They Were So Abundant That He
Simply Groped For Them In A Random Way, Or Aimed At Them By The Light
They Themselves Furnished.
That food to last a month or two may thus
be procured in less than an hour is a striking illustration of the
fruitfulness of these Alaskan waters.
Our Hoona neighbors were asleep in the morning at sunrise, lying in a
row, wet and limp like dead salmon. A little boy about six years old,
with no other covering than a remnant of a shirt, was lying
peacefully on his back, like Tam o' Shanter, despising wind and rain
and fire. He is up now, looking happy and fresh, with no clothes to
dry and no need of washing while this weather lasts. The two babies
are firmly strapped on boards, leaving only their heads and hands
free. Their mothers are nursing them, holding the boards on end,
while they sit on the ground with their breasts level with the little
prisoners' mouths.
This morning we found out how beautiful a nook we had got into.
Besides the charming picturesqueness of its lines, the colors about
it, brightened by the rain, made a fine study. Viewed from the shore,
there was first a margin of dark-brown algae, then a bar of
yellowish-brown, next a dark bar on the rugged rocks marking the
highest tides, then a bar of granite boulders with grasses in the
seams, and above this a thick, bossy, overleaning fringe of bushes
colored red and yellow and green. A wall of spruces and hemlocks
draped and tufted with gray and yellow lichens and mosses embowered
the campground and overarched the little river, while the camp-fire
smoke, like a stranded cloud, lay motionless in their branches. Down
on the beach ducks and sandpipers in flocks of hundreds were getting
their breakfasts, bald eagles were seen perched on dead spars along
the edge of the woods, heavy-looking and overfed, gazing stupidly
like gorged vultures, and porpoises were blowing and plunging outside.
As for the salmon, as seen this morning urging their way up the swift
current, - tens of thousands of them, side by side, with their backs
out of the water in shallow places now that the tide was
low, - nothing that I could write might possibly give anything like a
fair conception of the extravagance of their numbers. There was more
salmon apparently, bulk for bulk, than water in the stream. The
struggling multitudes, crowding one against another, could not get
out of our way when we waded into the midst of them. One of our men
amused himself by seizing them above the tail and swinging them over
his head. Thousands could thus be taken by hand at low tide, while
they were making their way over the shallows among the stones.
Whatever may be said of other resources of the Territory, it is
hardly possible to exaggerate the importance of the fisheries. Not to
mention cod, herring, halibut, etc., there are probably not less than
a thousand salmon-streams in southeastern Alaska as large or larger
than this one (about forty feet wide) crowded with salmon several
times a year.
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