Gradually the sturgeon grows sulky and tired, obstinately floating on the surface. The savage knows he is not vanquished, but only biding a chance for revenge; so he shortens up the line, and gathers quietly on upon him, to get another spear in. It is done—and down viciously dives the sturgeon; but pain and weariness begin to tell, the struggles grow weaker and weaker, as life ebbs slowly away, until the mighty armour-plated monarch of the river yields himself a captive to the dusky native in his frail canoe.
The Clam.—Amongst the edible shellfish found on the coasts of Vancouver Island and British Columbia, the Great Clam, as it is there styled (Lutraria maxima), or the Otter-shell of conchologists, is by far the most valuable. Clams are one of the staple articles of winter food on which all Indian tribes in a great measure depend who inhabit the north-west coast of America. The clam to the Indians is a sort of molluscous cereal, that they gather and garner during the summer months; and an outline sketch of this giant bivalve’s habits and style of living, how captured, and what becomes of it after being made a prisoner, may be interesting; its habits, and the uses to which, if not designed, it is at least appropriated, being generally less known than its minute anatomy. Clams attain an immense size; I have measured shells eight inches from the hinge to the edge of the valve. We used them as soap-dishes at our headquarters on Vancouver Island.
The clam has a very wide range, and is thickly distributed along the mainland and Vancouver Island coasts; his favourite haunts are the great sandbanks, that run out sometimes over a mile from the shore. The rise and fall of the tide is from thirty to forty feet, so that at low-water immense flats or beaches, consisting of mud and sand, are laid bare.
There is nothing poetical about the clam, and its habits are anything but clean; grovelling in the mud, and feeding on the veriest filth it can find, appears to constitute the great pleasure of its life; the stomach is a kind of dusthole, into which anything and everything finds ready admission. Its powers of digestion must be something wonderful; I believe clams could sup on copper tacks, and not suffer from nightmare. Spending the greater part of its time buried about two feet deep, the long syphon, reaching to the surface, discovers its whereabouts, as the ebbing tide leaves the mud, by continually squirting up small jets of water, about six or eight inches high. The sand flats dry, out marches an army of squaws (Indian women), as it is derogatory to the dignity of a man to dig clams. With only a small bit of skin or cedar-mat tied round the waist, the women tramp through the mud, a basket made from cedar-root in one hand, and in the other a bent stick about four feet long.
Thus armed, they begin to dig up the mud-homes of the unsuspecting clam: guided by the jets of water, they push down the bent stick, and experience has taught them to make sure of getting it well under the shell: placing a stone behind the stick, against which the squaw fixes her foot firmly, she lifts away: the clam comes from darkness into daylight ere he knows it, and thence into the Indian’s basket. The basket filled, the clam-pickers trudge back again to the lodge—and next to open him. He is not a native to be astonished with an oyster-knife; once having shut his mouth, no force, saving that of dashing his shell into atoms, will induce him to open it. But the wily redskin, if she does not know the old fable of the wind and the sun trying their respective powers on the traveller, at least adopts the same principle on the luckless clam; what knife and lever fail to do a genial warmth accomplishes. The same plan the sun adopted to make the traveller take off his coat (more persuasive, perhaps, than pleasant) the Indian squaw has recourse to in order to make the clam open his shell.
Hollowing out a ring in the ground, about eight inches deep, they fill the circle with large pebbles, made red-hot in the camp-fire near by, and on these heated stones put the bivalve martyr. The heat soon finds its way through the shelly armour, the powerful ropes that hold the doors together slacken, and, as his mansion gradually grows ‘too hot to hold him,’ the door opens a little for a taste of fresh air. Biding her chance, armed with a long, smooth, sharp-pointed stick, sits the squaw—dusky, grim, and dirty—anxiously watching the clam’s movements. The stronghold opens, and the clam drinks draught after draught of the cool lifegiving air; then down upon him the savage pounces, and astonishes his heated and fevered imagination by thrusting, with all her force, the long sharp stick into the unguarded house: crash it goes through the quivering tissues; his chance is over! Jerked off the heated stones, pitilessly his house is forced open; ropes, hinges, fastenings crack like pack-thread, and the mollusc is ruthlessly dragged from his shelly home, naked and lifeless.
Having got the clam out, the next thing is to preserve it for winter: this is effectually accomplished by stringing-up and smoking. A long wooden needle, with an eye at the end, is threaded with cord made from native hemp; and on this the clams are strung like dried apples, and thoroughly smoked, in the interior of the lodge. A more effectual smoking-house could hardly be found. I can imagine nothing in the ‘wide, wide world’ half as filthy, loathsome, and disgusting as the interior of an Indian house. Every group has some eatable—fish, mollusc, bird, or animal—and what the men and squaws do not consume, is pitched to the dusky little savages, that, naked and dirty, are thick as ants in a hill; from these the residue descends to the dogs, and what they leave some lower form of animal life manages to consume. Nothing eatable that is once brought in is ever by any chance swept, or carried, out again, and either becomes some other form of life, or, decomposing, assumes its elemental condition.
An old settler once told me a story, as we were hunting together, and I think I can vouch for the truth of what he related, of having seen a duck trapped by a clam:—‘You see, sir, as I was a-cruising down these flats about sun-up, the tide jist at the nip, as it is now, I see a whole pile of shoveller ducks snabbling in the mud, and busy as dogfish in herring-time; so I creeps down, and slap I lets ’em have it: six on ’em turned over, and off went the pack gallows-scared, and quacking like mad. Down I runs to pick up the dead uns, when I see an old mallard a-playing up all kinds o’ antics, jumping, backing, flapping, but fast by the head, as if he had his nose in a steel trap; and when I comes up to him, blest if a large clam hadn’t hold of him, hard and fast, by the beak. The old mallard might a’ tried his darndest, but may I never bait a martin-trap again if that clam wouldn’t a’ held him agin any odds ’til the tide run in, and then he’d a’ been a gone shoveller sure as shooting; so I cracked up the clam with the butt of my old gun, and bagged the mallard.’
Any one who has travelled in America must have eaten clam-chowder, or, more probably perhaps, tried to eat it. It is a sort of intermediate affair between stew-proper and soup. How it is made I do not know, but I do know that to my palate it is the vilest concoction I ever tasted; and I always look upon a man who can eat clam-chowder with a kind of admiration almost akin to envy; for I feel and know that if he can eat chowder, short of cannibalism he can eat anything. I have tried smoked clam, but that I cannot say I enjoy; it is remarkably like chewing good old tarry ropeyarn, and, save the slight difference in nutritive power, about an equally agreeable repast.
If any of my readers should be curious to see the shells of these monster clams, they will find many I have recently brought home in the Shell Room of the British Museum.