"That's all right," his friend said heartily, "I've enjoyed having you, and so has Paul, I know. I shall hear from you occasionally, I hope, and maybe the Golden Falcon will have you on board for some other trip."
"Thank you ever so much, sir," Colin answered; "but I guess I'm booked for college steadily until next summer, and the Bureau of Fisheries during vacation."
But Colin was mistaken in his idea that almost
a year would elapse before he was busy again with Fisheries work, for shortly before the end of his first term, he received a letter from his father in which the suggestion was made that the boy should spend a week on the Great Lakes during the Christmas vacation, to get an idea of what winter work was like. Colin smiled as he read the letter, for he knew well that he was 'in for it,' since his father would make him go through every step of the training.
Accordingly, one cold day, he found himself aboard the steamer Mary N. Lewis, which had been chartered by the Bureau for a couple of weeks' trawling in Lake Michigan. A bitter wind was blowing and lumps of ice floated near the shores. The whitefish were not plentiful that winter, and when the nets came up and Colin had to pick fish out, b-r-r-r, but it was cold! A great many of the fish were not ripe for spawning and had to be thrown back again, which delayed matters greatly and kept the party on the water for several days.
Frequently Colin's lips were blue and his fingers numb, while his ears and cheekbones and chin felt as though they were being sliced off gradually by the blasts blowing down from icy
Canada, but he knew that, to a certain extent, he was on trial, and he laughed and joked and managed to keep his spirits up, though his teeth chattered. There was no great amount of excitement in catching the whitefish and securing the spawn for development in the hatchery, but it was a test of endurance, and incidentally the boy learned much about the fishes of the Great Lakes.
"There's one thing I don't quite see, though," he said one day to the government fish culturist, with whom he was working; "and that is, why we need to do this."
"How do you mean, Dare?"
"Well, in the West, they hatch young salmon because the old salmon are caught going up the river before they spawn, and they die, anyway; but here they have all the room they want for spawning, and I should think Nature would look after it."