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 one’s stomach full of them, 
plump, and silvery, fresh from the sea. 
‘¢ Thus they chased the herrings about and had a merry time. Then they were chased | 
about in turn by great sea-lions, swimming monsters with huge half-human faces, long 
thin whiskers, and blundering ways. The sea-lions liked to bite out the throats of the 
salmon, with their precious stomachs fall of lucious 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 
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 alittle 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 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 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 caddice 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, afcer all, what his thoughts 
really were. 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 spurned 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 Cowlitz 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 Columbia. 
_ “They were swimming bravely along where the current was deepest, nen 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 off, 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 
