagined them dashing from side to side or circling in panic, the crowd
+knowing nothing but its own entity and safety. I talked to a man who
+was watching the scene from the window of his car. He told me that
+there had been a high bluff, washed away some years back, from which
+you could actually see the fish in the water as they struggled to swim
+in.
+
+“We had a good stream went out there that wouldn’t a happened,” he
+said, suggesting that if there were a deeper channel meeting the
+Bay waters, most of the fish might be able to get up the creek in
+comparative safety.
+
+Along this stretch of rhythmic work of greed and death little groups
+of gulls began to settle down on the water, glutted and loaded down.
+Then long lines of them, looking like white shoals, rested on the water
+upshore, digesting their meal. Low tide that afternoon came at 3:57. By
+two o’clock when the sands began to show, well out toward the weirs,
+the great tribal company of gulls were finished with the hunt. For a
+mile along the flats they were standing into a stiff wind. In the
+distance I could see a litter of dead fish along the bed of the creek
+waters. When I walked out I saw them, silver, blue, and white, with
+brassy tints from the sun, flung along, strewn on like debris through a
+wide city square.
+
+Even though there may be no waste in nature--with everything used,
+fired, and consumed in the interactions of the living world--what an
+enormous, careless expenditure! The bed of the outgoing waters was
+paved with this alewife coinage for hundreds of yards. Each one I
+picked up, and there were thousands, had its body scraped and clawed,
+or its head torn, its eyes gouged out. For every one gobbled during the
+chase there must have been many more left uneaten. Remembering what
+the night fishermen had said, it seemed like an indiscriminate feast,
+and it was not clear to me that the gulls were primarily after roe.
+But since fish eggs are a delicacy to other animals, gulls may find a
+special enjoyment in them too.
+
+So the alewives did not choose to come in by night or evening only,
+seeing that they chose to come in by day--provided there was much
+choice in the matter. I heard the theory put forward that they must
+have been chased in by bass; but if they were so chased, it did not
+seem likely that they would choose the narrow waters of this particular
+creek for refuge, or have that much calculation in them. That is not
+why they came in. Those thousands of years the alewives had migrated
+provided their own track. The fish knew instinctively when and where
+to go, and all risks were incidental to that. The only possibility was
+that they might have been schooling around in the farthest reaches
+of the creek waters in the bay and were hurried in by the bass; but
+they were there first. Many others may have gone in the night before.
+Those trying to come in during the morning waited their turn after
+an ebb tide. This rhythmic deliberation and then going seemed very
+characteristic of the fish as I had watched them in inland waters, and
+in a larger way it might be similar to their schooling in salt water.
+I found out subsequently that the alewives coming into the Bournedale
+run in the Cape Cod Canal do so both day and night, but that there is
+less chance of the gulls intercepting them there because of the deeper
+waters.
+
+I went down to Paine’s Creek the following morning, May 22, and the
+frenzied hunt was going on again. I had checked the previous night and
+did so the night of this day too and there were no fish coming in, so
+far as I could tell. There was no sign of them in the water during the
+late evening, no sound of their soft slapping on the surface later on.
+
+It is my impression that though they start into the creek in the
+dark--perhaps not later than ten-thirty or eleven o’clock--they do not
+move upstream very much until daylight comes. Sunlight stimulates them,
+or, to be exact, its radiation. You can see them swimming up faster in
+Stony Brook after the bright sunlight warms the water in the morning.
+
+They might enter the creek more successfully under the protection of
+fog, or darkness, combined with deep water, but did not prefer such
+conditions to broad daylight. When the temperature was right and they
+were physiologically ready, alewife schools began to move in from salt
+water on an incoming tide ... swing in might be a better term, since a
+circular movement is characteristic and sends them on. According to my
+observation, incidentally, this is very likely to be counterclockwise.
+In any case the power and direction of the migration came from their
+combined rhythmic impulses.
+
+Alewives seemed to me to demand a study of universal motions and their
+interrelationships. The body of a fish must have in it the declination
+of the globe and all its years. If I had read some of my limited
+science reading correctly, there was a time system in the world of
+life which had nothing to do with clocks, and their specific minutes
+and hours. It was built into its creatures so that their stages of
+development, their growth and movements, followed the direction and
+change of all other forces affecting them. It is a running world; and
+who, in that context, is more automatic than another?
+
+
+
+
+                                   X
+
+                      Transition: Salt and Fresh
+
+
+The change, for those fish that make it in, is from salt to fresh,
+wide to narrow, deep to shallow. Watched at Paine’s Creek in the first
+sheltered inland curve, the movement of those I was able to see was
+like the movement of tides and estuary waters, a flowing back and
+forth, a waving and interweaving. Some dropped back like leaves, then
+swam up again with the rest as they all turned together. At the start
+of an incoming tide--when the salt water moved in under the fresh and
+the creek began to rise--the fish seemed stimulated and swam faster,
+back and forth against it. Then gradually, though it was hard to see
+them in the high tide waters, they appeared to move farther up the
+inlet.
+
+It was an encounter at the dramatic approaches of sea and land, on the
+long shoreline where continuous transitions are made between water and
+earth and air.
+
+If you say the “anadromous habit” started somewhere in geologic time,
+it is difficult to conceive of, and it is probably not accurate, in
+the sense that these adaptations to environment do not start so much
+as develop and evolve. In any event the incredibly long history of
+the earth is not broken down with any facility. First of all, leaving
+out the question of whether fish originally evolved in fresh waters
+or the sea, and then blithely skipping one hundred million years or
+so, you have an evolved race of alewives, established residents of the
+sea. As to their habit of spawning in fresh water, it is possible that
+alewives, like other coastal fish, may gradually have explored the
+inland rivers and streams, until they began to use their comparative
+quiet and refuge in which to spawn. Along the northern coasts their
+inland migration would have been interrupted during the glacial epochs,
+and their range would have started farther to the south. There are
+landlocked varieties of alewife in Lake Ontario and in New York State,
+which also suggests a period when the continental glaciers retreated,
+leaving an access by water to inland lakes from the sea which was later
+cut off. In any case this anadromous habit was arrived at gradually,
+involuntarily, over a very long time. But, in a sense, what you see
+_now_, your center of history, is a routine which is neither old
+nor new but both various and inexorable, having in it the pull of the
+land, the blood of the sea.
+
+This starting, circulatory movement of the few small schools I had seen
+was succeeded by the swimming of steady herds in the brown water of
+the channel. I couldn’t find them at first. On the ebb tide, when the
+water had receded enough from the banks along the inlet I walked there
+for a while and then cut across the tidal marsh. The day was cool and
+fresh, with a light northeast wind lifting in, and it smelled of the
+sea. (You can live a mile or so inland on the narrow peninsula of Cape
+Cod, in the towns or oak woods, and never smell that rich combination
+of salt water, shellfish, and tidal marsh, unless the wind is from
+the right quarter, with a special condition of the atmosphere.) Light
+rippled up the broad inlet--the coppery waters seemed to move slowly
+and reliantly. The season had hatched its enthusiasms everywhere, from
+flies, to crabs, to birds. The tidal ground was pitted with holes made
+by fiddler crabs. They backed away in front of me, the males comically
+holding up their one big claw--little characters of a dull metal-blue,
+with bubbling mouths--and disappeared into the safety of their burrows.
+Ahead of me nine Canada geese, which had been resting and feeding in
+the marshes, unfolded their wings and lunged up and out toward the Bay.
+
+Then two black ducks flew off quacking in their deep, wild way. I saw
+where a deer had left fresh hoofprints in the mud; looking down at them
+made me notice many tiny shells, newly hatched whelks perhaps, carried
+in by the tide, strewn between the stiff spikes of the marsh grass; and
+I found a couple of empty pint bottles, sometimes as common in these
+parts as Kleenex beside the highways of America. Insects, shells,
+ducks, geese, crabs, wind, cloud rack overhead, brilliance and shadows
+on the tidal ground--many lifetimes of learning. Is there any man who
+knows the length and breadth of anything, let alone a creek? Yet such a
+place keeps announcing its novelties and exacting from us whatever love
+and discipline we are capable of; or so I felt, challenged in the keen
+air and the high glitter of the light.
+
+Several hundred yards around another bend in the inlet, where it was
+some twelve to fifteen feet wide, I looked down into the water and saw
+them again. The dark channel was alive with them. It had a floor of
+turning, slowly moving alewives. A few at the end of this school would
+run quickly back, revealing their shadows on the bottom. The procession
+moved back and forth, as smoothly as the flow of the water, and across
+the entire width of the channel. They were more numerous in the areas
+where the sun hit the water directly.
+
+Some of them looked torn and scarred. On that basis, and because many
+thousands had either been trucked off from the Herring Run in barrels
+by this time, or had reached the ponds, spawned, and returned to
+the Bay, you could not say categorically that they were all moving
+inland. As the season develops you can always find spent fish on
+their way to salt water running through those still heading up to
+the spawning areas. Aside from watching their movements, one method
+of distinguishing between the two classes of fish is to see if they
+bear any white patches on their backs and sides. A certain number of
+the spent fish will show fungus growths after a period of time in
+fresh water. What seems to happen is that an alewife, attacked by a
+gull or predatory fish or flung against sharp rocks, will at first
+show a “scaling” from the damage. This scaling, unless it is more
+than that, a mortal wound, is likely to develop into a fungus growth,
+which sometimes covers a large part of a fish’s body; but without,
+apparently, any added injury. I believe experiment proves that the
+fungus disappears fairly soon after the fish affected are back in salt
+water.
+
+The returning alewives will stay for a while in the brackish water of
+the inlet, resting and feeding. They are spare and hungry and will feed
+on shrimp, small eels, and small fish. Alewives that by chance stay
+longer than the others in fresh water have been known to chase and eat
+their own young, if they were small enough to swallow.
+
+Their basic salt-water diet is plankton. The copepods and
+amphipods--tiny animals similar to the well-known sand hoppers, beach
+fleas, water fleas, or small shrimp--provide the staple part. On their
+inland migration they will not eat much of anything. They are in the
+service of a mission, and they fast. Still there may be occasions when
+they snap at lures. I have heard of some, migrating inland, that were
+caught by fishermen casting with flies at the Herring River in Harwich,
+on the south side of the Cape.
+
+Those herds now in the brown waters of the channel seemed to be
+gradually moving inland as the day advanced, and I guessed that for
+most of them it was the journey up.
