The Spell of the White Sturgeon

by Jim Kjelgaard

When a foot-long bass, a very monster of a thing compared with the baby sturgeon, swam among them, they scattered in wild panic. The feeding bass had only to snap here and there to get all he wanted, but the White Sturgeon did not flee with the rest. Instead, he sank down beside a cattail and did not move. A tiny cloud of mud-colored water drifted around and covered him.

Thus, from the very first, the White Sturgeon seemed to have a keener brain, or a sharper instinct, that made up for his distinctive coloring. Though he should have been the first to die, he did not die. He learned his lessons well, and saw how many of his brothers and sisters perished. Thus he discovered how to stay alive.

For weeks he lived near his birthplace, swimming scarcely two yards from it and feeding on minute particles of both vegetable and animal life. Most of his time he spent feeding, and he grew very fast. Not until encroaching winter drove him there did he move out into the pool.

Most of the ducks were gone before the first thin shell ice formed on the borders of the pool, and those that lingered after that flew out with the first snow. The snow blew in from the north on the heels of an unseasonably early winter wind, and the White Sturgeon saw the mighty pines heaped with feathery snow. Snow lay deep on the ground, and the deer that came down to the pool seemed almost jet-black against its virginal whiteness.

Lingering in the shallows, the White Sturgeon held very still. His was the accumulated wisdom of ages. Ancestors almost exactly like him had swum in antediluvian seas when huge, scaley monsters roamed the earth, and perhaps the White Sturgeon knew that, as long as he held still near the snow-covered bank, he would be hard to see. Or perhaps he merely found the snow, his own color matched at last, interesting.

Right after the snow stopped there was a spell of sub-zero weather that threw a sheathing of ice clear across the pool and froze the shallows to the very bottom. Only then did the White Sturgeon move out of them.

He did not move far because it was not necessary to move far, and anyway the great pike lingered in the center of the pool. Almost one third jaw, the pikes' mouths were edged with needle-sharp teeth that never let go and never failed to rip what they seized. Of the young sturgeon that lived until fall, perhaps two hundred and fifty in all, the pike had half before the winter was well set. The rest were too wary to be easy prey.

All winter long, living on the edge of the ice and finding all the food he needed in the soft mud floor of the pool, the White Sturgeon led a solitary existence. But it was not a lonely life because, as yet, it was not in him to be lonely. All he knew, and all he had to know, was that he must survive. Every effort was bent to that end.

In the spring, shortly after the ice broke up and moved sluggishly down the river, the White Sturgeon followed it. With him went three of his brothers and two sisters, and if more than that had survived he did not know about them or where they were. Nor did he care. In his life there was no room for or meaning to affection; he traveled with his brothers and sisters merely because, like him, they too were going down the river.

The journey was not at all hurried. The White Sturgeon, who by this time knew much more about the various arts of survival than he had known when he left the pool, passed the next winter in another, smaller pool, less than two miles from his birthplace. He chose the pool largely because it was the home of a vast number of fish smaller than he, and they offered an easy living to the pike, bass and other things that lived by eating fish. Grown fat and sluggish in the midst of super-abundance, these predators were not inclined to chase anything that cared to avoid them or to work at all for their living. All they had to do was lie still and sooner or later the living would come to them.