Part 7

During the third week in May, when the run seemed about over I had still not seen them spawning, although I had heard a description of it from my local authority, Mr. Alexander.

“A kind of swish dance is what they do,” said he, giving a hula-hula motion with his hands.

Harry also described them as sidling up at the shallow edges of the ponds, rocking as you would rock a baby; and then shooting out the spawn, their fins lifting up with the effort. The pond suckers, as he related it, would swim up to grab the eggs almost as soon as they came out of their bellies.

What about that school I had seen running along the shore of the Upper Mill Pond?

“Well, they were kind of getting acquainted, you know. Just cuddling together!”

This was on May 25, as I have it in my notes, and when I started out from the Herring Run to walk up to the ponds above it, Salvadore was still there with his truck, barrels, and net; but he said he was going to quit soon and deal in some redfish (another name for rosefish, or ocean perch). The redfish made tougher, better bait for lobsters anyway. While he had been in Brewster he had netted forty barrels a day on the average, sometimes as many as eighty, but he told me that he had not yet reached the four-hundred mark. One barrel, weighing some two hundred pounds, might contain around three hundred fish or more, so that about 120,000 alewives might be pulled out of Stony Brook in a season, though I imagine this is a very low estimate. I have heard it said that there are a potential two thousand barrels in the Brewster run during the full season, taking all fish. In an abundant year there might be close to six or seven hundred thousand adult alewives migrating up the brook. Even so, subtracting the mortality, the necessary minimum of fish allowed through the gate during the week have a very heavy job to do to assure the return of hundreds of thousands of their race in three and four years’ time.

Because of some kind of alewife caution or deliberation, not enough of them were going into the seining pool to make a good haul. They were delaying on the down side of the road. Salvadore waded in with his rubber boots on to drive them under and through the bridge, but they hardly budged, so he crouched down with little more than three feet of height for body room, and swashed in after them. They skittered before him, landing with a simultaneous series of quick dashes into the pool.

It was a warm day. There was a new lassitude in the air, and the sweet smell of lilacs. The gulls were gone that had flocked in quarreling and screaming when the run was heaviest, hovering and rising over the waters and their hordes of fish, bold enough sometimes to perch on the bridge over the run, looking very large, with their pale-yellow eyes glaring as naked as stone.

Once I saw a herring gull display its fantastic eating capacity by dropping down into the fish ladder, grabbing an alewife, and swallowing it whole. Down went the fat, foot-long fish in a few gulps, headfirst so that neither scales nor sawbelly would stop the progress. Then the loaded gull flew very heavily away as I came up, the alewife’s tail having barely disappeared.

Now, in place of gulls, there were a few dove-gray, black and white quawks perched on the outer branches of overhanging trees like heavy sculptured ornaments, or standing in the water with their spear-head bills ready poised for a frog or small fish. I have heard it said, incidentally, that these night herons keep the gulls away. I have never witnessed any aggressive action between the two races. On the whole they seem to respect each other’s territory and to keep their distance from each other; but I have seen quawks and gulls together waiting for little alewives on the flats beyond Paine’s Creek.

In the brook there were still some fish ascending, but many more were going back. It is a little hard to tell the difference at first, since both face up against the current, but the returning alewives gradually drop back, and many of them have the characteristic white marks on them of fresh-water fungus infection. The strain of spawning and using up their store of fat makes them thin, slow, and weary. They have lost a good deal of their vigor, though not to the extent of preventing the return journey.

In spite of this “spring fever” day it was not that the greatness of events was over ... only the first great toppling of a wave, only the first violent forwardness with its illimitable sounds and changes. There was a steadier greenness on the trees, and blossoms on the high lilacs. The run waters went on with a constant wail and wah, if without the turbulence of a few weeks earlier. I left the Herring Run and walked up into the warm pine woods to try and find the culminative point of the migration.

A light wind was running straight down the long surfaces of the Upper Mill Pond when I reached it, and little waves scudded ahead. I walked on the north side where sandy banks descended to the shore, shaded by pitch pines and covered with viburnum bushes and bearberry, a pink-blossomed, shiny-leaved ground cover locally known as “hog cranberry.” There were stretches of amber sand, small stones, or gravel, along the pond’s edge. A fat sucker jumped for a fly and crashed heavily back into the water.

All at once I heard a light thrashing and noticed a large water snake under a blueberry bush. It had dropped a small salamander that was twisting over and over on the ground, its damp body collecting bits and shreds of dry leaves. As I came up, the snake hung over a low-lying branch and watched me, its mouth slightly open with a little toothed white and pink jawline showing. I picked up the salamander and dropped it into the pond, where it hesitated for a few seconds and then wiggled away into a patch of green ooze and deeper water. With a stick, I tossed the snake twenty feet away, thus establishing myself as universal arbitrator.