+
+As I watched them there was a slight, quick change of wind, a shift in
+the breeze that flicked the water, and in the crosshatches this made on
+the bright surface all the fish disappeared. Then the surface cleared
+and I could see them again, swimming through a rippling weave of light
+that was reflected on the channel floor.
+
+They meandered along, an occasional lively one dashing through the
+rest, or rushing up to the surface. I could hear light plops, faint
+flips along the water. I walked closer to the edge so that my shadow
+fell across them, and they turned back in one quick and graceful
+stampede, some of them dashing to deeper water under the opposite bank.
+That so many separate entities should have such an immediate response
+to one another that they all moved like the beat of a wing was hard for
+one individual to understand.
+
+Alewives are able to stand the quick change from salt to fresh water
+without any trouble. It would kill some other kinds of fish, but
+neither the alewife fry growing up in fresh water nor adults growing
+up in the sea seem to mind being taken out of one medium and plunged
+into another. They are adapted to both. On the other hand, repeated
+changes, such as occur sometimes under certain conditions in tidal
+estuaries, are said to be able to kill them.
+
+These changes, incidentally, are registered in an alewife’s scales. To
+read them is difficult and requires a competent biologist. In general
+they mark physiological changes, such as occur when young alewives
+go from fresh to brackish water, or when the adults spend some time
+in fresh water before returning to the sea. An alewife’s age can be
+determined because a record of each spawning migration is etched on the
+scales.
+
+I had seen them flashing and swarming inland up in the Herring Run
+area, but in this wide channel were new motions that needed more
+patience and information to be understood. For example, where the
+fish eddied and wheeled under the dazzling rays, I noticed one group
+idling in front of a submerged sand bar or reef that ran across the
+channel. I waited there for three-quarters of an hour before the fish
+showed signs of any common impulse to cross over it. One or two dashed
+over sportively to chase a minnow and then sped back, but the rest
+of them--a hundred or more--would make no move. Finally, after many
+circling approaches by the whole crowd, the measure of their circle
+came closer and closer out of the brown water to the brightly lit,
+coppery bar, until some of the vanguard spilled over. Then more and
+more sped and skittered over until the move was accomplished. Why?
+Were they afraid of the brightness? Did the contrast in light stop them
+in some way? This would hardly seem consistent with what I had found
+out so far. Perhaps it was just routine to their motion. Evidently
+alewives idle in the deeper channels where the velocity of the water is
+slower and easier to swim in. They respond to the relative force of the
+flow. Where the current is more uniformly rapid, and they are going up
+against it, they progress steadily. And perhaps the bar formed an eddy
+behind it, so that the water where they swam moved against the current
+in the channel and they were unable to tell their direction.
+
+The alewife hordes puzzled me as they moved slowly but definitely
+through the channel. A new animal, moving to unknown needs is hard to
+understand. You grasp for some translation between you that will not
+come. Relationships in the water world seem to need other senses than
+your own. It could be said that to understand the transition of the
+alewives from salt to fresh water and back you must know about the
+effect of the endocrine glands on the reproductive system, as well as
+adaptations of the kidney, along with the temperature, the time of the
+tides, and the chemical composition of a particular stream--just to
+begin with. If you are wise and devoted enough to put all the known
+factors together, you may come out with a unified interpretation, and
+be abreast of the latest theories of process. Knowledge is the motion
+by which the human animal may come closest to a fish. Still I looked
+in my ignorance for another familiarity in which we shared. Where the
+sea pushed inland and the alewives moved ahead or returned, I saw an
+indefinite route, of surpassing, complex elaboration; but in their
+pulse and tempo I felt something that gave me present assurance, and a
+touch of joy.
+
+
+
+
+                                  XI
+
+                             Up the Valley
+
+
+When you leave the channel that elbows through the tidal marshes and
+then goes under the shore road, Route 6 A, through the valley ending
+at the Herring Run, you go from one living community to another. You
+leave the thousands of fiddler crabs tunneling through marshy ground,
+the fat, olive-colored little salt-water minnows, or mummichogs,
+darting through green clouds of muck in the warm pools left by the
+tide, and muskrats, kingfishers, herons, ducks, or gulls. Some are
+permanent residents, others are itinerants, but all are presently bound
+together in the tidal grounds. They feed off one another, being both
+producers and consumers of food, and so sustain the balance of all
+their lives together. Such communities are the principal study of the
+ecologists--the interrelationship of living things in their environment.
+
+The alewife migrates from sea to ponds through the inland vein, from
+crabs and shellfish to robins, and frogs beyond the tide. Its migration
+runs through several different life communities, of which it is not
+strictly a part, although its progeny, the fry, will be a part of
+the food chain all the way along, the prey of many different kinds
+of fish and birds, and eaters themselves of food the ponds provide.
+But the alewife’s migrant continuity is like the water itself that
+runs unceasingly down the valley, and ties all the life together that
+adjoins it.
+
+The stream, on the north side of the shore road, used to run up the
+center of the valley where there is still a ditch dividing once
+cultivated cranberry bogs, but the watercourse was long since diverted
+to the eastern side of the valley. It was in that direction I went one
+half-showery, half-sunny day for a further exploration, but first by
+way of the short, bordering range of hills before going down again.
+Hills and scoured valley were left by the most recent continental
+glacier as it melted back from the terminal moraine of Cape Cod perhaps
+some twelve thousand years ago. I climbed the steep slope on the west
+side of the valley, nearest the Herring Run. Below me the long, snaky
+turns of the run went down from its rocky top where the waters were
+churning white and spilling over. As I walked up and down the slopes
+and across the small ravines between them, I could hear voices receding
+down by the Herring Run; and then a woodchuck whipped a whistle and
+dove when I came up, its brown rump disappearing into a freshly dug
+hole, which had an arc of sandy yellow dirt piled outside. On the way
+there were wild cherry, viburnum, hawthorn, pitch pine, and juniper
+sparsely growing, and I passed a dipping stone wall that marked an old
+boundary line. I picked up a wing from the remains of a dead herring
+gull on the ground, put it before the light wind, and was struck with
+what broad strength it held the air. As I came toward that knob of a
+hill where the gulls congregated, they flocked away with a simultaneous
+rush of wings and went crying high toward the Bay. The hill was bald,
+except for a few wild rosebushes on its crown, and its slopes were
+covered with a wild pink, moss campion, and patches of sorrel made
+more profuse by nitrogen and ammonia from gull droppings. On the other
+side of the valley there was a wood of twirling, gnarled, gray tupelo
+trees with the pink of their buds still showing. Bay waters and the
+curving, final shore carried distance out along with the gulls; while
+this valley with its dips and slopes and the migratory waves of life to
+which its land and water were hosts seemed wide enough for many worlds.
+
+As I clambered down a slope toward the stream, three ducks that were
+coming in to settle on marshy ground changed course, two black-crowned
+night herons flew out of a tree, clucking like hens, and a yellowlegs
+stalking through muddy peninsulas flew up and away, its sickle wings
+in reckless flight, with a cry both tremulous and sharp. Everything
+fled before me. I might be a part of these communities myself but as
+an itinerant, it seemed, and a dangerous one. How difficult it is to
+prove to anything but domestic animals, long since tamed and lost, that
+a man is not dangerous! Men have a hard time trying to prove it to
+themselves.
+
+I had come down near the point where Stony Brook started to turn to the
+east side of the valley. The banks behind me were streaming with spring
+water and the wet edges were lush with new growth: lettuce-green grass,
+succulent-looking leaves of skunk cabbage, fiddlehead ferns newly
+uncurling, and clumps of violets, flowers of a sky-delicate light blue.
+At this edge of the valley the water was full of thicketed islands,
+hummocks, and muddy shallows, but as the stream stretched on, ten to
+twelve feet wide, the current swung along at a man’s fast walk over a
+brown and sandy bottom, and in it, constantly eddying by and turning
+over, were innumerable silver fish scales, debris of the striving and
+death at the Herring Run, several hundred yards behind.
+
+Where the stream turned at right angles across the valley it was
+bordered by a low man-made dike. Halfway down the dike, at the end
+of a long narrow ditch bisecting the old bogs, was the remains of a
+_stop water_, a kind of three-sided dam designed to raise or lower
+the water in a cranberry bog to its desired level. I looked down into
+its still, dark square of water and there was a split-second rush of
+a fish, and perhaps two or three others coiling in the small space
+together. They may have been spawning. In any case, intentionally
+or not, they had come down the ditch instead of by the main stream
+and could go no farther. There are many areas in a run, side pools,
+ditches, marshy land, to which some alewives may be sidetracked, before
+the main spawning grounds.
+
+I saw a few later in a dead-end offshoot of the Herring River that
+looked very much as if they were trying to go back, though I have no
+reason to suppose they felt that they had made a mistake. If they were
+not ready to spawn they may have circled back with the ebb tide, which
+reached that point, and found the main flow where they had lost it on
+the way up.
+
+I have idly wondered whether a single fish, isolated from its brethren,
+might not suffer some kind of unknown hell of estrangement. I have seen
+one swimming wildly down a narrow ditch off a tidal inlet as if it knew
+the crowd had left it behind, and was frantic to get back. Still, for
+all we can say about their lack of consciousness, they carry out their
+great decisions, their deep harmonies, together, by natural laws which
+we ourselves cannot completely explain, and by which we too may carry
+out our migrant purposes.
+
+The creek flowed on through banks tangled with poison ivy, blueberry
+bushes, briars, and grapevines--at times almost impassable. Once, as
+I peered out from the tangle, I saw a bird I had never seen outside a
+field guide--a Virginia rail, moving along a muddy shelf under the
+opposite bank. It moved almost humped over, neck and head forward, like
+a great mouse, with a docked tail and red-orange beak. Then farther on
+I saw an egret with head and slender neck above some high pitch pines,
+pure sky-white, Grecian, out of a stately, impenetrable world, almost
+too secret for an ecologist.
+
+Where the stream was wider and the shallow water flowed along, lightly
+and unobstructed, a group of some ten or twelve fish ran easily across
+it. Then they stopped and circled with the current like a nest of eels,
+in a slow, fluid mass.
+
+I turned back. After light sunshine there was a faint shower, a spray
+of rain. The valley was full of sound. A slow plane flew over; a
+truck’s gears ground over the road; I heard a song sparrow staking out
+his territory; crows cawed; blue jays gave harsh and silvery shouts; I
+heard my own breath and the almost silent touch of cool air and rain
+spray on the ground--a narrow valley, but with melodious resources from
+everywhere. Why “back to nature”? I thought. Is there anything in it
+but forwardness?
