_THE GREAT FISH_
The great White Sturgeon was not, in the truest sense of the word, a
native of the lake. More years ago than any living thing could remember,
he had been born, along with thousands of brothers and sisters, halfway
up one of the many rivers that emptied into the lake. The sturgeon
remembered little about that time, but just the same it had helped to
shape him and make him what he was.
The spawning sturgeon, a vast number of them, had started up the river
together. It was a journey as old as the lake itself. Side by side they
swam, in such numbers and so many evenly-spaced layers that none of the
many Indians who fished along the river was able to thrust his spear
without striking a sturgeon. Preying bears, otter, panthers, lynx and
other creatures that liked fish, thronged the river's banks and struck
at the horde as it passed. So little did all their raids combined matter
that it was as though they had taken nothing. No creature that wanted
one lacked a sturgeon to eat. But the great mass of fish, impelled by
the desperate necessity of laying their eggs in the river, swam on.
Only when miles were behind them and they were about a third of the way
to the river's source, did the vast schools start to thin out. Then it
was not because their enemies took too many, though they caught a great
number. The schools started to lessen because many, too exhausted to go
farther or content with spawning grounds already reached, dropped behind
to spawn.
Finally only a few, not necessarily the biggest but invariably the most
vigorous, were left. Day after day, night after night, stopping only to
rest or feed, they went on up the virgin river. Buck deer, drinking, saw
the fleeting shadows pass, snorted and leaped skittishly away. Drinking
buffalo raised their shaggy heads and, with water dribbling from their
muzzles, stared after the migrating fish.
Everything seemed, in some small way, to sense the mystery that went
with the swimming sturgeon. They were part of the abundance of this
wealthy land, and when they were through spawning, that abundance would
be increased. The very presence of the fish was within itself a promise
that more were to follow.
Finally there were only half a dozen sturgeon left.
One was a very strong female whose spawn-swollen body even now contained
the egg, the cell, that was to be the great White Sturgeon. Swimming
close beside her was an equally vigorous male. All the sturgeon that had
been able to come this far were among the finest and best.
They stopped in a quiet pool which, within itself, was almost a little
lake. A third of a mile wide by a mile and a half long, the pool rolled
smoothly down an almost level course. It was shaded on either side by
gloomy pines that marched like soldiers in disordered rank for a very
great distance. There were no grunting buffalo here, though an
occasional white-tailed deer tripped daintily down to drink from the
sweet, unpolluted water.
On either side of the pool was a mat of green sedges and water-lilies,
and in them a great horde of ducks were rearing their young. They
skittered foolishly over the water, seeming to pay no attention to
anything save the sheer joy of being alive. Now and then the water
beneath them would dimple and ripple in widening circles towards either
bank; and when it did, invariably there would be one less duckling.
Nothing paid any attention whatever to such casualties. Life teemed in
the pool, and there life also fed on life. It was meant to be, and the
mighty pike that lived in the pool had to eat, too.
Weary, but far from exhausted, the female carrying the White
Sturgeon-to-be pushed herself into the sedges and lay quietly while she
rid herself of the burden that she had carried so far. A million or more
eggs she left there, and almost before she was finished two little pike
that made their home in the sedges had started gobbling them up.
The female sturgeon paid absolutely no attention, and neither did her
mate, when he came to fertilize the eggs. They were here to do, and knew
how to do, only one thing. Finished, they had no thought as to what
might happen next. The two sturgeon swam back into the pool and rested
before beginning their long return journey to the great lake. But they
had chosen wisely and well.
Almost before the parent fish left, a mink that had long had his eye on
the small pike swam quietly down to take one while it was feeding. The
other one fled. Though other things came to eat them, in due time what
remained of the spawn hatched. The White Sturgeon was the first to
appear.
The baby fish came of strong parents, so that there were almost no
infertile eggs, but such inroads had already been made among them that
not one in twenty ever knew life. Immediately they were singled out by
hungry enemies.
The White Sturgeon should have died first for, though all his brothers
and sisters were almost the color of the water in which they found
birth, he was distinctly different. He was lighter--perhaps a throwback
to some distant age when all sturgeon were white--and thus he was the
easiest to see. But he seemed to have been born with compensating
factors.
When a foot-long bass, a very monster of a thing compared with the baby
sturgeon, swam among them, they scattered in wild panic. The feeding
bass had only to snap here and there to get all he wanted, but the White
Sturgeon did not flee with the rest. Instead, he sank down beside a
cattail and did not move. A tiny cloud of mud-colored water drifted
around and covered him.
Thus, from the very first, the White Sturgeon seemed to have a keener
brain, or a sharper instinct, that made up for his distinctive coloring.
