HOW THE TROUT CAME TO CALIFORNIA. 269 



No one can tell the story of its migrations from 

 one great dreary river to another in this vast 

 region, for no one knows what it does there to- 

 day. We know that Siberia is a land of trout; 

 but the names of the kinds of trout in Siberia are 

 bare names to-day, as they were in the days of 

 Steller and Pallas and Krascheninnikow. From 

 Kamchatka to Alaska across the cold Bering 

 Sea is but a step for a fish of spirit, and this step 

 is often made by the trout to this day. In the 

 Kamchatka rivers the trout has changed some- 

 what from any of the varied forms that are known 

 in Europe. Its scales are smaller (180 instead of 

 130 in a line along its sides), and across its throat, 

 half hidden by the branches of its lower jaw, is 

 the A- shaped blotch of scarlet. Such a mark 

 is known in the North as the sign-manual of the 

 Sioux Indian. It is the mark of the Cut-throat 

 Trout. This Trout freely enters the sea in Alaska 

 to-day, and has done so ever since it came to that 

 region. Thus it passes readily from one stream 

 to another; one colony mixing freely with an- 

 other, till from end to end of the territory the 

 trout are virtually alike. In the brooks the 

 trout grow slowly and in the sea rapidly, but 

 the streams are clear and the sea is cold. If food 

 is scarce in the rivers, there is a clear passage 

 from them to the ocean, with no alkaline basin or 

 mud-flat to be crossed. For these reasons the 

 trout of Alaska and Kamchatka have remained 

 uniform in appearance. They are all alike Cut- 

 throat Trout. A hundred and fifty years ago, 

 the Russians in Kamchatka called them Mykiss. 



