Trout and Salmon 189 



of the trip they are so thin and bruised and battered that 

 they must be quite content to lie down and die as soon as 

 they have done what they came for. In fish with much 

 shorter journeys to make, it seems to be just a habit. They 

 die also. 



The spawning act of the Atlantic salmon has been scien- 

 tifically reported as identical with that described for the 

 steelhead. The spawning act of the Pacific salmons, accord- 

 ing to those who have visited their breeding areas, is in a 

 general way similar. The landlocked sockeye, also called 

 "little redfish" or "kokanee," has been observed and re- 

 corded in close detail, but not the sea-run salmons on their 

 natural breeding grounds. In the throngs of fish milling 

 around, with dead bodies strewing the banks for miles, with 

 new fish swarming in to dig up the eggs already laid in 

 their search for nesting places, and with Dolly Varden trout 

 darting about to prey on unprotected eggs, it is probably 

 difficult to make out just what does happen. Somehow the 

 eggs do get fertilized, and the next generation does get 

 produced. Between generations, however, the waste is tre- 

 mendous. It has been estimated in one case that, out of over 

 seventeen million fertilized eggs, only five to six thousand 

 fish survived to become parents of the second generation — a 

 survival to maturity of only one fish for every three thousand 

 eggs. 



We now have reached the point where we can gaze with 

 proper appreciation upon one of the great wonders, one of 

 the outstanding unsolved mysteries, of the zoological world. 

 This is the fact that the salmon, after years in the wide 

 ocean, find their way back to spawn in the very same stream- 

 bed out of which they once wriggled toward the light of 

 day. 



When and where human beings first began to suspect that 

 this might be happening is uncertain. It was long ago, for the 



