A human body is a kind of locomotive furnace, that has to be kept up to a given temperature by fuel, its food. Under a tropical sun, not much fuel is needed, and that of a sort that will not keep up a large fire. Man, therefore, wears clothes made from a vegetable fibre, and eats fruit and rice, the lowest in the scale of heat-making materials. Far north among the polar ice, where you cannot touch metal without its taking the skin off your fingers, the human locomotive is protected by thick coverings of fur: the native takes the jackets from his furry-footed companions, and covers his own skin with them. But the grand oil-springs—the locomotive’s necessary coal-mines in another form—are in the bodies of the great seals and whales. Oil and blubber burn rapidly, and give out a large amount of heat. With a fur-suit outside, and inside a feed of seal’s flesh washed down with seal’s oil, the steam of life is kept up very easily.
But all the fat of the sea is not in the bodies of those great blubbering whales and seals. There is a fish, small in size, not larger than a smelt, that is fat beyond all description, clad in glittering silver armour, and found on the coasts of British Columbia, Russian America, Queen Charlotte and Vancouver Islands, which is called by the natives Eulachon or Candle-fish. I have had both leisure and opportunity to make this fish’s intimate acquaintance; played the spy upon its habits, its coming and going, and have noted how it is caught and cured.
Picture my home—an Indian village, on the north shore of British Columbia. The village is prettily situated on a rocky point of land, chosen, as all Indian villages are, with an eye to prevention of surprise from concealed foes. Rearward it is guarded by a steep hill, and it commands from the front the entrance to one of those long canals, which, as I have previously stated, resemble the fiords of Norway, often running thirty or forty miles inland.
The dwellings consist of ten or fifteen rude sheds, about twenty yards long and twelve wide, built of rough cedar-planks; the roof a single slant covered with poles and rushes. Six or eight families live in each shed. Every family has its own fire on the ground, and the smoke, that must find its way out as best it can through cracks and holes (chimneys being objected to), hangs in a dense upper cloud, so that a man can only keep his head out of it by squatting on the ground: to stand up is to run a risk of suffocation. The children of all ages, in droves, naked and filthy, live under the smoke; as well as squaws, who squat round the smouldering logs; innumerable dogs, like starving wolves, prick-eared, sore-eyed, snappish brutes, unceasingly engaged in faction-fights and sudden duels, in which the whole pack immediately takes sides. Felt, but not heard, are legions of bloodthirsty fleas, that would try their best to suck blood from a boot, and by combined exertions would soon flay alive any man with a clean and tender skin.
The moon, near its full, creeps upward from behind the hills; stars one by one are lighted in the sky—not a cloud flecks the clear blue. The Indians are busy launching their canoes, preparing war against the candle-fish, which they catch when they come to the surface to sport in the moonlight. As the rising moon now clears the shadow of the hills, her rays slant down on the green sea, just rippled by the land-breeze. And now, like a vast sheet of pearly nacre, we may see the glittering shoals of the fish—the water seems alive with them. Out glides the dusky Indian fleet, the paddles stealthily plied by hands far too experienced to let a splash be heard. There is not a whisper, not a sound, but the measured rhythm of many paddlers, as the canoes are sent flying towards the fish.
To catch them, the Indians use a monster comb or rake, a piece of pinewood from six to eight feet long, made round for about two feet of its length, at the place of the hand-grip; the rest is flat, thick at the back, but thinning to a sharp edge, into which are driven teeth about four inches long, and an inch apart. These teeth are usually made of bone, but, when the Indian fishers can get sharp-pointed iron nails, they prefer them. One Indian sits in the stern of each canoe to paddle it along, keeping close to the shoal of fish another, having the rounded part of the rake firmly fixed in both hands, stands with his face to the bow of the canoe, the teeth pointing sternwards. He then sweeps it through the glittering mass of fish, using all his force, and brings it to the surface teeth upwards, usually with a fish impaled, sometimes with three or four upon one tooth. The rake being brought into the canoe, a sharp rap on the back of it knocks the fish off, and then another sweep yields a similar catch.
It is wonderful to see how rapidly an Indian will fill his canoe by this rude method of fishing. The dusky forms of the savages bend over the canoes, their brawny arms sweep their toothed sickles through the shoals, stroke follows stroke in swift succession, and steadily the canoes fill with their harvest of ‘living silver.’ When they have heaped as much as this frail craft will safely carry, they paddle ashore, drag the boats up on the shelving beach, overturn them as the quickest way of discharging cargo, relaunch, and go back to rake up another load. This labour goes on until the moon has set behind the mountain-peaks and the fish disappear, for it is their habit rarely to come to the surface except in the night. The sport over, we glide under the dark rocks, haul up the canoe, and lie before the log-fire to sleep long and soundly.
The next labour is that of the squaws, who have to do the curing, drying, and oil-making. Seated in a circle, they are busy stringing the fish. They do not gut or in any way clean them, but simply pass long smooth sticks through their eyes, skewering on each stick as many as it will hold, and then lashing a smaller piece transversely across the ends, to prevent the fish from slipping off the skewer. This done, next follows the drying, which is generally achieved in the thick smoke at the top of the sheds, the sticks of fish being there hung up side by side. They soon dry, and acquire a flavour of wood-smoke, which helps also to preserve them. No salt is used by Indians in any of their systems of curing fish.
When dry, the candle-fish are carefully packed in large frails made from cedar-bark or rushes, much like those one buys for a penny at Billingsgate; then they are stowed away on high stages made of poles, like a rough scaffolding. This precaution is essential, for the Indian children and dogs have an amiable weakness for eatables; and as lock-and-key are unknown to the redskins, they take this way of baffling the appetites of the incorrigible pilferers. The bales are kept until required for winter. However hungry or however short of food an Indian family may be during summer-time, it seldom will break in upon the winter ‘cache.’
I have never seen any fish half as fat and as good for Arctic winter-food as these little candle-fish. It is next to impossible to broil or fry them, for they melt completely into oil. Some idea of their marvellous fatness may be gleaned from the fact, that the natives use them as lamps for lighting their lodges. The fish, when dried, has a piece of rush-pith, or a strip from the inner bark of the cypress-tree (Thuja gigantea), drawn through it, a long round needle made of hard wood being used for the purpose; it is then lighted, and burns steadily until consumed. I have read comfortably by its light; the candlestick, literally a stick for the candle, consists of a bit of wood split at one end, with the fish inserted in the cleft.