+
+In the stretch below the Herring Run again I suddenly saw, in the
+blank, dark water under gray skies, a wave, an eruption, a rushing
+ahead of a group of fish. Then they moved over to the side of the
+shallow stream, thirty or forty of them, and stayed there almost
+stationary for a while in deeper, slower currents where an overhanging
+shrub shaded the water. I threw a stick in their direction ... when
+it hit the water they wheeled wildly on their group axis, but stayed
+in the same place. Then in a minute or two they all made a break for
+open water at once, and I noticed that another group had come in unseen
+behind them. They would progress in this way, group after group, until
+they met the denser population below the fish ladders. One of them
+would come out first with a kind of flitting, darting, weaving forward
+against the current and the rest wheeled in behind it.
+
+I took off my shoes and waded out into the stream. A lead fish working
+its way back and forth with the current swung around as I came and fled
+back. I stood still for a while, noticing that the gulls I chased out
+of the valley had returned and were hovering over, chuckling, crying,
+mumbling, or barking like seals. After a few minutes of waiting the
+fish came right through and around my legs. My slightest change in
+posture would send the ones in front looping back, but they still kept
+coming. It was a quickening thing to see a fish race up in a long reach
+and then drop part way back again--a tentative, fast exploration of
+the current, the living current as perpetual as its own communicated
+impulses.
+
+One hundred yards or so upstream the alewives covered the stream bed
+where Stony Brook’s divided waters met. Some schooled slowly around
+below the unsurmountable falls, the rocks of death, the majority headed
+up the main stream toward the fishway where hundreds were massed,
+slipping and turning, arched in the white waters. Fishways are so
+designed as to allow the alewives an easier way to mount an incline,
+but they do have the effect of concentrating them in narrow quarters.
+The resting pools are compartments deep enough to check the velocity of
+the water and so permit the fish to wait before leaping on again. Even
+so the water roared down with great force on the alewives crammed in
+them. I could hardly hold my cupped hand against it. As they leaped up
+they were tunneled in spouts of water, and then they would flip through
+the boiling surface from one pool to the next, sometimes being thrown
+back to try again.
+
+
+
+
+
+                                  XII
+
+                         The Imperfect Ladder
+
+
+There is no such thing, I have been told by men who were in the
+business of making them, as a good or even adequate fishway. There is
+always an imbalance between the purposes they serve and the results.
+All the same, fishways are the best we can do to remedy a situation
+that blocked great populations of fish from entry to their natural
+routes. They are built to try and bring back what man has taken away;
+though it should be said that they are as much in man’s interest as the
+alewife’s. Commerce is the main benefactor of their success.
+
+Fishways help open up free passage to the fish, and so increase their
+numbers. In a good fishway alewives can be counted or sampled. They can
+be taken out and transferred to other areas that are to be stocked with
+them. In other words, the removal of obstacles and the construction of
+a fish ladder means, in most cases, that a run can either be introduced
+or improved, and, above all, kept under control.
+
+The trouble is that they cannot be built so as to result in
+free-and-easy passage for the fish at all times. In fact, if they are
+not properly placed, they can even be a hindrance. A fishway requires
+engineering and research in its preparation. They vary greatly, of
+course, according to local conditions. A fish ladder’s length depends
+on the distance of the slope down which a flow is directed, or the
+kind of banks, rocks, or stream formation through which it is built.
+I imagine there are no ideal specifications. For alewives, fishway
+construction depends in general on the size and habits of the fish and
+the nature of the waters in which they travel. The great fish ladders
+built for salmon at the Bonneville Dam, on the Columbia River, have
+pools in them that are forty feet wide, sixteen feet long, and six feet
+deep, each being a foot above the other. One foot is no problem to the
+salmon, which have been known to leap as high as ten.
+
+At Stony Brook the pools on the down, or north, side of the road are
+ten in number and various in size, extending some distance downstream.
+The first six are smaller and deeper than the others, being so designed
+as to round a bend in the stream. Their depth, subtracting several
+inches of sand that keeps washing down from the road, is about two feet.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+On the upper side, above the seining pool, leading from one of the pond
+outlets, is a straight ladder, some twenty feet long. Its pools are
+four and a half feet square and twenty-eight inches deep, each being
+about five inches above the other, thus graduating to fit the slope.
+
+Whatever their design, fishways are all built so as to assure the
+alewives quick transit from one pool to another. In most cases they
+seem to work satisfactorily, but unless they are well managed they
+can effect full use of the stream by the migrant fish. Alewives have
+their own crowd pressure and motion, their way of moving on, and any
+reduction in their numbers at any one time or counterpressure, keeping
+them back, may result in a decline because less will get to the ponds
+to spawn.
+
+Fishways are more rigid than a natural stream bed, though sometimes
+less hazardous. Water levels change; the flow varies both in angle and
+pressure; and managers of a good fishway must be constantly on the
+alert for new conditions. A marked increase or decrease in the volume
+of water, especially as it is reflected at the head of a fish ladder,
+which usually has a gate or wooden dam of some kind, may create a
+barrier instead of an aid. Unless the adjustment in the dam is just
+right the head of water coming down may be almost impossible for a fish
+to surmount.
+
+Alewives are not like the muscular west coast salmon with their
+spectacular leaps, as if shot by a giant sling. An alewife does not
+leap over a pool and up a falls so much as swim through it rapidly,
+being a much smaller fish and in smaller streams. If a head of water
+coming over a dam or sluice is at the wrong pitch, the fish will not be
+able to climb it. In designing a fishway an engineer has to take into
+account the relationship between the water head and the angle of the
+flow below it, which has to be translated into how far an alewife can
+swim at what speed.
+
+A fish is supported by water--an advantage over cumbersome human beings
+in their own surrounding medium, the air--its specific gravity being
+close to that of its own body. The fish is so made as to swim through
+the water with as little resistance as possible. It also gets energy
+from the water, orienting itself by the current, or the various changes
+of pressure in the flow, the way a bird uses currents in the air. In
+so far as a bird is streamlined too, and finds in air pressure and
+weight the means to fly up and forward, their actions have something
+in common. A bird, like an alewife, may lose its momentum if the angle
+of climb gets too steep. Swimming and flying take place in fluid
+surroundings.
+
+The difficulty in making an artificial aid like a fishway comes from
+the problem, in part, of understanding a fish’s behavior; of meeting
+its needs; arranging its passage; trying, if not to control nature, at
+least to be a substitute for it. The positive results are plain to see,
+but there is something almost as elusive about it as trying to explain
+a fish in human language.
+
+At one point along the Herring River in Harwich is a concrete fish
+ladder, twenty-five feet long and six feet wide. The pond above was
+high, after this same rainy spring, and the waters were roaring and
+frothing down. The alewives migrating upstream were being held back.
+Only a few I noticed were getting through. The flow had tremendous,
+deep force, so that the resting pools were not serving their function,
+and most of the fish that did manage by extraordinary effort to reach
+the head of water at the top were not able to pass it.
+
+The racing torrent dropped to a wide, shallow basin which ended in the
+river winding on within its banks. A continuous long line of fish kept
+swimming through to the bottom of the ladder, where they would vainly
+skip and twist and strain through the water’s force. Then they swung
+back in a semicircular arc across the basin and re-formed at its edge.
+There was a wide shiver on the water. They wheeled as in a dance, or
+like the planets in pursuit of light, where they ran up again into
+the flood. It happened time after time, in this futile but concurrent
+motion, a beauty to watch--its tension, effort, and relief were exactly
+co-ordinated with the water. These fish _were_ the water. But I
+saw in them the mechanics of breath ... contraction and expansion; and
+systole, diastole, balance and counterbalance, within the dynamics
+of all nature. They showed the push of life against a current, its
+running back and leaping forward, its fulfillment and defeat. It was
+the alewife circle again, as we have ours, in a motion of entirety; but
+almost impossible to translate.
+
+“You never enjoy the world aright,” wrote Thomas Traherne, “till the
+sea itself floweth in your veins.” In the knowing and encompassing
+sense of his word _enjoy_, we will never know alewives until the
+motion, lift, light, weight, and changing beauty of the water is in
+some degree a part of us. In any case, we will never build the perfect
+fishway.
+
+
+
+
+                                 XIII
+
+                              Persistence
+
+
+When the little wire gate on the upper side of the seining pool was
+left open during the weekends the fish could pursue their destiny past
+the concessionaires. One weekday night during the last run in May some
+prankster took the gate out and caused much excitement in the alewives
+committee.
+
+“Gawd! Gawd! ... running all night long. Here’s the town selling this
+young feller the fish, and he doesn’t get any. We’ll have to put a
+padlock on it ...” etc. etc.
+
+I may have had such a delinquent impulse myself at one time, but I kept
+it way down.
+
+There are two streams falling into the seining pool. Both start as pond
+outlets some fifty yards above, one with the fish ladder going down
+from it, and the other falling into a pool that ends above the old
+mill, the water of which can be used to run the water wheel on occasion
+by being diverted to a wooden sluiceway, instead of taking its natural
+course down over rocks into the seining pool. This second stream cannot
+be traveled by fish going up to spawn although they can go down it on
+their return journey.
+
+One weekend I watched the fish at the top of the ladder as they jumped
+over the board dam, to meet at last the quiet stretch of pond water
+above it. The waters were growing green with algae as the season
+developed, and were penetrated by deep shadows, blue shafts from the
+sun, yellow and pink reflections from the spring leaves on the bank.
+Some were unable to make it and slipped back into the rushing, narrow
+flow in the ladder, and then tried again. Jumping the dam, they would
+give a final, vibrant, struggling push into the smooth, heavy weight
+of water over the rim and then shoot off, wriggling away, easing into
+a new peace. The impetus of this leap was enough to send some of them
+skittering along the flat surface on their sides, like skimmed stones.
+Others going into the pond would start back again toward the head of
+the ladder, and then return and wait a while as if they wanted company.
+As some new arrivals came they would swim a kind of half circle in
+relation to them, and then all would go on, having established a
+communication; but the general movement was a bolt into deeper water
+and then a rejoining into groups as they went on. After that, where do
+they go?
+
+As far as fish migration in general is concerned the spawning route
+beyond Stony Brook is not very great. Roughly, the distance from the
+outlet through Lower Mill Pond and Upper Mill Pond to the end of
+Walker’s Pond is about two and a quarter miles. Upper Mill is the
+largest of these, being about one and a half miles long and a quarter
+mile wide. Where the fish spawn in this area is not too easy to find
+out at first. Their preference as to spawning grounds seems to lie
+along stony, pebbly shores, or shallow beaches. Many of them, before
+spawning, will travel to the farthest reaches of any given water route.
