An Indian who was spearing fish from a canoe stared his astonishment. Trembling, he sheathed his spear and paddled back to his encampment. He had seen the White Sturgeon, the Ghost Fish, and that night a mighty storm knocked down a big pine near the Indian's camp. Two people were killed when it fell.
Knowing nothing of this, lying contentedly in thirty feet of water where he was aware of the storm only because his fine and deep senses made him aware of everything that occurred above, the White Sturgeon grubbed for food in the lake's bottom.
The next time his tribe left the lake to rush up the river, the White Sturgeon journeyed with them. He went because he must, because it was a call even stronger than hunger and he could not resist it. The strongest of sturgeon, he stayed in the fore-front of the spawning horde and still remained away from the banks. The few Indians who saw him were so astonished that they forgot to strike with their spears, and he never even came close to the prowling bears and other beasts that waxed so fat when the migrating sturgeon came back to spawn.
Guided by the most precise of instincts, the White Sturgeon went exactly to that spawning bed in the sedges where he was born, and fertilized the eggs that a female left there. Wan and spent, caring for nothing, once his main purpose in life had been realized, he turned and swam back into the lake. That was now his home.
Again and again the White Sturgeon went up the river with his kind. Only once, in all the trips he made, was he in real danger, and that time an Indian's spear scratched his side. The Indian, fishing with two companions, promptly fell into the river and drowned.
Thus the legend of the White Sturgeon grew. Born in a red man's fertile mind, it was handed from red man to white and distorted in the transfer. Now none could trace its origin and none knew exactly how it had begun. Lake men knew only of the White Sturgeon, and he had learned much of men. But he lived in the present, not the past.
Years had elapsed since Lake Michigan was shadowed only by canoes. Now there were the Mackinaw boats, the pound boats, the churning side-wheelers and the rowboats. Because it was his affair to know everything that went on in the lake, the White Sturgeon knew them all.
He knew also that it was good to rest in the lake's gentler places. Not in years had he rushed up the river with his spawning comrades. The fires of his youth had long since been quenched, and besides, he was now far too big to travel up any river. Perhaps the same quirk of nature that had granted him his pigment had given him his size. Other sturgeon were thought to be huge when they attained a weight of two hundred and fifty pounds. The White Sturgeon weighed almost a thousand pounds.
He was still a gentle creature, though the sudden angers of age were apt to seize him, and on the morning that Ramsay, Pieter and Hans were called to Three Points, the Sturgeon was feeding quietly in the tunnel of the first pound net they had set. He stopped feeding when he sensed an approaching boat.
It was a Mackinaw boat, used for setting gill nets, and it was shrouded in mist that sat like a fleecy blanket upon the lake. The White Sturgeon lay very still. He was not afraid but he had no wish to be disturbed, and if he remained very quiet, perhaps he would not be bothered. He was aware of something coming into the lake and of the boat's withdrawal into the shrouding mist.