4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 







certain, after all, what bis thoughts really were. What he did we know. 

 He did what every grown salmon in the ocean does when he feels the 

 glacier-water once more upon his gills. He became a changed being. 

 He spurned the blandishments of soft- shelled crabs. The pleasures of 

 the table and of the chase, heretofore his only delights, lost their 

 charms for him. He turned his course straight toward the direction 

 whence the cold fresh water came, and for the rest of his life he never 

 tasted a mouthful of food. He moved on toward the river-mouth, at 

 first playfully, as though he were not really certain whether he meant 

 anything, after all. Afterward, when he struck the full current of the 

 Columbia, he plunged straight fortvard with an unflinching determi- 

 nation that had in it something of the heroic. When he had passed 

 the rough water at the bar, he found that he was not alone ; his old 

 neighbors of the Cowlitz and many more, a great army of salmon, 

 were with him. In front were thousands ; pressing on, and behind 

 them, were thousands iiiore, all moved by a common impulse, which 

 urged them up the Columbia. 



They were swimming bravely along where the current was deep- 

 est, when suddenly the foremost felt something tickling like a cobweb 

 about their noses and under their chins. They changed their course 

 a little to brush it off, and it touched their fins as well. Then they 

 tried to slip down with the current, and thus to leave it behind. But 

 ho the thing, whatever it was, although its touch was soft, refused to 

 let go, and held them like a fetter ; and, the more they struggled, the 

 tighter became its grasp. And the whole foremost rank of the salmon 

 felt it together, for it was a great gill-net, a quarter of a mile long, 

 and stretched squarely across the mouth of the river. By-and-by men 

 came in boats and hauled up the gill-net and threw the helpless salmon 

 into a pile on the bottom of the boat, and the others saw them no more. 

 We that live outside the water know better what befalls them, and we 

 can tell the story which the salmon could not. 



All along the banks of the Columbia River, from its mouth to 

 nearly thirty miles away, there is a succession of large buildings, 

 looking like great barns or warehouses, built on piles in the river, 

 and high enough to be out of the reach of floods. There are thirty 

 of these buildings, and they are called canneries. Each cannery has 

 about forty boats, and with each boat are two men and a long gill- 

 net, and these nets fill the whole river as with a nest of cobwebs from 

 April to July ; and to each cannery nearly a thousand great salmon 

 are brought in every day. These salmon are thrown in a pile on the 

 floor ; and Wing Hop, the big Chinaman, takes them one after another 

 on the table, and with a great knife dexterously cuts off the head, the 

 tail, and the fins ; then with a sudden thrust removes the intestines 

 and the eggs. The body goes into a tank of water, and the head goes 

 down the river to be made into salmon-oil. Next, the body is brought 

 on another table, and Qiiong Sang, with a machine like a feed-cutter, 