As I walked and watched along the shore I saw one group of alewives, and then another, running by, looking light-colored and bright in the sunny water. Sometimes these groups seemed to be made up of one female escorted by several males, but the closer they came to shore the more intermingled they were, and it was not clear to me that this was a definite pattern. When she is running upstream, the female’s eggs are unripe, but ripen soon after arrival in the ponds, provided the water temperature is high enough--between 55 and 60 degrees may be the average spawning temperature during the big April and early May runs. As to the act of spawning, the female, depending on her size, deposits anywhere between sixty thousand and a hundred thousand eggs (each some 0.05 inches in diameter) in shallow places; and because they are sticky they adhere to gravel, sticks, stones, or whatever they settle on. The males, who have been following the females closely, immediately cover the eggs with milt, thrashing and scattering it with their tails. The eggs hatch out in some six days’ time when the water is at 60 degrees, and in three days or less at 72.

When I first watched them spawn I saw a group of alewives run, circle, and weave offshore, sometimes slowing up at deeper holes on the bottom, or behind rock-protected water, and then come in close, with one quick impulse. They raced in together to the gravelly, shallow edge, through water not much more than ankle deep, with a sinewy, rippling motion. Then in the shadows under an overhanging shrub there was a flipping, whirling, and thrashing, a breaking of the surface. The female slapped up against the side of a rock with a rising, shuddering motion of the body as though it were shaking everything out of it, while the others simultaneously writhed, coiled, thrashed tails, and shimmered through. Then it seemed to me that there were a few seconds in which they slowly reassembled their senses to go elsewhere. The word “deposit” was hardly active enough.

A fat pond sucker was hanging around the center of activity, following the alewives slowly like a small sunken log. It was obvious that eggs, to this crude, crass, lazy taster of a fish, were the ultimate delicacy.

There were other occasions when the alewives, in greater numbers, swam next to the shore, spawning in what might have been concentric groups for several hundred yards. Some at the edge would be coiling and thrashing while others swam on or circled back. The fish that were farther out in the pond ran nervously, with eager movements, making quick turns as if reconnoitering, or practicing for a culminating turn. They collected suddenly when spawning, with quick, spontaneous decision. I noticed that the males while running in would often shoulder or press the females on. The characteristic thrashing whirl they make is sudden and amazing, almost like a pinwheel in a short burst.

Their attendants, the pond suckers, would loll in the slow rock of the pond waters. They are large, soft-looking fish, with round, pink fins, and white, fleshy lower lips with which they go nibbling and nuzzling with snail-like speed over the bottom. The alewives by contrast are small, gray, and quick. If alewife eggs are deposited between rocks the suckers go down in after them, and, if the water is shallow enough, present the odd picture of a large topheavy body sticking down with its tail above the surface.

It is not I think, incongruous to apply the word love to a cold-blooded fish. In this spawning act there is an imperative rhythm, with grace in its preparation and power in its fulfillment.

Sometimes the war cry of gulls, in small flocks settling on the shore waters or rising up, told me where the alewives were, but most of the time I found them in accustomed places like that stretch of shore on the Upper Mill Pond. Sometimes I could hear them splashing before I saw them. They seemed to be more inclined to spawn when the water was not too rough. On the other hand, I watched them spawning when the ponds were very choppy and the small waves were pushing them as they thrashed at the edge. Once, on the south side of the pond, I noticed the suckers before the alewives. There were twenty or more lined up as if they were giving the bottom a slow going over. When groups of alewives ran in and characteristically heaved, flipped, and writhed at the edge, the big suckers would move up closer. They were so oblivious to anything but their slow gluttony that I could tap them on the head with a stick.

Occasionally a couple of alewives would give a sucker a little rush, a brief chase, as much, so it looked, by way of sport as aggressiveness. They were certainly incapable of damaging it very much, and it could not be driven away for long. An overdose of suckers in any one area seemed to discourage the alewives a little and make them move on, but on the whole they too were so intent on what they were doing that they hardly noticed anything else. They had to fulfill themselves; then, stunned, go on. The eggs were expendable.

XV

The Return

After the first week in June there were very few if any alewives coming up over the dam at the head of the run. An increasing number, on the other hand, were going down, and I could find very few in the ponds. I was to see them returning well on in July, which indicates that while many, perhaps a majority, will leave the ponds a few days or a week after spawning, others may stay there for weeks longer. For reasons known only to the individual fish, occasional strays have been found lingering in fresh water well into the winter.