+Others, depending perhaps on how far the season is advanced and on
+their bodily development, will either go the entire distance and then
+return part way, or spawn before they get there.
+
+It may be that the earliest, coming in during the month of March, or
+early April, when the pond waters are still cold, will go farther
+than the later arrivals. Their eggs develop more rapidly as the
+temperature of the water advances, from around the late forties say,
+at the beginning of the season, to a maximum of 72 or 74 degrees. When
+the spawn is not ready they may keep going, schooling, roaming in the
+ponds for days. But there are no hard-and-fast rules about which of the
+alewife schools goes where, and any generalizations would have to be
+varied to suit conditions in other localities where they are found. At
+one extreme they may travel for six or eight miles up a tidal river,
+or at another they may come into a pond connected with salt water by a
+waterway or cut only a few feet long.
+
+Many of them swim up headwaters as far as they can go, through the last
+ditch to its stagnant end. I have heard of their going through marshy
+land in the direction of Pine Pond, a small pond beyond Walker’s,
+once connected with it I believe. There were cranberry bogs in this
+land, bordered by wire fences. The alewives would slip sideways under
+the wire so as to get to the other side. This is characteristic of
+them. When in very shallow water, inches deep, hardly enough for their
+bodies, they will skitter on, almost flat on their sides at times,
+going as far as they can until the water gets deeper.
+
+Occasionally they have been known, on their way upstream, to butt their
+heads against a leaky dam where the flow of the water continued to come
+rather than go up a fishway to which it had been rerouted. (In one case
+an old log dam obstructing a stream had enough leaky cracks in it so
+that fish slithered through them.) Such behavior may not make sense
+from our point of view, but it is part of a life necessity to them.
+Returning alewives are not concerned that we bypass a stream or send it
+off its course. They continue to follow the direction and limits of the
+flow that is in them, even as it might have been before we came.
+
+Behind their persistence, if one term can encompass enough, is
+the “homing instinct.” This is not only a matter of reacting to
+environmental waters, but insisting on that area where they were
+spawned, and where they grew, in the first few weeks or months before
+they migrated to salt water. In trying to rehabilitate the alewife
+population, men in fishery management are greatly helped by this
+powerful drive to return. Sometimes they are hindered by it.
+
+There have been some areas in which the construction of dams across a
+stream or river has almost destroyed an old run, although there were a
+few fish left over, making a yearly, token migration. They continued to
+come in and spawn below the last, impassable obstruction in their way;
+but when the dams were abandoned and removed and new fishways built so
+that they could travel upstream to the headwaters, the alewives stayed
+where they were. They did not migrate beyond their original limit, and
+the population failed to increase. It was as if there were an invisible
+wall in the water where the last, accustomed barrier had stood. Not
+until the headwaters above were newly stocked with spawning fish was
+there any chance of the run being fully used.
+
+This built-in reaction to home waters might go back for thousands
+of years in an unobstructed stream, or, in a new run, only three or
+four. It has its limits, and its wisdom. What can go farther back, or
+forward, than its own birth?
+
+When I started watching the alewives I heard of one phenomenon that
+seemed to me to surpass all analysis. It tempted me to look for magic.
+The run that comes up from Nantucket Sound on the south side of the
+Cape by way of the Herring River goes through a pond called Hinckley’s,
+then through a stream ending in a fairly large body of water called
+Long Pond. The migrating alewives are also able to go into another pond
+out of Hinckley’s--north of it, and east of Long Pond--called Seymour
+Pond, but the majority seem to spawn in Long Pond, from which there is
+only one clear exit. The fish must go back to Hinckley’s, the way they
+came. But this outlet was not always the same. Early in the nineteenth
+century the natural outlet was a brook going into Seymour Pond, but it
+was blocked and banked off by the construction of some cranberry bogs,
+and the present outlet was dug some five hundred yards away. Now the
+extraordinary thing is that on their return, the alewives still school
+in the banked-up area of the old outlet. I went over there and could
+find nothing to distinguish it from the rest of the sandy, water-lapped
+shore, except that there was a slightly boggy area on the other side of
+the road where the brook used to run, and a trace of its route through
+the underbrush.
+
+Was there any reason at all why these fish should be able to detect
+an old route cut off a hundred years ago? The direction of its flow
+no longer existed as currents in the water. Yet the “damfool herrin’”
+were certainly behaving according to report. I could see them, a school
+of several hundred, running freely along the shore, slipping lightly
+over the sand through the unruffled pond waters. When they reached the
+area of the old outlet they began an almost puzzled circling, which
+continued for some time before they swung back again. There should have
+been a common-sense reason for it, but I was tempted to ask, “What is
+verifiable truth?” and not stay for an answer.
+
+This story does not end in mysticism. It was suggested to me that there
+was a certain amount of seepage at the outlet, probably going under
+the bank and road, which the alewives felt and to which they reacted.
+I can only say that all has not been told about their sensitivity and
+perceptiveness ... transmitted from generation to generation through
+thousands of years. I was quite sure at least that they knew more about
+Long Pond than I.
+
+Even if all the long-range problems about their movements cannot be
+fathomed, there are enough local ones to keep a searcher busy. Given
+enough persistence of one’s own, they may all be solved; helped of
+course by the consistent fish. As the weeks went by I learned about
+most of the local areas where they spawned. I had noticed a school
+running offshore in the Upper Mill Pond, although I had not seen them
+in the act of spawning. But there was one place where I had seen them
+without knowing why. A few miles west of Stony Brook the fish come into
+the tidal inlet known as Quivett Creek, where they appear to reach a
+dead-end stretch of marsh ditched for mosquito control. I had tramped
+around in this boggy region, seen a few alewives there, and come to
+the quick conclusion that this was where they spawned. No one of whom
+I inquired in the vicinity could tell me otherwise. I did not know
+whether it was logical or not. They were not inclined, apparently, to
+spawn in the full ebb and flood of the tides, but looked instead for
+quiet waters. On the other hand, I had a pamphlet from the Fisheries
+Research Board of Canada which said, about alewives: “... in the
+Miramichi and other river systems extensive spawning takes place in the
+swift waters of the main tributaries.” This was not swift water but it
+drained and flooded daily. However, the fish did not seem to stay long
+in the ditches, for whatever reason. It was hard to believe that they
+would return to the Bay so quickly, when they had come to spawn.
+
+Being puzzled about it, I went back some days later. I walked again
+through the marsh at low tide when the ground was firmer, and finally I
+saw where the main flow narrowed into one of the ditches, then ran into
+a very small, almost imperceptible culvert that went under the highway,
+Route 6 A. Sure enough, on the other side of the road, in a ditched
+area tangled with briars, I could see many fish, slowly crowding
+on--but this was not the end of it either.
+
+Beyond was an impenetrable tangle of woods and thickets and an old
+abandoned house, reproachfully dying, with large empty eyes where the
+windows were, tall, unpainted, with dark-brown clapboards, and broken
+inside. You could reach this house from a side road off the highway.
+To one side of it was a small pond, which I had caught a glimpse of
+before, covered with water lilies in the summertime. I went in over a
+long high bank, part of an old road, that ran back of the house between
+the tangled ditches and the pond. There seemed to be no access from one
+side to the other; but toward the middle, on the side of the bank where
+the ditches ended, I saw a few alewives circling in a pool of still
+water. Then I heard a light splashing on the other side. I walked over
+through the thickets and saw a number of fish wiggling and thrashing up
+and over a little neck of water that ran out of the pond.
+
+On one side this action, and on the other an apparently aimless moving
+through rocks and sodden branches in the water. Undoubtedly there was
+an old, hidden culvert that ran under the bank, but the underground
+passage must have been partly clogged and certainly very small. So
+the alewives that came into Quivett Creek spawned in that pond. Most
+of them had probably been hatched there. The flow from the sea had a
+logical termination. What else, the fish might ask me, had I expected?
+
+
+
+
+                                  XIV
+
+                          Spawning: the Dance
+
+
+During the third week in May, when the run seemed about over I had
+still not seen them spawning, although I had heard a description of it
+from my local authority, Mr. Alexander.
+
+“A kind of swish dance is what they do,” said he, giving a hula-hula
+motion with his hands.
+
+Harry also described them as sidling up at the shallow edges of the
+ponds, rocking as you would rock a baby; and then shooting out the
+spawn, their fins lifting up with the effort. The pond suckers, as he
+related it, would swim up to grab the eggs almost as soon as they came
+out of their bellies.
+
+What about that school I had seen running along the shore of the Upper
+Mill Pond?
+
+“Well, they were kind of getting acquainted, you know. Just cuddling
+together!”
+
+This was on May 25, as I have it in my notes, and when I started out
+from the Herring Run to walk up to the ponds above it, Salvadore was
+still there with his truck, barrels, and net; but he said he was going
+to quit soon and deal in some redfish (another name for rosefish,
+or ocean perch). The redfish made tougher, better bait for lobsters
+anyway. While he had been in Brewster he had netted forty barrels a day
+on the average, sometimes as many as eighty, but he told me that he
+had not yet reached the four-hundred mark. One barrel, weighing some
+two hundred pounds, might contain around three hundred fish or more,
+so that about 120,000 alewives might be pulled out of Stony Brook in a
+season, though I imagine this is a very low estimate. I have heard it
+said that there are a potential two thousand barrels in the Brewster
+run during the full season, taking all fish. In an abundant year
+there might be close to six or seven hundred thousand adult alewives
+migrating up the brook. Even so, subtracting the mortality, the
+necessary minimum of fish allowed through the gate during the week have
+a very heavy job to do to assure the return of hundreds of thousands of
+their race in three and four years’ time.
+
+Because of some kind of alewife caution or deliberation, not enough of
+them were going into the seining pool to make a good haul. They were
+delaying on the down side of the road. Salvadore waded in with his
+rubber boots on to drive them under and through the bridge, but they
+hardly budged, so he crouched down with little more than three feet
+of height for body room, and swashed in after them. They skittered
+before him, landing with a simultaneous series of quick dashes into the
+pool.
+
+It was a warm day. There was a new lassitude in the air, and the sweet
+smell of lilacs. The gulls were gone that had flocked in quarreling
+and screaming when the run was heaviest, hovering and rising over the
+waters and their hordes of fish, bold enough sometimes to perch on the
+bridge over the run, looking very large, with their pale-yellow eyes
+glaring as naked as stone.
