Part 9
It was easy enough to get a sampling, because they had a tendency, owing to their very light weight perhaps, to be caught at the bottom of the little falls that poured out of each resting pool in the ladder. They were tossed, turned, tumbled in the bubbling water, flung out from it but returning to be tossed again. On the surface of that turbulence they sometimes managed like gulls riding drafts of wind, but then they would drop down and under and be carried off to the edge once more. This would go on for a long time, although they were very gradually dropping down the brook. Because of this tendency of theirs I was able to scoop them out of the falls with a sieve--although the larger they were the more elusive.
I noticed their absence during a number of cloudy and rainy days in September and their return when the sun shone; which is not to say that I did not see them on overcast days too, but the good days started them going. They responded to warmth like the adults. Beginning in October the next schools of fish coming down had increased in size, so that the average seemed to have gone up to about two and three-quarters to three inches. This movement, off and on, kept up until the end of the month. I saw one last small group coming in to the upper falls on November 16.
In the larger individuals I noticed a wider radius of response, even though they circled with fish much smaller than themselves. They were faster. They were gaining more control, and more apparent ability to see what was coming, my hand or sieve, for example, and to avoid it. These later age groups were not tossed downstream so helplessly as the earlier one-and-a-half-inchers had been. They showed more strength against the current. Yet the motion of them all was consistent with what I had seen in the adults going the same course.
I would see a little gray school of fish circling above the dam between the two outlets, with a beautiful, light swinging, and running by. There might be a sudden split in the middle of them when a leaf fell or a dragonfly touched close to the surface of the water. Then one or two of the tiny fish would fall back over the outlet with an almost electric beat, while the rest stayed. Then four or five more dropped over, and suddenly all the rest spilled over after them. They were tumbled down the first steep ladder; then they followed out the longer stretches farther on, sometimes running with the current, sometimes turning back against it; and on the down side of the road they were caught in the in-boiling waters of the second fishway, before the uninterrupted flow ahead.
A minority came down the side or waste stream instead of swimming down the second fishway, and, because they were not contained there as they were in the resting pools, I could see more clearly what happened to them as they approached a falls. The current was consistently smooth and swift, but it was a long, level, calm stretch of water. I watched them swimming straight down with it and then, quite close to the sudden tug of the high falls, they would turn back. They felt it, and had a quick response to it. It was as though they suddenly had their equilibrium tested, and that they were like trapeze artists feeling wrists, body, and rope, before swinging out and over.
Then down where Stony Brook was broad, shallow, and swift, they ran, or were carried on, like sticks and leaves. Where the water lost some of its force they swam up against it, in little schools together, or they swam off to the side of the main flow for a while, sometimes lingering in deeper water, or the shelter of rocks and banks, but continually returning to it, always a part of that outward seagoing rhythm. Gradually they traversed the swirling, eddying, long-stretching waters. They moved toward the influence of the tides where the brook ran through the marshes. They held position or circled back when the brackish water came in against them. Finally they swam, or were pulled out, from Paine’s Creek on an ebb tide, and moved toward the new shelter of the sea and its many dangers.
XVII
The Power of Fragility
I think one of the greatest challenges is to watch each bounded living thing with care for its particularity, as far as we can go, to find out we can go no farther. Flower, fish or leaf, child or man--they take none of our suggestions as to rules. Each has a strong language that we never quite learn. No matter how many times I try to describe the alewife by the uses of human speech, or classify its habits, its intrinsic perfection resists me. It is _something else_. It goes on defying my own inquiring sense of mystery.
The beauty of a little alewife held between the fingers, struggling out of water, dying, by human arbitrary reach, becomes the subject of thought and language, creative protestation in themselves. But the two-inch creature makes a mightier protest than my conscious sight of it ... wild, fragile, vibrant, shivering with a quickness that will die out in a matter of seconds. It is a marvelously knit animal, compact, flexible, shining, with its tiny meshed scales that interlock the light, iridescent silver like the adults, green, yellow, purple, receiving earth and sky. And the eyes, wholly black, interminably deep. By a chance scoop of my hand it is out in the long killing air, the little vibrancy out with the bird-gray clouds, a leashed arrow straining for the stars, that have their running too in the circle of immensity.
Fragile they are, and powerful, a wonderful work of which so many are made as to afford them death as well as life. Let us say, arbitrarily, that 150,000 female alewives lay their eggs in the ponds above Stony Brook each year. After the pond suckers take their share and the remaining eggs hatch out, then the young alewives run the gauntlet of their first few days and weeks of life. The toll taken would seem incredible if it were not also natural and expected. From billions the young are reduced to millions.