On the morning of June 10, after a lapse of a few days in which I had seen only a few returning, a boy who was weekending on the Upper Mill Pond told me he had seen thousands go by in the direction of the Herring Run. So they were still schooling for the return to salt water, progressing again by accumulative motion. In a few weeks some of the little ones, hatched out earlier, would start down too.

I stood on a rock and looked down into the water along that peaceful stretch above the dam. This is an area where Indians gathered and camped when the alewives were running, spearing them, or taking them with nets made out of reeds. Many Indian artifacts have been found on the surrounding slopes. On this June day insects were settling down on the still surface. A shower was due--the air heavy. An alewife slanted slowly up to the surface and then dropped down again. It left a perfect circle behind it that gently widened over the blended images of clouds, leaves, and rocks. Then as other small circles, raindrops falling, began to show on the water, a belt of flying herons passed in reflection. A breeze corrugated the surface slightly and the fish swam slowly on toward the roar of the seaward-casting falls.

The returning migrants now have a choice between two outlets: one at the top of the fish ladder, and the other at a board dam where the water drops into a long pool above the old mill. At the far end of the pool the waters fall again a short but precipitous distance, often roaring full and hard down the rocky slope into the seining pool. The alewives use both outlets, but the majority seem to prefer the falling second stream to the ladder by which they came up, perhaps because it is the point of greatest flow. Where they drop down over the falls it looks to the proportionate, or disproportionate, senses of a human being almost suicidal. Most go over tail first. Then they appear to be dashed headlong down the jagged incline that ends in rocky narrows going off at an angle to the pool. One after another they flip and fall, their bodies bent like bows, and flash finally, swift and vibrant--not, surprisingly, having been broken to pieces--at the bottom. Occasionally a fish near the end of the slope will frantically try to skitter back up. Presumably it is trying to reduce the speed at which the ground is going by it, in the way a man tries to brake himself when running downhill. But this almost helter-skelter falling reveals almost as much of the alewife’s supple strength as its leaping up against the current.

As June went on and polliwogs turned to frogs, the leaves came fully out, clover and buttercups were blooming, and the pond algae had increased at a fast rate so that a thick green scum gathered behind the dam, and the pond waters were yellow-green. Still you could see the fish gathering at intervals massed sometimes fifty feet or more behind the two outlets. There is a small wooden footbridge over the board dam at the head of the pool. When I lay down on the bridge and looked under at the curved lip of the water I could see the fish gathering behind. Against the steady rush and whine I could hear a dull, deep change in sound as the fish suddenly turned and plummeted over. Their bodies, enlarged behind a green curve of water, had a metallic sheen, a dull silver, as they would wheel in, loom up, and drop away. I came back at night, and could still hear that heavy sound in this lens, or gong, of water.

In each new phase of migrant action there is an old ceremony. The alewives approach the dam, in groups of varying sizes. They circle, withdraw, and swim back again. Some of them swim between the two outlets as if to decide which one to take. Coming closer, they show an increasing animation, a quicker circling and flipping, as if the outward pull of the water resulted in a more vital excitement between them. After many more starts and withdrawals, lasting anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour or more from the approach of a given group, or school--using that term in the sense of larger numbers--one or more fish will drop over, and then the rest will follow.

I watched one school making these ceremonious retreats and approaches for two hours. When they finally started dropping over I counted some fifty fish a minute for about fifty-five minutes, until there were only three left. This remaining three must have lacked the common stimulus to go, the rhythm of sufficient numbers, and they stayed behind, as more fish began to draw in closer from the pond. I have seen this often. Sometimes seven, nine, and up makes enough of a group to start over on its own; very occasionally one alewife will go it alone; but it does seem as if a certain variable minimum will not take the move upon itself.

Though a single fish may be the first to go over, or to advance upstream, it is hard, from my observation, to attribute any leadership to individuals, male or female. The crowd provides its own pressure and momentum. Perhaps the circling of these groups and schools, and their dropping over, might be analogous, though it is a looser motion, to a flock of sandpipers flying off simultaneously as if they were cast out by a lithe, invisible wire, and then turning on an instant, glinting in the sun. The impulse is in the rhythmic unity of the group, even though in the case of the fish some may be left off or behind until they are rejoined in it.

The speed at which they drop over seems to depend on the size and pressure of the oncoming school--population pressure, in other words, unless pressure of numbers is a better term, which must also affect the timing of their entry from the sea. Sometimes they go over: one--two--three--four--one a second; but if the group is small the rate may be ten to twenty a minute. Finally there are those few fish left behind that circle around at the outlet or turn back into deeper water where another school will be coming up.

