“Among the fishermen are a lot of English, Scotch, and Irish, and some of the very best are Norwegians and Danes. There are also many Italians and Greeks. On the Columbia River the boats and nets belong to the fishermen, while here on the Fraser the canneries own all the vessels and gear. The pay is very good while the work lasts, varying from 150 to 350 dollars for a month and a half or two months.

“Last year,” said Mr. Barker, referring to 1909, “the pack was the highest in the history of the business, and amounted to 5,340,000 cases. It was all readily sold. The consumption of tinned salmon in this country is increasing, of course, with the rapid growth of population. Then, too, the English market is again brisk, while we find it impossible to keep pace with the demand from New Zealand and Australia, where the salmon does not occur. This year we could have sold five and a half million cases, but the pack only reached a little over four millions. You may be surprised to note the difference in the quantity caught and canned in 1909 and the quantity caught and canned in 1910. But that was a normal and expected difference. The year 1901 witnessed a tremendous run of salmon, as did the year 1905. There will be another great supply of fish in 1913. It occurs every fourth year with such absolute regularity that we prepare for it by making an extra number of tins. Moreover, new canneries are always set up in the recurring ‘fat’ year, which is invariably followed by a ‘thin’ year. The life history of the salmon—from the time spawn is laid in the river to the return into that river of the full-grown fish—is four years; and it is natural, therefore, that the productiveness of each year should be echoed, as it were, in the fourth following year, and in each succeeding fourth year. That may or may not be the explanation. Some people, indeed, seek to identify the recurring ‘fat’ year and ‘lean’ year with a corresponding variation in the rainfall. But whatever the cause, it is constant and can be depended upon.

“Apart from that fluctuation in the available quantity of salmon, the supply of fish of almost all sorts on the Pacific coast is beyond anyone’s power to gauge. I have seen 35,000 salmon caught in one haul of a seine net. That was in Alaska, where the bulk of the salmon are caught. There is, of course, a tendency for that fish to retire before the advance of a human population. Pollution of the rivers is the actual cause of that retirement, and in British Columbia pollution takes the form of sawdust from the lumber industry. Here, then, we touch the reason why, in my opinion, the Fraser must rank as the finest salmon river in the world. You simply cannot pollute the Fraser.”

CHAPTER XIX
BRITISH COLUMBIA AND SOME REFLECTIONS

A man might try to describe the Rockies as he sees them from the railway; but he could not succeed. Let me content myself with an ungrateful reflection. The through traveller in that astounding region is sated with scenery—bored with beauty. A hundred grand mountains, entrancing valleys, noble rivers, bewitching glades, and glorious waterfalls—that quantity would leave you still exclaiming, still in an extremity of enthusiasm. But when you have experienced a sunny day and starry night of peerless panorama, and find there is yet more to come, a heaviness comes over your senses. Because the eye has been debauched, the numbed brain can no longer receive definite impressions. In a feeble revolt, and hungry for contrast, you long for a sight of something ugly, like a row of London suburban villas.

Among the mountains there are halting-places of luxury, loveliness, and slippered ease. One of these is Banff, where you may swim in an open-air bath of sulphur water, which flows soft and warm from fiery entrails of the earth. On certain stretches of the line, trains pause beside pretty buildings, where fountains play in gardens ablaze with blossoms, and where in dainty observation-towers telescopes give you intimacy with the stretches of eternal snow high overhead.

BIG TREES IN VANCOUVER, B.C.

Constantly in the hurrying waters of fairy rivers one sees the dismembered trunks of trees—some jolting onwards to be butchered into planks, the respited majority stranded on rocky islands or sandy shores. The trees of Canada are apt to excite one’s sympathy. You pass acre upon acre of mountain side that has been swept by prairie fires. They are a pathetic sight—those black, leafless forests of carbon. Some of the abbreviated trunks remain erect, some lean at perilous angles, some are prostrate. The ground is strewn with ashes and sorrow. In those regions of blackness and death, I saw no moving thing, save only, on occasion, a yellow flying grasshopper—a creature that flutters forward slowly, makes a grating noise. Conspicuous among plants that push their way through the desolate ashes is the great willow herb, commonly called the “fire rod.” Settlers tell you it appears only on land that has been swept by fire; but there is another justification for the very appropriate name. The spike of ruddy blossoms suggests flame, while the clouds of feathery seed resemble smoke.

The living forests are as inspiriting as the dead forests are depressing. Canada has vast tracts dense with majestic trees, which grow bolt upright to give one another room. In the island of Vancouver, that richly favoured region, I journeyed for hours, in the makeshift rolling stock of a mining railway, through an interminable paradise of lofty trees and lovely undergrowth. Sometimes we zig-zagged on a switchback track right up mountain sides; sometimes we crept cautiously along the edges of deep ravines. Away beyond the forest-wrapped island lay the Pacific Ocean—a broad stretch of soft blue.