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 form's 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 J/ykiss. 
