There were plenty of ducks, coots, grebes, and gulls on the river, and I had fine sport with them whenever I cared to shoot.
A mile above where I killed the goose we entered a long reach of shoal rapids, where all the brawn and skill of the Indians were required to stem the powerful current and the immense volume of water. The rapids are over a mile long, and it took us nearly two hours to reach their head. As soon as we were well into them we came among large numbers of live, healthy salmon. Many of them were running down the stream, some up, while others seemed not to be going anywhere in particular, but just loafing around, enjoying themselves. They were wild, but, owing to the water being so rough and rapid, we frequently got within two or three feet of them before they saw us, and the Indians killed two large ones with their canoe poles. Occasionally we would corner a whole school of them in some little pocket, where the water was so shallow that their dorsal fins would stick out, and where there was no exit but by passing close to the canoe. When alarmed they would cavort around like a herd of wild mustangs in a corral, until they would churn the water into a foam; then, emboldened by their peril, they would flash out past us with the velocity of an arrow. They were doing a great deal of jumping; frequently a large fish, two or three feet long, would start across the stream, and make four or five long, high leaps out of the water, in rapid succession, only remaining in the water long enough after each jump to gain momentum for the next. I asked Charlie why they were doing this, if they were sick, or if something was biting them.
WRECKED BY AN EXPRESS BULLET
"No," he said. "Play. All same drunk—raise hell!"
These salmon run up the rivers and creeks to deposit their spawn, and seem possessed of an insane desire to get as far up into the small brooks as they possibly can. They frequently pursue their mad course up over boiling, foaming, roaring rapids, and abrupt, perpendicular falls, where it would seem impossible for any living creature to go—regardless of their own safety or comfort. They are often found in dense schools in little creeks away up near their sources, where there is not water enough to cover their bodies, and where they become an easy prey to man, or to wild beasts. In such cases, Indians kill them with spears and sharp sticks, or even catch and throw them out with their hands.
Or if their journeyings take them among farms or ranches, as is often the case, the people throw them out on the banks with pitch-forks, and after supplying their household necessities, they cart the noble fish away and feed them to their hogs, or even use them to fertilize their fields. I have seen salmon wedged into some of the small streams until you could almost walk on them. The banks of many creeks, far up in the foot-hills, are almost wholly composed of the bones of salmon. In traveling through dense woods I have often heard, at some distance ahead, a loud splashing and general commotion in water, as if of a dozen small boys in bathing. This would, perhaps, be the first intimation I had that I was near water, and, on approaching the source of the noise, I have found it to have been made by a school of these lordly salmon, wedged into one of the little streams, thrashing the creek into suds in their efforts to get to its head.
After depositing their spawn the poor creatures, already half dead from bruises and exhaustion incurred in their perilous voyage up stream, begin to drift down. But how different, now, from the bright, silvery creatures that once darted like rays of living light through the sea. Unable to control their movements in the descent, even as well as in the ascent, they drift at the cruel mercy of the stream. They are driven against rough bowlders, submerged logs and snags, or through raging rapids by the fury of the torrent, until hundreds, yes thousands, of them are killed outright, and thousands more die from sheer exhaustion.
I have seen salmon with their noses broken and torn off; others with a lower jaw torn away; some with sides, backs, or bellies bruised and bleeding; others with their tails whipped and split into shreds, and still others with their entrails torn out by snags. In this sad plight they are beset at every turn in the river by their natural enemies. Bears, cougars, minks, wild cats, fishers, eagles, hawks, and worst and most destructive of all, men, await them everywhere, and it would be strange, indeed, if one in each thousand that left the salt water should live to return. The few that do so, are, of course, so weak that they fall an easy prey to the seals, sharks, and other enemies, that wait with open mouths to engulf them. So, all the leaping, rushing multitude that entered the river a few months ago, have, ere this, gone to their doom, but their seed is planted in the icy brook, far away in the mountains, and their young will soon come forth to take the place of the parents that have passed away. The instinct of reproduction must, indeed, be an absorbing passion in poor dumb creatures, when they will thus sacrifice life in the effort to deposit their ova where the offspring may best be brought into being.
