274 Sport and Life. 



waterway dawned on one. In other places again, as if nature 

 had not done the best she could to puzzle the navigator and try 

 the length and strength of his temper, the animal kingdom 

 had come to her assistance. In the days preceding the inaugura- 

 tion of the salmon canning industry at the mouth of the great 

 river, where now some 2000 great seine nets bar ingress, 

 untold quantities of the royal fish ascended the 1200 or 1300 

 miles to its very source, i.e., the lake which we were striving 

 to reach, and which lies about 3000 feet over the Pacific 

 Ocean. There all the conditions of water, gravel, and slow 

 current favoured the process of spawning. The countless 

 ridges in the gravel bottom of the young Columbia where it 

 emerges from the mother lake,* cast up during untold ages by the 

 tails of the parent fish, gave in 1887 still silent evidence of the 

 vast quantity of fish whose instinct had driven them to perform 

 what is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable journeys per- 

 formed by any denizen of the ocean. These salmon beds extended 

 for three or four miles, ridge following ridge, the depth of water 

 on the top of each crest, at the time, hardly exceeding a foot. 



Not far from these salmon beds, by which name the locality is 

 still known, a side stream puts in from the neighbouring Selkirks. 

 These mountains, though not more than ten miles or so in an air-line 

 from the parallel ridge of the Rockies, have much more rain than 

 the latter. In consequence of this, the tributaries from the Selkirks 

 often come down in full flood, with the result that the current ot 

 the Columbia above the junction suddenly changes into the opposite 

 direction, flowing up to instead of down from the source. Almost 

 incredible as this sounds, I have seen it do so on several occasions, 

 the effect of this extraordinary state of things being that the water 

 in the Columbia below this tributary would suddenly fall, leaving 

 one stranded until the flood had ceased. t We came in for two of 



* There are really two lakes connected by a short " gut." 



f In recent years considerable sums have been spent by the Government in 



dredging the salmon beds, thereby increasing the current, so that this turning 



of the current no longer occurs. 