+
+Once I saw a herring gull display its fantastic eating capacity by
+dropping down into the fish ladder, grabbing an alewife, and swallowing
+it whole. Down went the fat, foot-long fish in a few gulps, headfirst
+so that neither scales nor sawbelly would stop the progress. Then the
+loaded gull flew very heavily away as I came up, the alewife’s tail
+having barely disappeared.
+
+Now, in place of gulls, there were a few dove-gray, black and white
+quawks perched on the outer branches of overhanging trees like heavy
+sculptured ornaments, or standing in the water with their spear-head
+bills ready poised for a frog or small fish. I have heard it said,
+incidentally, that these night herons keep the gulls away. I have never
+witnessed any aggressive action between the two races. On the whole
+they seem to respect each other’s territory and to keep their distance
+from each other; but I have seen quawks and gulls together waiting for
+little alewives on the flats beyond Paine’s Creek.
+
+In the brook there were still some fish ascending, but many more were
+going back. It is a little hard to tell the difference at first, since
+both face up against the current, but the returning alewives gradually
+drop back, and many of them have the characteristic white marks on them
+of fresh-water fungus infection. The strain of spawning and using up
+their store of fat makes them thin, slow, and weary. They have lost a
+good deal of their vigor, though not to the extent of preventing the
+return journey.
+
+In spite of this “spring fever” day it was not that the greatness of
+events was over ... only the first great toppling of a wave, only the
+first violent forwardness with its illimitable sounds and changes.
+There was a steadier greenness on the trees, and blossoms on the
+high lilacs. The run waters went on with a constant wail and wah, if
+without the turbulence of a few weeks earlier. I left the Herring Run
+and walked up into the warm pine woods to try and find the culminative
+point of the migration.
+
+A light wind was running straight down the long surfaces of the
+Upper Mill Pond when I reached it, and little waves scudded ahead. I
+walked on the north side where sandy banks descended to the shore,
+shaded by pitch pines and covered with viburnum bushes and bearberry,
+a pink-blossomed, shiny-leaved ground cover locally known as “hog
+cranberry.” There were stretches of amber sand, small stones, or
+gravel, along the pond’s edge. A fat sucker jumped for a fly and
+crashed heavily back into the water.
+
+All at once I heard a light thrashing and noticed a large water
+snake under a blueberry bush. It had dropped a small salamander that
+was twisting over and over on the ground, its damp body collecting
+bits and shreds of dry leaves. As I came up, the snake hung over a
+low-lying branch and watched me, its mouth slightly open with a little
+toothed white and pink jawline showing. I picked up the salamander and
+dropped it into the pond, where it hesitated for a few seconds and
+then wiggled away into a patch of green ooze and deeper water. With a
+stick, I tossed the snake twenty feet away, thus establishing myself as
+universal arbitrator.
+
+As I walked and watched along the shore I saw one group of alewives,
+and then another, running by, looking light-colored and bright in the
+sunny water. Sometimes these groups seemed to be made up of one female
+escorted by several males, but the closer they came to shore the more
+intermingled they were, and it was not clear to me that this was a
+definite pattern. When she is running upstream, the female’s eggs
+are unripe, but ripen soon after arrival in the ponds, provided the
+water temperature is high enough--between 55 and 60 degrees may be the
+average spawning temperature during the big April and early May runs.
+As to the act of spawning, the female, depending on her size, deposits
+anywhere between sixty thousand and a hundred thousand eggs (each some
+0.05 inches in diameter) in shallow places; and because they are
+sticky they adhere to gravel, sticks, stones, or whatever they settle
+on. The males, who have been following the females closely, immediately
+cover the eggs with milt, thrashing and scattering it with their tails.
+The eggs hatch out in some six days’ time when the water is at 60
+degrees, and in three days or less at 72.
+
+When I first watched them spawn I saw a group of alewives run, circle,
+and weave offshore, sometimes slowing up at deeper holes on the bottom,
+or behind rock-protected water, and then come in close, with one quick
+impulse. They raced in together to the gravelly, shallow edge, through
+water not much more than ankle deep, with a sinewy, rippling motion.
+Then in the shadows under an overhanging shrub there was a flipping,
+whirling, and thrashing, a breaking of the surface. The female slapped
+up against the side of a rock with a rising, shuddering motion of the
+body as though it were shaking everything out of it, while the others
+simultaneously writhed, coiled, thrashed tails, and shimmered through.
+Then it seemed to me that there were a few seconds in which they slowly
+reassembled their senses to go elsewhere. The word “deposit” was hardly
+active enough.
+
+A fat pond sucker was hanging around the center of activity, following
+the alewives slowly like a small sunken log. It was obvious that eggs,
+to this crude, crass, lazy taster of a fish, were the ultimate delicacy.
+
+There were other occasions when the alewives, in greater numbers,
+swam next to the shore, spawning in what might have been concentric
+groups for several hundred yards. Some at the edge would be coiling
+and thrashing while others swam on or circled back. The fish that were
+farther out in the pond ran nervously, with eager movements, making
+quick turns as if reconnoitering, or practicing for a culminating
+turn. They collected suddenly when spawning, with quick, spontaneous
+decision. I noticed that the males while running in would often
+shoulder or press the females on. The characteristic thrashing whirl
+they make is sudden and amazing, almost like a pinwheel in a short
+burst.
+
+Their attendants, the pond suckers, would loll in the slow rock of the
+pond waters. They are large, soft-looking fish, with round, pink fins,
+and white, fleshy lower lips with which they go nibbling and nuzzling
+with snail-like speed over the bottom. The alewives by contrast are
+small, gray, and quick. If alewife eggs are deposited between rocks the
+suckers go down in after them, and, if the water is shallow enough,
+present the odd picture of a large topheavy body sticking down with its
+tail above the surface.
+
+It is not I think, incongruous to apply the word love to a cold-blooded
+fish. In this spawning act there is an imperative rhythm, with grace in
+its preparation and power in its fulfillment.
+
+Sometimes the war cry of gulls, in small flocks settling on the shore
+waters or rising up, told me where the alewives were, but most of the
+time I found them in accustomed places like that stretch of shore on
+the Upper Mill Pond. Sometimes I could hear them splashing before I saw
+them. They seemed to be more inclined to spawn when the water was not
+too rough. On the other hand, I watched them spawning when the ponds
+were very choppy and the small waves were pushing them as they thrashed
+at the edge. Once, on the south side of the pond, I noticed the suckers
+before the alewives. There were twenty or more lined up as if they were
+giving the bottom a slow going over. When groups of alewives ran in and
+characteristically heaved, flipped, and writhed at the edge, the big
+suckers would move up closer. They were so oblivious to anything but
+their slow gluttony that I could tap them on the head with a stick.
+
+Occasionally a couple of alewives would give a sucker a little rush, a
+brief chase, as much, so it looked, by way of sport as aggressiveness.
+They were certainly incapable of damaging it very much, and it could
+not be driven away for long. An overdose of suckers in any one area
+seemed to discourage the alewives a little and make them move on, but
+on the whole they too were so intent on what they were doing that they
+hardly noticed anything else. They had to fulfill themselves; then,
+stunned, go on. The eggs were expendable.
+
+
+
+
+                                  XV
+
+                              The Return
+
+
+After the first week in June there were very few if any alewives coming
+up over the dam at the head of the run. An increasing number, on the
+other hand, were going down, and I could find very few in the ponds. I
+was to see them returning well on in July, which indicates that while
+many, perhaps a majority, will leave the ponds a few days or a week
+after spawning, others may stay there for weeks longer. For reasons
+known only to the individual fish, occasional strays have been found
+lingering in fresh water well into the winter.
+
+On the morning of June 10, after a lapse of a few days in which I
+had seen only a few returning, a boy who was weekending on the Upper
+Mill Pond told me he had seen thousands go by in the direction of the
+Herring Run. So they were still schooling for the return to salt water,
+progressing again by accumulative motion. In a few weeks some of the
+little ones, hatched out earlier, would start down too.
+
+I stood on a rock and looked down into the water along that peaceful
+stretch above the dam. This is an area where Indians gathered and
+camped when the alewives were running, spearing them, or taking them
+with nets made out of reeds. Many Indian artifacts have been found on
+the surrounding slopes. On this June day insects were settling down
+on the still surface. A shower was due--the air heavy. An alewife
+slanted slowly up to the surface and then dropped down again. It left
+a perfect circle behind it that gently widened over the blended images
+of clouds, leaves, and rocks. Then as other small circles, raindrops
+falling, began to show on the water, a belt of flying herons passed in
+reflection. A breeze corrugated the surface slightly and the fish swam
+slowly on toward the roar of the seaward-casting falls.
+
+The returning migrants now have a choice between two outlets: one at
+the top of the fish ladder, and the other at a board dam where the
+water drops into a long pool above the old mill. At the far end of the
+pool the waters fall again a short but precipitous distance, often
+roaring full and hard down the rocky slope into the seining pool.
+The alewives use both outlets, but the majority seem to prefer the
+falling second stream to the ladder by which they came up, perhaps
+because it is the point of greatest flow. Where they drop down over
+the falls it looks to the proportionate, or disproportionate, senses
+of a human being almost suicidal. Most go over tail first. Then they
+appear to be dashed headlong down the jagged incline that ends in rocky
+narrows going off at an angle to the pool. One after another they
+flip and fall, their bodies bent like bows, and flash finally, swift
+and vibrant--not, surprisingly, having been broken to pieces--at the
+bottom. Occasionally a fish near the end of the slope will frantically
+try to skitter back up. Presumably it is trying to reduce the speed
+at which the ground is going by it, in the way a man tries to brake
+himself when running downhill. But this almost helter-skelter falling
+reveals almost as much of the alewife’s supple strength as its leaping
+up against the current.
+
+As June went on and polliwogs turned to frogs, the leaves came fully
+out, clover and buttercups were blooming, and the pond algae had
+increased at a fast rate so that a thick green scum gathered behind the
+dam, and the pond waters were yellow-green. Still you could see the
+fish gathering at intervals massed sometimes fifty feet or more behind
+the two outlets. There is a small wooden footbridge over the board dam
+at the head of the pool. When I lay down on the bridge and looked under
+at the curved lip of the water I could see the fish gathering behind.
+Against the steady rush and whine I could hear a dull, deep change in
+sound as the fish suddenly turned and plummeted over. Their bodies,
+enlarged behind a green curve of water, had a metallic sheen, a dull
+silver, as they would wheel in, loom up, and drop away. I came back at
+night, and could still hear that heavy sound in this lens, or gong, of
+water.