All morning, as the alewives massed, circled, and dropped, there was one fish that kept wandering through and over the others in a puzzling way. It was a conspicuously darker color, which is characteristic of blindness, as I learned later on. Its loss of sight, then, had deprived it to some degree of the community action, though it had been able to feel its way toward the outlet. Occasionally one that looked exceptionally tired and slow would drop over the falls by itself. I noticed also that those which were scarred and infected seemed to have lost some of the fire of communication.

To the casual eye the spent fish may not look any thinner or weaker than the rest, though when they hit the seining pool they are obviously in no hurry to move on, but circle slowly around it for some time. Their flesh, for the human carnivore, is of poorer quality than when they came in from salt water. Going back to history again, it seems that the recipients of alewives in the Caribbeans were not always pleased with the product. There were complaints in the eighteenth century, as I have indicated, and in the early nineteenth as well, when plantation owners in the West Indies objected that this food was doing bad things to their slaves. They said that alewives taken when they were going downriver after spawning were “poison fish,” and “the very worst food that can be given to slaves, as it both disheartens them, keeps them continually murmuring, and brings on those scorbutic diseases so common among negroes in that climate.”

Bad food or not, they were in all things directional, with the water and the season, moving on and out, taking the rhythms of perpetuation with them, these “reflex machines,” bearers of strong tides. They had been giving me something of a lesson in cosmic weather, though I was still a hopeless beginner. From one place, one road, around one circle, they had led me through so much variety that I was left to wonder at my omissions. The man-made world must still have far to go to learn its inner and outer relations to a greater, expanding world of lives that are given, not made.

What further connections are there, say, between the sun and sight, between our tactile senses and the medium of earth and air in which we are born, between the moon and the tides and the rhythms of water and of blood? Who knows more about the universe--I with my conscious measurements, my personal faltering, or the poor fish with its unthinking precision through the various unknown? Can we not combine? In any case, whatever human beings decide about what is effective or ineffective, what shall stay or what shall go, the alewives know where they live.

The crowd in the seining pool moved slowly, in a wide circle around its rim. Most of their inland enemies had gone now. The human hunters had driven away. The herring gulls had flown to other feeding grounds. Not that one enemy or another made much difference to them, except in terms of sudden fear. Like their eggs, they were expendable. Nature’s ruthlessness, the using and the building up of that which fed and that which was food, would keep them on the way of primordial energy. For the same reason they were also spenders--one of the great sacrificial coinages of the living world.

Still this point in their migration before the return to salt water might be called a place of demobilization, a separation center. They swam slowly around in the pool, passing between each other, but always a part of the circle, each fish with its body and its large black eyes leading forward, obedient to it. They dispersed very gradually throughout the day. One small group after another broke off, sparks from a wheel, and the fish let themselves be carried back down the brook where the outlet of the pool led under the road. In the run below where they went back step by step to the sea--whose pull was in them--they faced up against the current, their orientation, with a tired, slow weaving. I noticed a little perch attendant on them. It ran down backward with the large procession, giving the alewives a look of ceremonial grandeur. I have seen sunfish join up too, although there could be a point on the approach to brackish water when they decide that home life is better than parades. These motions must be catching, communicating to other lives and races than those in which they originate. All have their way stations, or orbits, along a route that is being followed out with primal grace and power.

XVI

The Young Follow After

When the last adult alewife of the season drops down Stony Brook for the tidal inlet and the sea, it has left the renewal of its continuity and motion behind it. The little alewives follow out the route of their elders with a silent animism, sent by ancient habit and unknown need. The repetitive ways of the anadromous fish come out of geologic time. On the long track since then, the adults, reaching their spawning grounds, have had the drive of the sperm toward the egg. From the top of a falls to the depth of the sea there are equivalent lifts and falls in their own being. The young, tiny and perishable though they may be, have the same inalienable motion in them.

After hatching, young alewives form dense schools, and begin to feed on the plankton--tiny organisms and plant life--in the pond waters. Occasionally they can be seen flipping on the surface. They are subject to attack by all kinds of predators: perch, pickerel, frogs, herons, kingfishers, water snakes, and many others, from the time they are out of the egg. Landlocked waters are often stocked with spawning alewives for that very reason. The fry make an excellent diet for such popular game fish as bass, trout, and salmon.

The survivors begin to move out of the ponds about the beginning of July. In other areas I have heard that the majority do not start down until September. The first time I saw them was on the second of July, when they were being drawn down by the thousands through the dam opening at the head of the fishway. They were scarcely over an inch long, and as they came in from the ponds they reflected the summer-green of the water. Their eyes seemed huge in proportion to the size of their bodies. They were poured down the boiling water of the ladder, tossed around like chips and slivers, spilled down helter-skelter; but where the current slowed, farther down the brook, they held together in the fashion of their race.