Though he should have been the first to die, he did not die. He learned
his lessons well, and saw how many of his brothers and sisters perished.
Thus he discovered how to stay alive.
For weeks he lived near his birthplace, swimming scarcely two yards from
it and feeding on minute particles of both vegetable and animal life.
Most of his time he spent feeding, and he grew very fast. Not until
encroaching winter drove him there did he move out into the pool.
Most of the ducks were gone before the first thin shell ice formed on
the borders of the pool, and those that lingered after that flew out
with the first snow. The snow blew in from the north on the heels of an
unseasonably early winter wind, and the White Sturgeon saw the mighty
pines heaped with feathery snow. Snow lay deep on the ground, and the
deer that came down to the pool seemed almost jet-black against its
virginal whiteness.
Lingering in the shallows, the White Sturgeon held very still. His was
the accumulated wisdom of ages. Ancestors almost exactly like him had
swum in antediluvian seas when huge, scaley monsters roamed the earth,
and perhaps the White Sturgeon knew that, as long as he held still near
the snow-covered bank, he would be hard to see. Or perhaps he merely
found the snow, his own color matched at last, interesting.
Right after the snow stopped there was a spell of sub-zero weather that
threw a sheathing of ice clear across the pool and froze the shallows to
the very bottom. Only then did the White Sturgeon move out of them.
He did not move far because it was not necessary to move far, and anyway
the great pike lingered in the center of the pool. Almost one third jaw,
the pikes' mouths were edged with needle-sharp teeth that never let go
and never failed to rip what they seized. Of the young sturgeon that
lived until fall, perhaps two hundred and fifty in all, the pike had
half before the winter was well set. The rest were too wary to be easy
prey.
All winter long, living on the edge of the ice and finding all the food
he needed in the soft mud floor of the pool, the White Sturgeon led a
solitary existence. But it was not a lonely life because, as yet, it was
not in him to be lonely. All he knew, and all he had to know, was that
he must survive. Every effort was bent to that end.
In the spring, shortly after the ice broke up and moved sluggishly down
the river, the White Sturgeon followed it. With him went three of his
brothers and two sisters, and if more than that had survived he did not
know about them or where they were. Nor did he care. In his life there
was no room for or meaning to affection; he traveled with his brothers
and sisters merely because, like him, they too were going down the
river.
The journey was not at all hurried. The White Sturgeon, who by this time
knew much more about the various arts of survival than he had known when
he left the pool, passed the next winter in another, smaller pool, less
than two miles from his birthplace. He chose the pool largely because it
was the home of a vast number of fish smaller than he, and they offered
an easy living to the pike, bass and other things that lived by eating
fish. Grown fat and sluggish in the midst of super-abundance, these
predators were not inclined to chase anything that cared to avoid them
or to work at all for their living. All they had to do was lie still and
sooner or later the living would come to them.
For his part, the White Sturgeon had no desire to hurt anything. His
sole wish was to be left alone, so he could peacefully pursue his own
path of destiny. He grubbed in the mud for his food and idled when he
was not eating. But, because he had a prodigious appetite, he was eating
most of the time. As a consequence, he continued to grow very rapidly.
Again and again, while he pursued his lazy journey down the river, the
White Sturgeon saw the lake sturgeon swim past him as they headed
upstream toward the spawning grounds. Swimming strongly, they came in
huge schools. Spent from the spawning, they swam slowly past him on
their way back to the lake.
Vaguely the White Sturgeon identified himself with these fish. Never did
he have more than a passing wish to join them. He wanted only to
continue his leisurely trip down the river, and time meant nothing at
all.
Though the White Sturgeon did not realize it, everything was part of a
mighty pattern and a vast scheme. Though there had never been a time
when he was not in danger, the river had not been an unkind school.
There he had learned how to avoid his enemies and how to become the
powerful fish which he must be were he to live. Then the river gave him
his last test.
He was near the mouth, only a few miles from the lake, when he suddenly
found himself face to face with a monstrous pike. The pike in the pool
of his birth were big, but they were dwarfed by this one. Out of the
shadows he came, a long, sinewy thing with the heart of a tiger and the
jaws of a pike. Even wolves' jaws are not more terrible.
The White Sturgeon did as he always did when danger threatened; he held
very still. But this time it was futile because the pike had already
seen him. Thus the thing which must never happen, did happen. The White
Sturgeon came face to face with danger in its deadliest form. If he
lived through this, then never again would he have to fear an enemy that
swam in the water.
