With spring, the birds desert the moors, pair off, and retire to the village barns and the chimneys of unopened summer cottages.
The hour of flood tide approaching, I left the moors behind and went to the west shore to see what I could of the strangest of all regional migrations.
III
Some five years ago, on a night in early April, I happened to be aboard a United States naval vessel bound coastwise from the southern drill grounds to New York. Our course lay well out of sight of land; the night was springlike, still and mild, the stars thick-sown in a faintly hazy sky. I remember that we saw the lights of a few ships standing in to Philadelphia. Once these had dimmed and disappeared behind, the sea was entirely our own, a vast, lonely, still, and starlit sea. Just after one o’clock I saw ahead of us on the sea a field, a shimmer of pale light, formless as the reflection of a cloud and mysteriously troubled by auroral undulations. We had overtaken a migration of fish moving north along the coast with the advance of spring. The skirts of the sun’s robe, trailing over ocean, stir the deep, and its mysterious peoples move North on the fringes of the light. I do not know what species of fish I chanced that night to see, for there is a definite and populous area of marine life lying between Hatteras and Cape Cod. They may possibly have been herring. As our vessel neared the living shoal, it seemed to move as one thing, there coursed through it a new vibration, and it turned east, grew vague, and vanished completely in the night.
Every spring even such a fish migration, moving through ocean as mysteriously as the force of a wave, breaks against our south New England shore. In colonial times the younger Winthrop wrote of it, telling of “the coming up of a fish called aloofes into the rivers. Where the ground is bad or worn out, the Indians used to put two or three of the forementioned fishes under or adjacent each corn hill. The English have learned like husbandry where those aloofes come up in great plenty.” This “aloofe” of the colonists, better known as the “alewife,” and often and incorrectly called a “herring,” is really not a herring at all but a related fish, Pomolobus pseudoharengus. It is distinguishable from the true sea herring by its greater depth of body and by the serrations on the midline of its belly which are stronger and sharper than those of the true herring—so sharp, indeed, that the fish is sometimes called a “saw belly.” In April they leave the sea and run up our brooks to spawn in freshwater ponds.
Fire in the Pitch Pines
There is a famous brook in Weymouth, Massachusetts, which I try to visit every year. I remember the last warm April day. The “herring” brook—it is scarce more than ten or twelve feet wide and hardly more than a foot deep—was flowing freely, its clear brownish waters rippling almost noiselessly in the morning light. The fish were “in,” moving up the brook as thickly massed as a battalion along a narrow road; there were no ranks—only an onward swarming. So numerous were the fish, and so regimented, that I stopped at the water’s edge and easily caught two or three with my bare hand. Through the brownish stream the eye looked down to numberless long backs of a subdued dark lavender-grey and to a fleet of dorsal fins breaking water. The brook smelt of fish. Here and there were dead ones, aground on the edges of the stream or held by the current against a rock; dead things lying on their sides, with opaque, slime-coated eyes, and rock bruises on their sides—raw spots of fish blood red in a side of brown and golden scales. Sometimes the advance seemed stilled till the studying eye perceived the constant individual advance. A hundred thousand had come.
These alewives of Weymouth come up out of the sea, and from Heaven knows just where out of the sea. They run up Weymouth Brook, are stopped by a dam, are fished out in a net, dumped into barrels of water, and carted overland in a truck to Whitman’s Pond. I have watched them follow currents in the pond, once they have been spilled out into it. Then comes, perhaps, a sense of arrival and intended time; each female lays from sixty thousand to a hundred thousand glutinous eggs, these drop to the bottom, drift along the mud, and ooze and attach themselves as chance directs. The spawning females and the males then go over the dam and back to sea, the herring born in the pond follow them ten months or a year later, and then comes another spring and a great mystery. Somewhere in the depths of ocean, each Weymouth-born fish remembers Whitman’s Pond, and comes to it through the directionless leagues of the sea. What stirs in each cold brain? what call quivers as the new sun strikes down into the river of ocean? how do the creatures find their way? Birds have landscape and rivers and headlands of the coast, the fish have—what? But presently the fish are “in” at Weymouth, breasting the brook’s spring overflow to the ancestral pond.
Some remember Whitman’s Pond, others remember the ponds of the Cape. There are “herring” ponds and “herring” brooks on the map of Eastham.