not start schooling to move out of the ponds until they are over an
inch in length. I have seen them, still not much more than pin size,
circling a few hundred yards above the outlet, but neither swimming
with the flow nor letting themselves be drifted on. Logically then, the
point at which they are stimulated to leave must coincide with growth,
the rate of which depends on food and temperature in the ponds.
Warm-water ponds are more favorable to growth than cold-water ponds.
They turn out better fish, larger and healthier. By the same token a
cold spring and summer will result in a poorer crop of alewives. They
will probably be hatched later. The colder pond waters will bring
down the “plankton bloom,” in other words less food for the fish. As
a result, young alewives going to salt water that year will be
smaller, weaker, more subject to disease, and less able to escape their
enemies.
It is just possible, then, that some spring when the annual run of
alewives is smaller than usual, for no apparent reason, you might find
an answer to the mystery in a cold season, four years before.
After the first young alewives have moved out, having attained the size
and response necessary for it, you can see a gradual increase in size
from early summer until autumn. One of the unsolved questions is why
the earliest to go will not stay longer in the ponds. Why not relax, if
a fish can, and eat well until autumn, as in fact large numbers of them
do. Were they nearest the outlet? Perhaps the larger fish that begin to
appear later on were hatched earlier and therefore came from farther
back in the chain of ponds.
Of course there is nothing rigid about their timetable, nothing exact
about their migratory behavior. Whatever stimulates it, their new
momentum takes the form of a gradual circling out. I have heard that
in some areas they will start down and then return when they can swim
back up the outlet, if the force of the water is not too strong for
them. They may be in a state of indecisive action for a while, or so
it sounds, but most of them are moved to go at some time before winter
sets in, though there have been many exceptions to the rule. John
Burns, of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, tells me
that he saw a “generous school of fry” one January, coming down under
the ice of a frozen pond at Bournedale.
Perhaps this phenomenon of migration in the young fish is not
susceptible of final analysis. Might that be because it is so simple,
however complex in detail and circumstance, simple though intangible in
the life rhythm it embodies? However slow or fast their response to it
may be, the little fish must be obeying an organic, directional drive
that goes back beyond history. As a part of their growing up they may
develop the same kind of built-in response to the waters in which they
find themselves as their parents schooling offshore in the spring; and
they come to have an intercommunication that knows its way. It is not
the adult call of sexual maturity that moves them, and yet they must
have a biological need to start out together on the same living track.
I recognize how much an amateur may leave out of his calculations, and
only proffer my individual guess that they follow the outward flow of
the ponds when they grow to feel a rhythmic, habitual motion in them
that responds to it and that belongs in its balance to the whole race
of alewives between land and sea. The fresh-water minnows stay where
they are, no matter how hard the pull of the waters may be. I have seen
them lazing in the shallows while a school of little alewives darted
over them, restlessly moving on. And as I followed the young migrants
I saw in them a roaming, roving sweep like sea birds made for distant
journeys.
I watched them coming down from July through October and into November,
from the lush green of early summer to the red and brown of dry weeks
in August, and on to the cool days of autumn when the sea turned a
brighter blue and winds and clouds blew full--all the way almost to
the hardening in of winter and its sullen skies. The alewife is a part
of the life of Stony Brook and the ponds above it for at least seven
months out of the year. And the fact that so many return again to the
particularity, the uniqueness of these waters is a reminder of the
power of living form and place together, the welding of those strands
of near and far in the body of a fish, the body of the world. The fish
egg rolls around on a greater axis than its own.
So the first of the tiny fish came down by the thousands during the
first week in July. After that there was hardly a day until the middle
of August when there were not at least a few to be seen in the brook.
Gradually they grew larger, so that in August they were up to two
inches on the average. The next big movement, after an August lull,
began on September 6 and 7. Their size by then had increased to between
two and two and one-half inches. A few were considerably larger. I
measured one at the surprising length of four and one-half inches, and
another, which escaped my net, looked to be well over five.
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.