QUINNAT SALMON. 889 



" Those who eat only sardines, packed in oil by greasy fingers, and herrings dried in 

 the smoke, can have little idea how satisfying it is to have oub's stomach full of them, 

 plnmp, and silvery, fresh from the sea. 



" Thas they chased the herrings abont and had a merry time. Then they were chased 

 abont in turn by great sea-lions, swimming monsters with hnge half-hnman faces, long 

 thin whiskers, and blundering ways. The sea-lions liked to bite out the throats of the 

 salmon, with their preoions stomachs fall of Incious sardines, and leave the rest of the 

 fish to shift for itself. 



" And the seals and the herring scattered the salmon about, and at last the hero of 

 onr story fonnd himself quite alone, with none of his own kind near him. But that did 

 not trouble him much, and he went on his own way, getting his dinner when he was 

 hungry, which was all the time, and then eating a little between-meals for his stomach's 

 sake. 



" So it went on for three long years ; and at the end of this time our little fish had 

 grown to be a great, fine salmon, of forty pounds' weight, shining and silvery 'as a new 

 tin pan, and with rows of the loveliest round black spots on his head, and back, and 

 tail. One day, as he was swimming about, idly chasing a big eonlpin, with a head so 

 thorny that he never was swallowed by anybody, all of a sudden the salmon noticed a 

 change in the water aronnd him. 



" Spring had come again, and the south-lying snow-drifts on the Cascade Mountains 

 once more felt the ' earth was wheeling sunward,' and the cold snow-waters ran down 

 from the mountains and into the Columbia River, and made a freshet on the river, and 

 the high water went far out into the sea, and out in the sea our salmon felt it on his 

 gills; and he remembered how the cold water used to feel in the Cowlitz when he was 

 a little fish, and in a blundering, fishy fashion he thought about it, and wondered 

 whether the little eddy looked as it used to, and whether caddioe worms and young 

 mosquitoes were really as sweet and tender as he used to think they were; and he 

 thought some other things, but, as a salmon's mind is located in the optic lobes of his 

 brain, and ours in a different place, we can not be certain, after all, what his thoughts 

 really vf ere. What he did we know. He did what every grown salmon in the ocean 

 does when he feels the glacier- water once more upon his gills. He became a changed 

 being. He spumed the blandishments of soft-shelled crabs. The pleasures of the table 

 and of the chase, heretofore his only delights, lost their charms for him. He turned his 

 course straight toward the direction whence the cold fresh water came, and for the rest 

 of his life he never tasted a mouthful of food. He moved on toward the river- mouth, at 

 first playfully, as though he were not really certain whether he meant anything, after 

 all. Aftewards, when he struck the full current of the Columbia, he plunged straight 

 forward with an unflinching determination that had in it something of the heroic. 

 When he had passed the rough water at the bar, he found he was not alone ; his old 

 neighbors of the-£!owlitz and many more, a great army of salmon, were with him. In 

 front were thousands; pressing on, and behind them, were thousands more, all moved 

 by a common impluse, which urged them up the Col&inhia. 



"They were swimming bravely along where the current wag deepest, when suddenly 

 the foremost felt something tickling like a cobweb about their noses and under their 

 chins. They changed their course a little to brush it oiF, and it touched their fins as 

 well. Then they tried to slip down with the current, and thus leave it behind. But 

 no — the thing, whatever it was, although its touch was soft, refused to let go, and held 

 them like a fetter ; and, the more they struggled, the tighter became its grasp. And 



