16 A SUMMER BOATING TRIP 



rifts, as we did several times, they leaped out quickly, 

 with their bare feet and legs, and pushed us off. 



"I think," said Johnny, "if you keep her straight 

 and let her have her own way, she will find the deepest 

 water. Don't you, Denny ? " 



"I think she will," replied Denny; and I found the 

 boys were pretty nearly right. 



I tried them on a point of natural history. I had 

 observed, coming along, a great many dead eels lying 

 on the bottom of the river, that I supposed had died 

 from spear wounds. "No," said Johnny, "they are 

 lamper-eels. They die as soon as they have built their 

 nests and laid their eggs." 



" Are you sure ? " 



"That's what they all say, and I know they are 

 lampers." 



So I fished one up out of the deep water with my 

 paddle-blade and examined it; and sure enough it was 

 a lamprey. There was the row of holes along its head, 

 and its ugly suction mouth. I had noticed their nests, 

 too, all along, where the water in the pools shallowed to 

 a few feet and began to hurry toward the rifts: they 

 were low mounds of small stones, as if a bushel or more 

 of large pebbles had been dumped upon the river bot- 

 tom; occasionally they were so near the surface as to 

 make a big ripple. The eel attaches itself to the stones 

 by its mouth, and thus moves them at will. An old 

 fisherman told me that a strong man could not pull 

 a large lamprey loose from a rock to which it had at- 

 tached itself. It fastens to its prey in this way, and 

 sucks the life out. A friend of mine says he once saw 

 in the St. Lawrence a pike as long as his arm with a 

 lamprey eel attached to him. The fish was nearly 



