Fig. 380. Salmon Leap at Kilmorack.
When the period for depositing their eggs approaches, a male and female pair off, as it were; seeming to choose, by a common accord, a retired place in which to spawn. Here both male and female employ themselves in hollowing out a nest in the strand, some eight or nine inches deep, wherein the female deposits her eggs, which the male fertilizes by shedding a milky fluid over them, sheltering the eggs afterwards by a covering of sand.
The salmon only ascends the rivers to spawn. They eagerly return afterwards to salt water. When enjoying themselves in the water they swim slowly, floating near the surface; but in pursuit of any object, or if threatened with danger, they dart out of the water with extraordinary promptitude. The tail is, in fact, a true oar moved by powerful muscles; a low waterfall is to the salmon no serious obstacle when it is impelled to ascend to its breeding-place. Curving its vertebral column, it forms itself into a sort of elastic spring; the arc of which being suddenly unbent, strikes the water with great force with the tail, and in the rebound it leaps to the height of several yards, clearing waterfalls of considerable height. If it falls without accomplishing its object, it repeats the manœuvre until it is at last successful. It is especially when the leader of the band makes a successful leap that the others, acquiring new spirit from its example, throw themselves upwards until their emulation is rewarded by success.
Some of the British waterfalls are celebrated for their salmon leaps. Wales, Scotland, and Ireland have each their celebrated leaps; in Pembrokeshire, Argyleshire, and at Ballyshannon, in county Donegal, and at Leixlip. The cataract of Leixlip is upwards of twenty feet high, and the country people make a holiday in order to see the salmon clear its height. These acrobat fishes frequently fall before they finally succeed, and it is not unusual for the people to place osier baskets to trap them in their fall. At the cataract of Kilmorack, in Inverness-shire (Fig. 380), the inhabitants living near the river have a practice of fixing branches of trees on the edge of the rocks. By means of these branches they contrive to catch the fishes which have failed in their leap; it is even asserted that sportsmen have been known to kill them on the wing, as it were, in their leap. But the exploit, attributed to Lord Lovat by Dr. Franklin, is perhaps the nearest approach to the fabulous which we have met with.
Having remarked that great numbers of salmon failed in their efforts to surmount the Falls of Kilmorack, and that they generally fell on the bank at the foot of the fall, Lord Lovat conceived the idea of placing a furnace and a frying-pan on a point of rock overhanging the river. After their unsuccessful effort some of the unhappy salmon would fall accidentally into the frying-pan. The noble lord could thus boast that the resources of his country were so abundant, that on placing a furnace and frying-pan on the banks of their rivers, the salmon would leap into it of their own accord, without troubling the sportsman to catch them. It is more probable, however, that Lord Lovat knew that the way to enjoy salmon in perfection is to cook it when fresh from the water, and before the richer parts of the fish have ceased to curd. The principal salmon found in the market are Tweed, Tay, North Esk, Spey, Skye, Norwegian, and above all Severn, said to be the best which comes to market, neither of which must be confounded with the imported American variety—the origin of the prevalent cheap London kipper—and the Cape, or red-mouthed variety. Cape and Americans are at once distinguished by their flesh boiling a blanched white. Tweed salmon are more varied; and this river, famous in song, is also noted for its production of the greatest proportion of bull-trout. The Tay yields the largest grilse and salmon, but the Spey follows fast in her wake; Tay fish sometimes weigh sixty pounds. The minor Scotch rivers produce smaller but superior fish. Skye and West-coast grilse are short, thick, and small-headed, and proportionally more abundant. Trout are numerous; sea-bull, burn, or loch, and the so-called herring-trout, are the varieties usually met with. The whitling of the Tweed, grayling of Tay, and tinnock of North and South Esk, are young sea and bull-trout, abounding in March and April, when a sportsman will land fifty or sixty daily, weighing from one quarter to a pound. Trout flesh varies in colour from a clear white to a dark red; the North Esk red trout is most esteemed. The best run from a pound and a half to three pounds. The burn-trout is always red, and has been killed as heavy as thirty pounds. The herring-trout, never found in English rivers, and only caught on our coast by herring-trawlers, is a special favourite: may it not be the whitling of the French rivers? In all other species colour varies with locality, and cannot be accounted for.
We have seen how rapidly the young salmon increase in size in the sea. During this stage of existence the salmon, being a carnivorous fish, rapidly develops itself from the grilse to the adult state. From a careful analysis made by Dr. Wilson Johnston of the Bengal army, it appears that there is no recorded instance of healthy salmon partaking of herring or sand-lances; the tape-worm and other conditions of perverted appetite persisting in all. Tape-worm is most common in the hybrid Norwegian, and explains the reason why Clupeadæ are sometimes found in their stomachs. Should the fish not be charged with spawn, it will shortly return to sport among the dancing waves; but if matured for breeding, at which period the female shows a dirty brown hue, and the male a black, they mate, choose a spot for the salmon nest, and there deposit myriads of ova. The longer a salmon continues in the river the duller their colour becomes; the flavour is greatly depreciated; so that Izaac Walton's statement, that "the further they get from the sea they be both fatter and better," is dead against our daily experience.
During the period of river residence salmon never feed. It avails not to argue that fear acts as an emetic and empties the stomach; the incontestable fact remains that the entire gastro-intestinal tract ab ore ad ano is in ninety-nine per cent. devoid of any trace of food. Juvenile experience on the part of the fish, recurring as a phantasm, causes them to snap at a shining artificial minnow or a gaudy fly, but they never rise out of the water; the bait must dip to them, and when hooked they shake the intruder as a terrier does a rat. If salmon never feed in fresh water, what is the rationale of their existing there? Well, the superabundant store of fat deposited in the areolar tissue appears to furnish a material which is functionally homologous to the fatty supply stored by the Asiatic and African doomba sheep, which is drawn upon to sustain life-action, when névès, avalanches, or a heavy snow-fall imprisons the herbage outcrop. That continued muscular exertion can be sustained without special fatigue on non-nitrogenous diet, Fick and Wislicensus have proved by the recent ascent of the Faulhorn: it is moreover notorious that the chamois hunter and the Hindoo runner prefer fats and saccharoids. Is there any show of reason, then, why the salmon should not maintain its fresh-water muscular tear and wear by a stock of non-nitrogenous fatty material? That such is the true philosophy of salmon river life is borne out by the following facts:
1st. So soon as the exhausting secretions of the milt and roe take place the spent fish turn seaward to recruit.
2nd. The digestive secretions are not eliminated in the absence of food; the most recent experience of physiology finds its echo here. Your boxer trains on meat or nitrogenous aliment, but enters the list on hydro-carbons (fats, saccharines, and amylaceous substances). The salmon get into condition by immediately appropriating the albumen of the echinodermal ova, enter their life-struggle of wintry months in river water with an incorporated stock of potential calorific aliment, convertible, as occasion demands, into organic muscular mechanical effort.