+
+In each new phase of migrant action there is an old ceremony. The
+alewives approach the dam, in groups of varying sizes. They circle,
+withdraw, and swim back again. Some of them swim between the two
+outlets as if to decide which one to take. Coming closer, they show
+an increasing animation, a quicker circling and flipping, as if the
+outward pull of the water resulted in a more vital excitement between
+them. After many more starts and withdrawals, lasting anywhere from
+fifteen minutes to an hour or more from the approach of a given group,
+or school--using that term in the sense of larger numbers--one or more
+fish will drop over, and then the rest will follow.
+
+I watched one school making these ceremonious retreats and approaches
+for two hours. When they finally started dropping over I counted some
+fifty fish a minute for about fifty-five minutes, until there were only
+three left. This remaining three must have lacked the common stimulus
+to go, the rhythm of sufficient numbers, and they stayed behind, as
+more fish began to draw in closer from the pond. I have seen this
+often. Sometimes seven, nine, and up makes enough of a group to start
+over on its own; very occasionally one alewife will go it alone; but it
+does seem as if a certain variable minimum will not take the move upon
+itself.
+
+Though a single fish may be the first to go over, or to advance
+upstream, it is hard, from my observation, to attribute any leadership
+to individuals, male or female. The crowd provides its own pressure
+and momentum. Perhaps the circling of these groups and schools, and
+their dropping over, might be analogous, though it is a looser motion,
+to a flock of sandpipers flying off simultaneously as if they were
+cast out by a lithe, invisible wire, and then turning on an instant,
+glinting in the sun. The impulse is in the rhythmic unity of the group,
+even though in the case of the fish some may be left off or behind
+until they are rejoined in it.
+
+The speed at which they drop over seems to depend on the size and
+pressure of the oncoming school--population pressure, in other words,
+unless pressure of numbers is a better term, which must also affect
+the timing of their entry from the sea. Sometimes they go over:
+one--two--three--four--one a second; but if the group is small the rate
+may be ten to twenty a minute. Finally there are those few fish left
+behind that circle around at the outlet or turn back into deeper water
+where another school will be coming up.
+
+All morning, as the alewives massed, circled, and dropped, there was
+one fish that kept wandering through and over the others in a puzzling
+way. It was a conspicuously darker color, which is characteristic
+of blindness, as I learned later on. Its loss of sight, then, had
+deprived it to some degree of the community action, though it had been
+able to feel its way toward the outlet. Occasionally one that looked
+exceptionally tired and slow would drop over the falls by itself. I
+noticed also that those which were scarred and infected seemed to have
+lost some of the fire of communication.
+
+To the casual eye the spent fish may not look any thinner or weaker
+than the rest, though when they hit the seining pool they are obviously
+in no hurry to move on, but circle slowly around it for some time.
+Their flesh, for the human carnivore, is of poorer quality than when
+they came in from salt water. Going back to history again, it seems
+that the recipients of alewives in the Caribbeans were not always
+pleased with the product. There were complaints in the eighteenth
+century, as I have indicated, and in the early nineteenth as well,
+when plantation owners in the West Indies objected that this food was
+doing bad things to their slaves. They said that alewives taken when
+they were going downriver after spawning were “poison fish,” and “the
+very worst food that can be given to slaves, as it both disheartens
+them, keeps them continually murmuring, and brings on those scorbutic
+diseases so common among negroes in that climate.”
+
+Bad food or not, they were in all things directional, with the water
+and the season, moving on and out, taking the rhythms of perpetuation
+with them, these “reflex machines,” bearers of strong tides. They had
+been giving me something of a lesson in cosmic weather, though I was
+still a hopeless beginner. From one place, one road, around one circle,
+they had led me through so much variety that I was left to wonder at
+my omissions. The man-made world must still have far to go to learn its
+inner and outer relations to a greater, expanding world of lives that
+are given, not made.
+
+What further connections are there, say, between the sun and sight,
+between our tactile senses and the medium of earth and air in which
+we are born, between the moon and the tides and the rhythms of water
+and of blood? Who knows more about the universe--I with my conscious
+measurements, my personal faltering, or the poor fish with its
+unthinking precision through the various unknown? Can we not combine?
+In any case, whatever human beings decide about what is effective or
+ineffective, what shall stay or what shall go, the alewives know where
+they live.
+
+The crowd in the seining pool moved slowly, in a wide circle around
+its rim. Most of their inland enemies had gone now. The human hunters
+had driven away. The herring gulls had flown to other feeding grounds.
+Not that one enemy or another made much difference to them, except in
+terms of sudden fear. Like their eggs, they were expendable. Nature’s
+ruthlessness, the using and the building up of that which fed and that
+which was food, would keep them on the way of primordial energy. For
+the same reason they were also spenders--one of the great sacrificial
+coinages of the living world.
+
+Still this point in their migration before the return to salt water
+might be called a place of demobilization, a separation center. They
+swam slowly around in the pool, passing between each other, but always
+a part of the circle, each fish with its body and its large black
+eyes leading forward, obedient to it. They dispersed very gradually
+throughout the day. One small group after another broke off, sparks
+from a wheel, and the fish let themselves be carried back down the
+brook where the outlet of the pool led under the road. In the run
+below where they went back step by step to the sea--whose pull was in
+them--they faced up against the current, their orientation, with a
+tired, slow weaving. I noticed a little perch attendant on them. It ran
+down backward with the large procession, giving the alewives a look of
+ceremonial grandeur. I have seen sunfish join up too, although there
+could be a point on the approach to brackish water when they decide
+that home life is better than parades. These motions must be catching,
+communicating to other lives and races than those in which they
+originate. All have their way stations, or orbits, along a route that
+is being followed out with primal grace and power.
+
+
+
+
+                                  XVI
+
+                        The Young Follow After
+
+
+When the last adult alewife of the season drops down Stony Brook for
+the tidal inlet and the sea, it has left the renewal of its continuity
+and motion behind it. The little alewives follow out the route of their
+elders with a silent animism, sent by ancient habit and unknown need.
+The repetitive ways of the anadromous fish come out of geologic time.
+On the long track since then, the adults, reaching their spawning
+grounds, have had the drive of the sperm toward the egg. From the top
+of a falls to the depth of the sea there are equivalent lifts and falls
+in their own being. The young, tiny and perishable though they may be,
+have the same inalienable motion in them.
+
+After hatching, young alewives form dense schools, and begin to feed
+on the plankton--tiny organisms and plant life--in the pond waters.
+Occasionally they can be seen flipping on the surface. They are subject
+to attack by all kinds of predators: perch, pickerel, frogs, herons,
+kingfishers, water snakes, and many others, from the time they are out
+of the egg. Landlocked waters are often stocked with spawning alewives
+for that very reason. The fry make an excellent diet for such popular
+game fish as bass, trout, and salmon.
+
+The survivors begin to move out of the ponds about the beginning of
+July. In other areas I have heard that the majority do not start
+down until September. The first time I saw them was on the second
+of July, when they were being drawn down by the thousands through
+the dam opening at the head of the fishway. They were scarcely over
+an inch long, and as they came in from the ponds they reflected the
+summer-green of the water. Their eyes seemed huge in proportion to
+the size of their bodies. They were poured down the boiling water
+of the ladder, tossed around like chips and slivers, spilled down
+helter-skelter; but where the current slowed, farther down the brook,
+they held together in the fashion of their race.
+
+There is an account, in a _Report of the Alewife Fisheries of
+Massachusetts_, 1921, of some alewives hatched out in the
+fisheries at Sandwich, Massachusetts, in June of 1919. The eggs were
+put in water of 72 degrees Fahrenheit and half of the lot, in that warm
+temperature, were hatched in only forty-eight hours. “In the surface
+water were thousands of tiny alewives with food sacs nearly transparent
+in appearance, and with tails resembling fine silk threads. The tiny
+creatures, about one-fifth of an inch in length, wiggled through the
+water with surprising activity. The eyes in both the egg and the
+hatched fish were but faintly visible. At the end of ninety-six hours
+their size had increased considerably, the outline of the yolk sac and
+the body was plainly marked, and the eyes showed prominently. By this
+time all the eggs had hatched. In cold water the period of development
+is retarded proportionately to the lowering of the temperature.”
+
+In a month the young alewives were about three-fifths of an inch long
+and by autumn between two and four inches. At three-fifths of an inch
+they look more like a sand eel than an alewife--an observation quoted
+in the same report. When they are an inch and a fifth long they look
+more like the adults. Their bodies are shorter at that size and they
+have a large head and relatively large eyes. When they reach one and
+two-fifths inches, about the size of those I saw, they look much the
+same, but with the addition of the alewife’s sawbelly--“serrations of
+the middle abdominal scales.”
+
+It may be that in times past little alewives have been unable to
+migrate out of the waters in which they were hatched, and local races
+of a landlocked variety were established. The landlocked alewives
+are much dwarfed in comparison with the salt-water variety. Some
+years ago there were a number of complaints from householders in New
+York City that small fish were coming out of the faucets. The Deputy
+Commissioner of the Department of Water Supply, Gas and Electricity,
+referred the matter to the New York Aquarium, which investigated and
+found that these were none other than landlocked alewives: _Pomolobus
+pseudoharengus_. They had been spawned in the Kensico Reservoir,
+and in the autumn they passed through the 5/8-inch mesh of the screens
+at the outlet. This might suggest the migrating habit of their ocean
+cousins. A friend of mine, getting the parent stream theory turned
+around, speculated as to whether a study might not show them returning
+from the same faucets over a period of years!
+
+But no conclusive evidence was found that these fish were following
+out any consistent migration. For a period of eight years during the
+course of the survey hardly any fish were reported as dropping into the
+kitchen sinks of New York.
+
+One interesting thing about the landlocked alewives is that they
+are subject to mass mortalities, or “die offs,” for reasons yet
+undecided. In some areas, like Cayuga Lake in New York State, this
+happens occasionally, but in others, Lake Ontario, for example, fairly
+regularly. This does not necessarily happen after spawning, so invites
+no analogy to the west coast salmon. Many of the dead fish have not yet
+reached sexual maturity.
+
+As to the normal, coastal migration of the fry from fresh to salt
+water, why do they leave when they do? Is there any theory that can
+account for these little fish suddenly moving out of the waters in
+which they were born, so rich with the fresh-water food that gave them
+their initial growth? Are they fleeing their enemies? Yet the young of
+the fresh-water fish are preyed upon too, and they stay behind.
