CHRYSANTHEMUMS A-BLOOM
BY A STEVESTON DOOR WAY.
CHAPTER XXXI.
STEVESTON.
Every Sunday evening at six o’clock during the salmon-run, the signal gun that marks the beginning of another fishing-week rings out upon the evening air of Steveston the capital of the British Columbia salmon fisheries at the mouth of the great Fraser River. Not a net passes over any gunwale of the hundred odd motorboats that for the past hour have been jockeying up-and-down picking up the great river’s signals-of-fish and the way they “set”, until the crack of the official gun rings out over the water. The moment, however, that this is heard, over go the great seines, imported here from Old Scotland for just this dramatic instant, entrants in the great race, boat against boat, and all in league, against salmon.
Of all the stories of animal-life, none is more wonderful or pathetic, than the story which the salmon of the Fraser have given to Canada. From out the deep-sea they come by tens of thousands, crowding, pushing, over-leaping each other, a silvery mass of fighting-mad mothers, trying to start their off-spring on the perilous road of fish-life, somewhere in a pool, high up in the mountains out of harm’s way; and here across the river, near its mouth, is this line of boats and their submerged nets lying in wait, while on the river’s bank in league with the boats are the huge canning factories, like so many Molochs open-mouthed, waiting to swallow to-day’s catch and to-morrow’s, as they have snapped up those of the years gone by.
One has not spent an hour on this waterfront before story and romance have flitted across the stage in almost confusing numbers. Each figure in the vaudeville of fish, a flashing mosaic, stepped out of the Far East to serve this river of the Far West. For the Japs are the servitors of Salmon at Steveston. Out of the Islands of Nippon have come these fishermen, to serve in the ranks of Fraser salmon-fishing, men with wives and little families, caught in the net of circumstance and landed far from home, to work here where the snow-capped Mount McKinley, over in the State of Washington, gleams an intermittent nimbus of light above the foggy head-veil of distance, suggesting, like a lighted candle on the altar of remembrance, all the sweet associations and memories clinging to the snow-capped brow of Fujiyama.
Here in the boats are the nets, all the way from the hand of the old net-maker in Scotland, and here the hands handling the nets come from the other side of the world to bring Canadian salmon to the tables of the home-land and to carry the overflow to the tables of the world. For when one comes to think of it, there must indeed be few, if any lands, that do not know Canadian salmon, and few undertakings calling for a ration of canned-food which do not depend on canned-salmon to hold up the fish-end.