Sum Dum Bay 



This morning we found out how beautiful a nook 

 we had got into. Besides the charming picturesque- 

 ness of its lines, the colors about it, brightened by 

 the rain, made a fine study. Viewed from the shore, 

 there was first a margin of dark-brown algae, then 

 a bar of yellowish-brown, next a dark bar on the 

 rugged rocks marking the highest tides, then a bar 

 of granite boulders with grasses in the seams, and 

 above this a thick, bossy, overleaning fringe of 

 bushes colored red and yellow and green. A wall of 

 spruces and hemlocks draped and tufted with gray 

 and yellow lichens and mosses embowered the camp- 

 ground and overarched the little river, while the 

 camp-fire smoke, like a stranded cloud, lay motion- 

 less in their branches. Down on the beach ducks and 

 sandpipers in flocks of hundreds were getting their 

 breakfasts, bald eagles were seen perched on dead 

 spars along the edge of the woods, heavy-looking and 

 overfed, gazing stupidly like gorged vultures, and 

 porpoises were blowing and plunging outside. 



As for the salmon, as seen this morning urging their 

 way up the swift current, tens of thousands of them, 

 side by side, with their backs out of the water in 

 shallow places now that the tide was low, nothing 

 that I could write might possibly give anything like a 

 fair conception of the extravagance of their numbers. 

 There was more salmon apparently, bulk for bulk, 

 than water in the stream. The struggling multitudes, 

 crowding one against another, could not get out of 

 our way when we waded into the midst of them. 

 One of our men amused himself by seizing them above 



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