If a run is to keep up over the years, there has to be an annual survival, or “escapement,” of somewhere between 3 and 7 per cent. Say a hundred million hatched, out of the original nine billion eggs. Five per cent of that, or five million, have to reach salt water in order to assure a normal spawning migration in three or four years’ time. From that figure, of course, you subtract the alewife mortality during their years of growth in the sea. I claim nothing for my calculations, but, rough as they are, they may help to indicate how much potential goes into the end result.
It is not only the alewives that are provided for by these great numbers, but the predators which hunt them. The alewives are only part of a great complex of need. Sometimes I have watched the fry as they swam out across the Brewster flats on an ebb tide, running in shallow water from the mouth of Paine’s Creek. In September, before they have migrated south, crowds of terns, along with the resident herring gulls and ring-billed gulls, would be hovering over the water and diving or flocking in as the alewives appeared. I watched the constant, sinewy beat of their wings as they held against a west wind. The sky was swept way up with long cirrus clouds. The young alewives were running into death and beyond it, in a windy world that teemed with risk and creation.
A friend of mine, who worked in the vicinity some years ago, watched the tiny fish coming down above the old mill one autumn day. He saw some night herons standing in the lip of the dam gobbling the “poor little devils” up as they went over. He was amazed at their stomach capacity. Then he noticed that at the rocky falls where the pool ended above the water wheel and seining pool only a few were dropping over as compared to the thousands coming in from the pond, and the toll the quawks took did not account for it. Somehow, somewhere, in this short stretch of water, they were disappearing into a gulf, or, more properly, a maw. It didn’t seem right. It made him angry, although: “You can’t get mad at nature because that’s the way it is.” He got a hook and line, baited it, threw it into the pool; and in two hours he had fished out seventy-six eels.
These slithering, hoselike creatures are still there in season waiting to prey on the fish. It does not take long as a rule to see one coming up at the edge of the bank, though I have never seen them in any great quantity, because they usually lie hidden in the muddy bottom. Sometimes you can see a small group of eels of varying sizes in one of the resting pools of the fishway below the road, where the little alewives as they go down must almost fall into their mouths. With broad-ribboned tails on one end of their long-finned bodies and pointed snouts on the other, they weave and flip over, arch and float in the water. Partly because of the narrow space, and their tendency to stay or be caught in the turbulent pools, many of the little fish cannot avoid being eaten. They have only the safety of numbers.
Having developed a certain affection for the race by this time, I must say I had feelings of pity for these little ones, helplessly tossed in and out of death. They _are_ fragile, like the young of other animals. They will not last more than about three-quarters of a minute out of water. But they are not ones to know or care whether I think of them or not. They are parts of a great ordered hunger, and a vast provision for things. They are both victims and executioners, the feeders and the fed upon, in the intercommunication of every single plant and animal in the natural world. There is nothing for affection in that order perhaps, unless we conceive of it in terms of love as well as annihilation.
I have followed them out and seen where their consistent motion, their automatic reaction to the waters they swim in, has brought them to grief. It serves for survival and also for disaster. When the young alewives get out to salt water on an ebb tide, they are not able to calculate how long it will last, or so we presume, and whether they should move out soon or stay behind. The result is that many are left stranded and wildly skittering in the rivulets that thread the sandy flats at extreme low tide. From the time the outgoing waters of Paine’s Creek begin to get low, they are also subject to attack by crowds of herons and gulls--but supposing they survive that and still have a chance in a matter of an hour or an hour and a half to reach deeper water? It is very often the case that because of their habit of heading back against the current they delay too long and lose their chance of escape. They are caught high and dry on the sand or in water so shallow that they are unable to move on, and so are easy prey for the birds. I have followed them through low water and seen them turn back, just as they had a chance to follow one waning current to join another and so out to safety; but when I use the word safety I have to remind myself that the flow goes where it will.
Now it is possible that you might interpret this behavior as a reluctance to leave the inland waters. They have a drive in them to go to salt water eventually, but they may be in no hurry. In some areas they stay in estuaries or tributaries for a long time. At Paine’s Creek and the channel above it they may have no alternative but to be carried out on the ebb tide.
When they finally reach Cape Cod Bay they probably school in fairly shallow shoal areas where the water is warmest, inviting bass or bluefish of course, to “come and get it.”
“Shiners” some call them, confusing alewife fry with fresh-water shiners, of which there are a great many species, but shine they do. In the summer at low tide the bathers try to catch them with their hands, or jump after them where they glitter in the pools. Sometimes there are trails of the little fish left behind by those gluttons the gulls. In death they look frail, limp, almost diaphanous. No longer so reflecting and vibrant, their bodies are a pale silver-white like the underside of fallen poplar leaves. Some of the heads are left uneaten along with the headless bodies strewn in the rivulets along the ridged sands. Sometimes their bodies are ripped down, gashed, leaving raw stripes on them. These wounds look no less cruel and vivid because of their tiny size.