+
+There is an explanation about salmon fry which has them gradually going
+seaward in order to escape the brighter light in the shallow fresh
+waters; but is there anything in the constitution of an alewife that
+is not accustomed to sunlit waters? They do not escape them so much
+as seek them, because of their warmer temperature. Aside from that,
+I would think, from my own observation, and the comments of others,
+that they have no preference between the dark and light along their
+way--they run through both--but do not like a sudden change. For
+example, they waited all one morning before coming out of the shaded
+waters under Stony Brook Road to go into the brightness of the seining
+pool, only moving when a shadow fell across it that was cast by the old
+mill.
+
+If the adults swim toward the coast in the spring because of some
+change in their make-up consonant with changes in the waters where they
+swim, is there also some change in food and temperature which makes
+the young start to leave fresh water at a particular time? The little
+alewives are creatures of such sensitivity to their medium, to its
+changes, and to what they eat, that a factor in the timing of their
+migration might be some internal discomfort, or so it was suggested
+to me. To begin to find out, a scientist would have to follow all the
+stages of a little alewife’s birth and growth, tracing where it goes,
+what it eats, and what the temperature, depth, and density of the
+water is along the way. He would also have to do this for every age
+group that leaves the three ponds from July through October, analyzed
+pond by pond, since conditions differ in each one. During this period
+the little fish leave at all stages in the seasonal development of
+the ponds, while not all of one age group seem to go with the others.
+Many appear to stay in the ponds for several months. So attempting
+consistency with such findings might result in more indigestion for the
+investigator than the fish themselves.
+
+From the outward evidence all I can say is that these little ones do
+not start schooling to move out of the ponds until they are over an
+inch in length. I have seen them, still not much more than pin size,
+circling a few hundred yards above the outlet, but neither swimming
+with the flow nor letting themselves be drifted on. Logically then, the
+point at which they are stimulated to leave must coincide with growth,
+the rate of which depends on food and temperature in the ponds.
+
+Warm-water ponds are more favorable to growth than cold-water ponds.
+They turn out better fish, larger and healthier. By the same token a
+cold spring and summer will result in a poorer crop of alewives. They
+will probably be hatched later. The colder pond waters will bring
+down the “plankton bloom,” in other words less food for the fish. As
+a result, young alewives going to salt water that year will be
+smaller, weaker, more subject to disease, and less able to escape their
+enemies.
+
+It is just possible, then, that some spring when the annual run of
+alewives is smaller than usual, for no apparent reason, you might find
+an answer to the mystery in a cold season, four years before.
+
+After the first young alewives have moved out, having attained the size
+and response necessary for it, you can see a gradual increase in size
+from early summer until autumn. One of the unsolved questions is why
+the earliest to go will not stay longer in the ponds. Why not relax, if
+a fish can, and eat well until autumn, as in fact large numbers of them
+do. Were they nearest the outlet? Perhaps the larger fish that begin to
+appear later on were hatched earlier and therefore came from farther
+back in the chain of ponds.
+
+Of course there is nothing rigid about their timetable, nothing exact
+about their migratory behavior. Whatever stimulates it, their new
+momentum takes the form of a gradual circling out. I have heard that
+in some areas they will start down and then return when they can swim
+back up the outlet, if the force of the water is not too strong for
+them. They may be in a state of indecisive action for a while, or so
+it sounds, but most of them are moved to go at some time before winter
+sets in, though there have been many exceptions to the rule. John
+Burns, of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, tells me
+that he saw a “generous school of fry” one January, coming down under
+the ice of a frozen pond at Bournedale.
+
+Perhaps this phenomenon of migration in the young fish is not
+susceptible of final analysis. Might that be because it is so simple,
+however complex in detail and circumstance, simple though intangible in
+the life rhythm it embodies? However slow or fast their response to it
+may be, the little fish must be obeying an organic, directional drive
+that goes back beyond history. As a part of their growing up they may
+develop the same kind of built-in response to the waters in which they
+find themselves as their parents schooling offshore in the spring; and
+they come to have an intercommunication that knows its way. It is not
+the adult call of sexual maturity that moves them, and yet they must
+have a biological need to start out together on the same living track.
+
+I recognize how much an amateur may leave out of his calculations, and
+only proffer my individual guess that they follow the outward flow of
+the ponds when they grow to feel a rhythmic, habitual motion in them
+that responds to it and that belongs in its balance to the whole race
+of alewives between land and sea. The fresh-water minnows stay where
+they are, no matter how hard the pull of the waters may be. I have seen
+them lazing in the shallows while a school of little alewives darted
+over them, restlessly moving on. And as I followed the young migrants
+I saw in them a roaming, roving sweep like sea birds made for distant
+journeys.
+
+I watched them coming down from July through October and into November,
+from the lush green of early summer to the red and brown of dry weeks
+in August, and on to the cool days of autumn when the sea turned a
+brighter blue and winds and clouds blew full--all the way almost to
+the hardening in of winter and its sullen skies. The alewife is a part
+of the life of Stony Brook and the ponds above it for at least seven
+months out of the year. And the fact that so many return again to the
+particularity, the uniqueness of these waters is a reminder of the
+power of living form and place together, the welding of those strands
+of near and far in the body of a fish, the body of the world. The fish
+egg rolls around on a greater axis than its own.
+
+So the first of the tiny fish came down by the thousands during the
+first week in July. After that there was hardly a day until the middle
+of August when there were not at least a few to be seen in the brook.
+Gradually they grew larger, so that in August they were up to two
+inches on the average. The next big movement, after an August lull,
+began on September 6 and 7. Their size by then had increased to between
+two and two and one-half inches. A few were considerably larger. I
+measured one at the surprising length of four and one-half inches, and
+another, which escaped my net, looked to be well over five.
+
+It was easy enough to get a sampling, because they had a tendency,
+owing to their very light weight perhaps, to be caught at the bottom of
+the little falls that poured out of each resting pool in the ladder.
+They were tossed, turned, tumbled in the bubbling water, flung out from
+it but returning to be tossed again. On the surface of that turbulence
+they sometimes managed like gulls riding drafts of wind, but then they
+would drop down and under and be carried off to the edge once more.
+This would go on for a long time, although they were very gradually
+dropping down the brook. Because of this tendency of theirs I was able
+to scoop them out of the falls with a sieve--although the larger they
+were the more elusive.
+
+I noticed their absence during a number of cloudy and rainy days in
+September and their return when the sun shone; which is not to say that
+I did not see them on overcast days too, but the good days started them
+going. They responded to warmth like the adults. Beginning in October
+the next schools of fish coming down had increased in size, so that the
+average seemed to have gone up to about two and three-quarters to three
+inches. This movement, off and on, kept up until the end of the month.
+I saw one last small group coming in to the upper falls on November 16.
+
+In the larger individuals I noticed a wider radius of response, even
+though they circled with fish much smaller than themselves. They were
+faster. They were gaining more control, and more apparent ability to
+see what was coming, my hand or sieve, for example, and to avoid it.
+These later age groups were not tossed downstream so helplessly as the
+earlier one-and-a-half-inchers had been. They showed more strength
+against the current. Yet the motion of them all was consistent with
+what I had seen in the adults going the same course.
+
+I would see a little gray school of fish circling above the dam between
+the two outlets, with a beautiful, light swinging, and running by.
+There might be a sudden split in the middle of them when a leaf fell
+or a dragonfly touched close to the surface of the water. Then one or
+two of the tiny fish would fall back over the outlet with an almost
+electric beat, while the rest stayed. Then four or five more dropped
+over, and suddenly all the rest spilled over after them. They were
+tumbled down the first steep ladder; then they followed out the longer
+stretches farther on, sometimes running with the current, sometimes
+turning back against it; and on the down side of the road they were
+caught in the in-boiling waters of the second fishway, before the
+uninterrupted flow ahead.
+
+A minority came down the side or waste stream instead of swimming down
+the second fishway, and, because they were not contained there as they
+were in the resting pools, I could see more clearly what happened to
+them as they approached a falls. The current was consistently smooth
+and swift, but it was a long, level, calm stretch of water. I watched
+them swimming straight down with it and then, quite close to the
+sudden tug of the high falls, they would turn back. They felt it, and
+had a quick response to it. It was as though they suddenly had their
+equilibrium tested, and that they were like trapeze artists feeling
+wrists, body, and rope, before swinging out and over.
+
+Then down where Stony Brook was broad, shallow, and swift, they ran,
+or were carried on, like sticks and leaves. Where the water lost some
+of its force they swam up against it, in little schools together, or
+they swam off to the side of the main flow for a while, sometimes
+lingering in deeper water, or the shelter of rocks and banks, but
+continually returning to it, always a part of that outward seagoing
+rhythm. Gradually they traversed the swirling, eddying, long-stretching
+waters. They moved toward the influence of the tides where the brook
+ran through the marshes. They held position or circled back when the
+brackish water came in against them. Finally they swam, or were pulled
+out, from Paine’s Creek on an ebb tide, and moved toward the new
+shelter of the sea and its many dangers.
+
+
+
+
+                                 XVII
+
+                        The Power of Fragility
+
+
+I think one of the greatest challenges is to watch each bounded living
+thing with care for its particularity, as far as we can go, to find
+out we can go no farther. Flower, fish or leaf, child or man--they
+take none of our suggestions as to rules. Each has a strong language
+that we never quite learn. No matter how many times I try to describe
+the alewife by the uses of human speech, or classify its habits, its
+intrinsic perfection resists me. It is _something else_. It goes
+on defying my own inquiring sense of mystery.
+
+The beauty of a little alewife held between the fingers, struggling
+out of water, dying, by human arbitrary reach, becomes the subject of
+thought and language, creative protestation in themselves. But the
+two-inch creature makes a mightier protest than my conscious sight
+of it ... wild, fragile, vibrant, shivering with a quickness that
+will die out in a matter of seconds. It is a marvelously knit animal,
+compact, flexible, shining, with its tiny meshed scales that interlock
+the light, iridescent silver like the adults, green, yellow, purple,
+receiving earth and sky. And the eyes, wholly black, interminably
+deep. By a chance scoop of my hand it is out in the long killing air,
+the little vibrancy out with the bird-gray clouds, a leashed arrow
+straining for the stars, that have their running too in the circle of
+immensity.
+
+Fragile they are, and powerful, a wonderful work of which so many are
+made as to afford them death as well as life. Let us say, arbitrarily,
+that 150,000 female alewives lay their eggs in the ponds above Stony
+Brook each year. After the pond suckers take their share and the
+remaining eggs hatch out, then the young alewives run the gauntlet
+of their first few days and weeks of life. The toll taken would seem
+incredible if it were not also natural and expected. From billions the
+young are reduced to millions.
