CHAPTER XXXIX

PLEASURE AND PROFIT IN THE MARSH

Checked by the impenetrable forests that covered all the interior of the country bordering on Puget Sound, the native Indians found pleasure and profit in investigating the marsh lands, tules and tide lands and beaver dams, and chasing the festive musk rat and the industrious beaver; or taking the numerous water fowl by simple methods now forgotten or long in disuse.

Nature for ages had been in process of forming vast tide marshes at the deltas and mouths of the numerous streams, the Duwamish, the Stillaguamish, the Skagit and Nooksack, Puyallup, Skokomish and others. Around the mouths of these rivers many of the largest Indian settlements were to be found. How long these rivers have been silently at work day and night tearing down the mountains and carrying the fragments away to the sea is a question no man can answer. For ages this work has been going on, with results perceptible in the acres of marsh where the rivers meet the tide. If diked and tilled this tide land is the richest and most productive of the whole state for certain kinds of crops.

All hunters know that snipe, ducks and migratory water fowl galore are temporary tenants of these marshy depths every fall and that good sport comes in with the tide at the right season of the year.

At flood tide the “flats” are full of life, for then the little channels that penetrate the tules like a labyrinth are peopled with thousands of gull, ducks, snipe, heron and other water birds, feeding on the crawfish, crabs and other crustacea that dwell in the slimy mud and only come forth when the waters cover the myriads of holes that constitute their homes. Muskrats paddle about towing bits of dead wood or tule in a streaming wake as they take advantage of the tide for water transportation to bring their winter bed to their burrow. Quaint little fellows they are, with beady black eyes that see everything, and a shining coat of brown fur which they oil and comb every time they can find a warm sunny nook where the wind doesn’t blow too brisk. They are not very shy if left alone and can often be seen swimming about or perched on some snag smoothing their coat with a little black paw or huddled up until they look like a brown ball of fur as big as your two fists. They have a tireless enemy in the person of the farmer who owns diked land, for they are the bane of his existence. Dikes seem to be a favorite place for them to dig their burrows in, presumably because it affords them an elevation above water level, consequently a dry home in the otherwise slimy expanse of marsh that forms their habitat.

Muskrats are not the only inhabitants of these lonesome, wind-swept deposits. Gulls wing their circling flight along the borders in quest of food left by the last tide, and croaking herons rise on heavy, uncertain wing, as they adjust their lank proportions to the conditions of aerial navigation. The crows are there always; high tide, low tide or no tide, the crows are about. At low water they pick up the clams and cockles left on top of the sand, take out the meat of such as they are able, and have a way of their own of opening those that persist in keeping their shells tightly closed. On finding one of this kind they take hold of it with their beak, give a preliminary croak or so, and rise in the air for several yards, then they drop the clam and follow it like a black plumb bob to the beach. The clam shell is cracked and mashed by the fall and the crow has everything his own way by his sharp practices. They clean up about everything considered eatable in the crow bill of fare that is left on the beach by the tide and what they miss the gulls get, so that the mud flats constitute a kind of a short order restaurant for the bird-folk that inhabit our bay shores.

The stoical Siwash stalks, barefooted, over the broad expanse of sand, gathering clams at low tide, or with silent paddle urges his cedar canoe among the canals of the tule patches, looking for a “pot shot” at ducks with his old Hudsons bay company musket. He never wastes any powder on a single duck or risks a wing shot. There must be a whole patch of ducks and they must be close and sitting still on the water before he turns his old gas-pipe fusee loose in their direction. He don’t go for sport, or sportsmanship, this aborigine, so he nearly always gets ducks and generally several of them every time he chucks a double handful of slugs among them.

He is silent as a shadow and piles branches and grass all over his canoe to enable him to do just the right kind of a “sneak” on his unsuspecting victims.

Mrs. Siwash paddles along the canals too, but she is on a peaceful mission and only takes the tules and rushes that grow thick on the tide-flat marshes for no other purpose, in her estimation, than for making mats for her dwelling on the other side of the bay. She knows all the devious windings of every little channel, though some of them are only about wide enough to float her light craft and are hung so close with grass and rushes that you would hardly suspect an open waterway. She knows that this or that blind canal opens out and gives access to a particularly fine patch of rushes a little further on and urges her boat ahead with lazy stroke that makes it glide along even if there is no water to be seen from your point of view.

These little waterways lead everywhere, and in walking about you find yourself unexpectedly confronted by a ditch a little too wide to jump over and a trifle to deep to wade, when you stop to consider that the bottom mud may be any depth you take a notion to imagine it, but at best deep enough to let the water in over the tops of your waders.

In the deeper ones crabs scurry away in a misfit, sideways fashion, peculiarly their own, and flounders fan their shingle shaped bulk down in the friendly slime and there lie buried as the roil drifts away, conforming so closely with the color of the bottom as to be invisible to any one but a Siwash. They can’t fool a Siwash a little bit for he just picks up a spear from his canoe, makes a jab at the muddy spot and eats flounder when he gets hungry.