XVIII
Going Out
The first alewife I saw in early spring was wild and new to me, feeling its way upcurrent alone, cautiously, as if testing out an old trail. Down Stony Brook there were long patterns in the water dappled like fish scales. In the sky above there were cloud tosses and wind turns during a break toward spring that the fish itself exemplified. Later on the fry in the apparently indiscriminate times they moved out and headed for salt water seemed to be pulled as if by moon tides and turning earth. The course I followed was full of natural complexity. Forms and patterns were endlessly co-ordinate and suggestive, but with the mystery of their making, the universal power, at once ordered, vast, fluid, out of reach.
The alewife migration taught me how to start. Had we been two and a half miles up from salt water to the farthest pond, then back again, or was it three thousand? I had learned that measurement was indefinite.
I still knew next to nothing about their lives in salt water. And what was ahead on land? I could expect them to follow certain rules of behavior. They would come back year after year unless the run was so consistently overfished that the population dwindled. I knew where to look for them now, and had some acquaintance with laws of supply and demand, plus the effects of management or the lack of it. Perhaps alewives could be expected in general to do what they had done before. But those laws that lead all migrants on have more in store for us than we can anticipate. The variations I had found in action and circumstance, following those fish, variations like the changes of air and water, leaves, grass and ground, intermoving light and shadow, were unexpected and perpetual. If the alewives ever proved that anything was static, it could only have been in me. There is no personifying the unknown fish. I am not acquainted with it yet; but now we are on a run together.
The alewife is another of the amplifications and extensions of life. In the flip of its body, its communicable “Let’s go,” it offers to be followed. So that race with its recoil and approach, approach and recoil, circling in consonance with the forces of the earth has the lesson of migration in ourselves. When I watched them coming in on their old, persistent track and felt so much in my own senses of that exploring, through the growing and falling off of leaves, the wind charging and easing off, the bright waters, I knew there was an infinite sum in me of the unused. What _is_ migration? Is it to “pass from one place to another”--just that? And its causes may be the need for food or to reproduce in season; but surely the term comprises a great deal more.
Whether the migration of animals seems random, or with definite intent, it leads across the earth. All the studies made of individual species result in new directions to be explored, new unknowns about the actions of other lives, and the ways they follow. The mystery about the travels of birds, eels, monarch butterflies, or alewives, is not only a matter of routes or seasonal behavior. It has to do with an internal response to this spinning globe and its unendingly creative energies. As a result of a respectful regard for other animals we may find that we are being led onto traveled ways that were once invisible to us, and in their deep alliance with natural forces we find a new depth in ourselves. This is the common ground for all living things, where migration has in it the blood of contact, the winds and waters of communication.
On that July week when I first saw the young alewives coming down through the outlet, the roads of Cape Cod were roaring and humming with cars. The tourist season had suddenly come to its height. The population of the Cape had jumped from 60,000 to 200,000 or more. There were new demands, new pressures in the air. This was the yearly coming on of an immense, expanding world, a migratory phenomenon in itself. Voices and prices were rising. Man’s abundance vied with the natural summer.
It was a hot day, though it had started out cool in the early morning, with drifts of fog along the shore and patches of it through the inland hollows. I had followed the alewife fry down from the Herring Run to the shore road. They had become increasingly hard to find; but when I reached the slow waters of the channel at Paine’s Creek I could see multitudes of them heading in the direction of the Bay. Farther on where the water ran out through the sands on the ebb tide there were groups of them moving with it like little clouds.
There were a few people walking on the flats in the distance where herring gulls were yelping and an occasional tern gave a light, harsh cry. An old panting setter dog lunged aimlessly across the sands, then splashed through the shallow waters of the creek at its outlet. On the beach a family crowd of bathers were listening to a portable radio that noised out the baseball scores. Some of them got up and saw to their children, or fell, sat down, or dove into the water at the edge of the sands. They sounded low, then high, like the gulls--“Stop it!” “Come on!” “Here, bunny” “Come back here!” “Jump in”--full of alarm, solicitude, friendliness, irritation, communality.
Back in the channel where the tiny fish, progeny of _Pomolobus pseudoharengus_, were swimming on in the brown water, a couple of growing, gawky children, a boy and a girl, half round, half lean, were pushing each other down, floundering and thrashing, while they laughed and threatened each other, completely oblivious of the great migration a few yards away. Or can anything be oblivious? I felt that I had come to the middle of things.
=Transcriber’s Notes=
New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.
Perceived typographical errors have been silently corrected.
Illustrations have been moved nearer to the text to which they refer.