+
+If a run is to keep up over the years, there has to be an annual
+survival, or “escapement,” of somewhere between 3 and 7 per cent. Say
+a hundred million hatched, out of the original nine billion eggs. Five
+per cent of that, or five million, have to reach salt water in order to
+assure a normal spawning migration in three or four years’ time. From
+that figure, of course, you subtract the alewife mortality during their
+years of growth in the sea. I claim nothing for my calculations, but,
+rough as they are, they may help to indicate how much potential goes
+into the end result.
+
+It is not only the alewives that are provided for by these great
+numbers, but the predators which hunt them. The alewives are only part
+of a great complex of need. Sometimes I have watched the fry as they
+swam out across the Brewster flats on an ebb tide, running in shallow
+water from the mouth of Paine’s Creek. In September, before they have
+migrated south, crowds of terns, along with the resident herring gulls
+and ring-billed gulls, would be hovering over the water and diving or
+flocking in as the alewives appeared. I watched the constant, sinewy
+beat of their wings as they held against a west wind. The sky was
+swept way up with long cirrus clouds. The young alewives were running
+into death and beyond it, in a windy world that teemed with risk and
+creation.
+
+A friend of mine, who worked in the vicinity some years ago, watched
+the tiny fish coming down above the old mill one autumn day. He saw
+some night herons standing in the lip of the dam gobbling the “poor
+little devils” up as they went over. He was amazed at their stomach
+capacity. Then he noticed that at the rocky falls where the pool ended
+above the water wheel and seining pool only a few were dropping over
+as compared to the thousands coming in from the pond, and the toll
+the quawks took did not account for it. Somehow, somewhere, in this
+short stretch of water, they were disappearing into a gulf, or, more
+properly, a maw. It didn’t seem right. It made him angry, although:
+“You can’t get mad at nature because that’s the way it is.” He got a
+hook and line, baited it, threw it into the pool; and in two hours he
+had fished out seventy-six eels.
+
+These slithering, hoselike creatures are still there in season waiting
+to prey on the fish. It does not take long as a rule to see one coming
+up at the edge of the bank, though I have never seen them in any
+great quantity, because they usually lie hidden in the muddy bottom.
+Sometimes you can see a small group of eels of varying sizes in one
+of the resting pools of the fishway below the road, where the little
+alewives as they go down must almost fall into their mouths. With
+broad-ribboned tails on one end of their long-finned bodies and pointed
+snouts on the other, they weave and flip over, arch and float in the
+water. Partly because of the narrow space, and their tendency to stay
+or be caught in the turbulent pools, many of the little fish cannot
+avoid being eaten. They have only the safety of numbers.
+
+Having developed a certain affection for the race by this time, I must
+say I had feelings of pity for these little ones, helplessly tossed
+in and out of death. They _are_ fragile, like the young of other
+animals. They will not last more than about three-quarters of a minute
+out of water. But they are not ones to know or care whether I think
+of them or not. They are parts of a great ordered hunger, and a vast
+provision for things. They are both victims and executioners, the
+feeders and the fed upon, in the intercommunication of every single
+plant and animal in the natural world. There is nothing for affection
+in that order perhaps, unless we conceive of it in terms of love as
+well as annihilation.
+
+I have followed them out and seen where their consistent motion, their
+automatic reaction to the waters they swim in, has brought them to
+grief. It serves for survival and also for disaster. When the young
+alewives get out to salt water on an ebb tide, they are not able to
+calculate how long it will last, or so we presume, and whether they
+should move out soon or stay behind. The result is that many are left
+stranded and wildly skittering in the rivulets that thread the sandy
+flats at extreme low tide. From the time the outgoing waters of Paine’s
+Creek begin to get low, they are also subject to attack by crowds of
+herons and gulls--but supposing they survive that and still have a
+chance in a matter of an hour or an hour and a half to reach deeper
+water? It is very often the case that because of their habit of heading
+back against the current they delay too long and lose their chance of
+escape. They are caught high and dry on the sand or in water so shallow
+that they are unable to move on, and so are easy prey for the birds. I
+have followed them through low water and seen them turn back, just as
+they had a chance to follow one waning current to join another and so
+out to safety; but when I use the word safety I have to remind myself
+that the flow goes where it will.
+
+Now it is possible that you might interpret this behavior as a
+reluctance to leave the inland waters. They have a drive in them to go
+to salt water eventually, but they may be in no hurry. In some areas
+they stay in estuaries or tributaries for a long time. At Paine’s Creek
+and the channel above it they may have no alternative but to be carried
+out on the ebb tide.
+
+When they finally reach Cape Cod Bay they probably school in fairly
+shallow shoal areas where the water is warmest, inviting bass or
+bluefish of course, to “come and get it.”
+
+“Shiners” some call them, confusing alewife fry with fresh-water
+shiners, of which there are a great many species, but shine they do. In
+the summer at low tide the bathers try to catch them with their hands,
+or jump after them where they glitter in the pools. Sometimes there are
+trails of the little fish left behind by those gluttons the gulls. In
+death they look frail, limp, almost diaphanous. No longer so reflecting
+and vibrant, their bodies are a pale silver-white like the underside
+of fallen poplar leaves. Some of the heads are left uneaten along with
+the headless bodies strewn in the rivulets along the ridged sands.
+Sometimes their bodies are ripped down, gashed, leaving raw stripes on
+them. These wounds look no less cruel and vivid because of their tiny
+size.
+
+
+
+
+                                 XVIII
+
+                               Going Out
+
+
+The first alewife I saw in early spring was wild and new to me, feeling
+its way upcurrent alone, cautiously, as if testing out an old trail.
+Down Stony Brook there were long patterns in the water dappled like
+fish scales. In the sky above there were cloud tosses and wind turns
+during a break toward spring that the fish itself exemplified. Later
+on the fry in the apparently indiscriminate times they moved out and
+headed for salt water seemed to be pulled as if by moon tides and
+turning earth. The course I followed was full of natural complexity.
+Forms and patterns were endlessly co-ordinate and suggestive, but with
+the mystery of their making, the universal power, at once ordered,
+vast, fluid, out of reach.
+
+The alewife migration taught me how to start. Had we been two and a
+half miles up from salt water to the farthest pond, then back again, or
+was it three thousand? I had learned that measurement was indefinite.
+
+I still knew next to nothing about their lives in salt water. And
+what was ahead on land? I could expect them to follow certain rules
+of behavior. They would come back year after year unless the run was
+so consistently overfished that the population dwindled. I knew where
+to look for them now, and had some acquaintance with laws of supply
+and demand, plus the effects of management or the lack of it. Perhaps
+alewives could be expected in general to do what they had done before.
+But those laws that lead all migrants on have more in store for us
+than we can anticipate. The variations I had found in action and
+circumstance, following those fish, variations like the changes of air
+and water, leaves, grass and ground, intermoving light and shadow, were
+unexpected and perpetual. If the alewives ever proved that anything was
+static, it could only have been in me. There is no personifying the
+unknown fish. I am not acquainted with it yet; but now we are on a run
+together.
+
+The alewife is another of the amplifications and extensions of life.
+In the flip of its body, its communicable “Let’s go,” it offers to
+be followed. So that race with its recoil and approach, approach
+and recoil, circling in consonance with the forces of the earth has
+the lesson of migration in ourselves. When I watched them coming in
+on their old, persistent track and felt so much in my own senses of
+that exploring, through the growing and falling off of leaves, the
+wind charging and easing off, the bright waters, I knew there was an
+infinite sum in me of the unused. What _is_ migration? Is it to
+“pass from one place to another”--just that? And its causes may be the
+need for food or to reproduce in season; but surely the term comprises
+a great deal more.
+
+Whether the migration of animals seems random, or with definite intent,
+it leads across the earth. All the studies made of individual species
+result in new directions to be explored, new unknowns about the
+actions of other lives, and the ways they follow. The mystery about
+the travels of birds, eels, monarch butterflies, or alewives, is not
+only a matter of routes or seasonal behavior. It has to do with an
+internal response to this spinning globe and its unendingly creative
+energies. As a result of a respectful regard for other animals we may
+find that we are being led onto traveled ways that were once invisible
+to us, and in their deep alliance with natural forces we find a new
+depth in ourselves. This is the common ground for all living things,
+where migration has in it the blood of contact, the winds and waters of
+communication.
+
+On that July week when I first saw the young alewives coming down
+through the outlet, the roads of Cape Cod were roaring and humming
+with cars. The tourist season had suddenly come to its height. The
+population of the Cape had jumped from 60,000 to 200,000 or more. There
+were new demands, new pressures in the air. This was the yearly coming
+on of an immense, expanding world, a migratory phenomenon in itself.
+Voices and prices were rising. Man’s abundance vied with the natural
+summer.
+
+It was a hot day, though it had started out cool in the early morning,
+with drifts of fog along the shore and patches of it through the inland
+hollows. I had followed the alewife fry down from the Herring Run to
+the shore road. They had become increasingly hard to find; but when I
+reached the slow waters of the channel at Paine’s Creek I could see
+multitudes of them heading in the direction of the Bay. Farther on
+where the water ran out through the sands on the ebb tide there were
+groups of them moving with it like little clouds.
+
+There were a few people walking on the flats in the distance where
+herring gulls were yelping and an occasional tern gave a light, harsh
+cry. An old panting setter dog lunged aimlessly across the sands, then
+splashed through the shallow waters of the creek at its outlet. On the
+beach a family crowd of bathers were listening to a portable radio
+that noised out the baseball scores. Some of them got up and saw to
+their children, or fell, sat down, or dove into the water at the edge
+of the sands. They sounded low, then high, like the gulls--“Stop it!”
+“Come on!” “Here, bunny” “Come back here!” “Jump in”--full of alarm,
+solicitude, friendliness, irritation, communality.
+
+Back in the channel where the tiny fish, progeny of _Pomolobus
+pseudoharengus_, were swimming on in the brown water, a couple of
+growing, gawky children, a boy and a girl, half round, half lean, were
+pushing each other down, floundering and thrashing, while they laughed
+and threatened each other, completely oblivious of the great migration
+a few yards away. Or can anything be oblivious? I felt that I had come
+to the middle of things.
+
+
+
+
+                          =Transcriber’s Notes=
+
+  New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the
+  public domain.
+
+  Perceived typographical errors have been silently corrected.
+
+  Illustrations have been moved nearer to the text to which they refer.
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77074 ***