BY SNOW-CLAD VOLCANOES 167 



This great mystery of the salmon run impressed me 

 there on that Httle nameless river. The salmon eggs are 

 hatched in a stream and the fish grow to maturity in 

 salt water. Just where they migrate to has never been 

 discovered. But four years after their beginning of life, 

 an imperious command bids them return to the very 

 source from which they sprang, to lay their eggs there 

 and die. In vast schools they come, crowding the nar- 

 row channels of fresh flowing water, flinging themselves 

 up shoal rifts and cataracts, tasting no food until they 

 have reached the safe, suitable spawning grounds. 

 There they leave their eggs. Then, exhausted, thin, 

 crippled by the struggle, they die. The imperative pro- 

 cess of regeneration has been fulfilled. 



It may not be that the physical agony of it alone ends 

 their lives. Some must fail to reach the headwaters of 

 their native stream. Many, such as I saw, were not 

 battered by the rocks nor tired by great effort. It is 

 true that I did not find any still unspawned, but perhaps 

 some were sterile. It seemed as if they were all pre- 

 destined now to die. They had lived their time, well or 

 ill, and when the call came they went home, instinc- 

 tively, irresistibly, some to battle through to the ultimate 

 fulfillment of their law, others to fail and expire bathing 

 in the sweet water they had been preordained to crave. 



As we turned into Pavlof Bay on the seventh of 

 September the twin peaks of Pavlof Volcano on the left- 

 hand side rose with graceful sweep from the water's edge 

 into dazzling white, perfect cones nearly nine thousand 

 feet high. They dominated the landscape from every 

 point of view. A tiny wreath of smoke, scarcely dis- 

 tinguishable from a bit of fleecy cloud, floated ever at one 

 of the pinnacles. Half way down the broadening bases 



