THE STORY OF A SALMON. 13 
with huge half-human faces, long thin whiskers, and 
blundering ways. The sea-lions liked to bite out 
the throat of a salmon, with its precious stomach 
full of luscious sardines, and then to leave the rest 
of the fish to shift for itself. And the seals and 
the herrings scattered the salmon about, till at last 
the hero of our story found 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 twenty-two pounds’ weight, 
shining like 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 sculpin with a head so thorny that he 
never was swallowed by anybody, all of a sudden 
the salmon noticed a change in the water around 
him. 
Spring had come again, and the south-lying 
snow-drifts on the Cascade Mountains once more 
felt that the “earth was wheeling sunwards.” The 
cold snow waters ran down from the mountains and 
into the Columbia River, and made a freshet on the 
river. The high water went far out into the sea, 
and out in the sea our salmon felt it on his gills. 
He remembered how the cold water used to feel 
in the Cowlitz when he was a little fish. In a 
blundering, fishy fashion he thought about it; he 
wondered whether the little eddy looked as it used 