Suddenly the pike whirled, flipped a contemptuous tail, and drifted back
into the shadows out of which he had come. He was not afraid; no pike is
ever afraid of anything, but the White Sturgeon was nearly as large as
he and even the pike never killed wantonly, or destroyed that which he
could not eat. The White Sturgeon swam on. He had graduated with honors
from the river's school, and he seemed to know it. For the first time
since his birth, a mighty restlessness gripped him.
Not again did he linger in the pools, or stop to feed for a week or a
month wherever he found a rich feeding bed. Urgings and commands within
him that had been passive were suddenly active.
With all this, he remained a harmless fish. Never born to battle, he had
no wish to fight and he did not abandon all his hard-won caution. If the
pike had not hurt him, nothing that swam in the river or lake would hurt
him; but the White Sturgeon retained a fear of those creatures not born
of the water. Aliens, they would not abide by the creed of the water.
While heeding a sudden and great wish to get out of the river and into
the lake, the White Sturgeon stayed far from both river banks.
A ghost figure in the murky water, he shot out of the river's mouth and
into the cold lake. For a while he sported like a dolphin, rising to
the surface, showing his white back, and diving.
An Indian who was spearing fish from a canoe stared his astonishment.
Trembling, he sheathed his spear and paddled back to his encampment. He
had seen the White Sturgeon, the Ghost Fish, and that night a mighty
storm knocked down a big pine near the Indian's camp. Two people were
killed when it fell.
Knowing nothing of this, lying contentedly in thirty feet of water where
he was aware of the storm only because his fine and deep senses made him
aware of everything that occurred above, the White Sturgeon grubbed for
food in the lake's bottom.
The next time his tribe left the lake to rush up the river, the White
Sturgeon journeyed with them. He went because he must, because it was a
call even stronger than hunger and he could not resist it. The strongest
of sturgeon, he stayed in the fore-front of the spawning horde and still
remained away from the banks. The few Indians who saw him were so
astonished that they forgot to strike with their spears, and he never
even came close to the prowling bears and other beasts that waxed so fat
when the migrating sturgeon came back to spawn.
Guided by the most precise of instincts, the White Sturgeon went exactly
to that spawning bed in the sedges where he was born, and fertilized the
eggs that a female left there. Wan and spent, caring for nothing, once
his main purpose in life had been realized, he turned and swam back into
the lake. That was now his home.
Again and again the White Sturgeon went up the river with his kind. Only
once, in all the trips he made, was he in real danger, and that time an
Indian's spear scratched his side. The Indian, fishing with two
companions, promptly fell into the river and drowned.
Thus the legend of the White Sturgeon grew. Born in a red man's fertile
mind, it was handed from red man to white and distorted in the transfer.
Now none could trace its origin and none knew exactly how it had begun.
Lake men knew only of the White Sturgeon, and he had learned much of
men. But he lived in the present, not the past.
Years had elapsed since Lake Michigan was shadowed only by canoes. Now
there were the Mackinaw boats, the pound boats, the churning
side-wheelers and the rowboats. Because it was his affair to know
everything that went on in the lake, the White Sturgeon knew them all.
He knew also that it was good to rest in the lake's gentler places. Not
in years had he rushed up the river with his spawning comrades. The
fires of his youth had long since been quenched, and besides, he was now
far too big to travel up any river. Perhaps the same quirk of nature
that had granted him his pigment had given him his size. Other sturgeon
were thought to be huge when they attained a weight of two hundred and
fifty pounds. The White Sturgeon weighed almost a thousand pounds.
He was still a gentle creature, though the sudden angers of age were apt
to seize him, and on the morning that Ramsay, Pieter and Hans were
called to Three Points, the Sturgeon was feeding quietly in the tunnel
of the first pound net they had set. He stopped feeding when he sensed
an approaching boat.
It was a Mackinaw boat, used for setting gill nets, and it was shrouded
in mist that sat like a fleecy blanket upon the lake. The White Sturgeon
lay very still. He was not afraid but he had no wish to be disturbed,
and if he remained very quiet, perhaps he would not be bothered. He was
aware of something coming into the lake and of the boat's withdrawal
into the shrouding mist.
The White Sturgeon decided to move, but when he tried to do so he found
his way blocked. A gill net was stretched across the entrance to the
pound net, effectively preventing anything outside from getting in or
anything inside from getting out, and the White Sturgeon was trapped by
it.
Gently he nosed against the gill net, seeking a way through. When none
offered, he swam a little ways and tried again. A third, a fourth and a
fifth time he sought escape. There was none, and the White Sturgeon's
anger flared.
He flung himself against the gill net, felt it cling to his mighty body,
and twisted about. A hundred yards to one side, in a weak place, the net
ripped completely in half. The White Sturgeon threshed and twisted until
he had reduced the entrapping folds to a mass of linen thread.
Segments of the ruined net clung to him as he swam away.