Part 3

Migration is universal. That which prompts animals to emerge from their burrows, or to start moving over the ocean floor, to fly north, to swim into brackish or fresh water from salt, or even, like a ladybird beetle, to move a short distance from a forest floor to a meadow, must have a world-wide energy to it, with lines of communication that reach everywhere ahead and invite the human drive for knowledge. But in a strict sense there are two accepted definitions of migration for the animals. There is return migration, of which the alewives provide an example. Fish or birds in this category travel seasonally from one area to another, usually coming back to some home region after varying lapses of time. Otherwise, there is emigration, in which animals leave their home base but never come back again, lemmings and locusts being good examples. Both definitions, I should think, can prove that home stretches farther than we know.

Why had this pioneer of an alewife, and the others that had come before it, arrived so soon? It is possible that they had migrated up Stony Brook before. All mature alewives--a majority seem to be four years old--are moved by sexual development and swim inshore when the temperature of the fresh or brackish water has turned warmer than the salt water from whence they came. The earliest comers often appear to be larger in size. This suggests, at least, that they may be older and that they have spawned in that run before. The latest to come seem to be the smallest, and therefore the youngest. Alewives, like other fish, seem to have a tendency to keep growing, though there may be a maximum size reached in their fifth or sixth year. The only conclusive way to tell their age is by microscopic examination of their scales, which reflect each spawning year and its physical changes.

Work done by Keith Havey on alewives in Maine shows a minimum of alewives spawning at three years of age and the largest number in the four- or five-year-old range. No scales were found which reflected more than two spawnings. As to size, he gives a sampling of their length in inches which graduates up from 11.25 inches in the three-year-old fish to 11.80 in the four-year-olds, 12.35 in five-year-olds, and 12.80 in the six. The female alewife, incidentally, is a little larger than the male.

Possibly then, these early alewives at Stony Brook were the oldest, and because of that they might have been the most practiced at finding their way. I am told that, with new fish ladders, observers have noticed the earliest arrivals seeking and passing through them more readily on the second year after construction than on the first, which leads to the belief that they have been through before. Age may improve the alewife in prowess, though it is a fish of crowds, and not one to strike out much on its own. The “homing instinct,” still unfathomed, but about which I will try to say more later on, brings them back to their streams of origin with almost united force.

So my lone alewife marked the greatness it preceded, though it was early, in early and still undecided weather. At first the sleet, hail, flurries of wet snow came in profusion, stabbing between the sunshine, as though nature, before making its next terms known, was full of passionate unease. Then wings of warm rain would beat in over the Cape, to slash and curve and follow along trees and houses, through inland ponds, across the ridges and hollows, and the wind poured behind in great gusts, trying, it seemed, to shake a tight world loose. Underneath the struggling air many things waited for more chances in the sun, but under the stars, on foggy evenings or bright days, the singing of peepers in pools, ponds, or boggy land would swell and widen everywhere.

Then as the month kept advancing, that which came out began to stay, and to expand, in variety, flexibility, and strength. The wheels of the world seemed to turn more brightly. I felt a suggestion in each changing tree, in the loosening ground, the kinetic light and air, of new unfoldings, kaleidoscopic discoveries. The formality, and power in the coming on of spring surprised me, as if it had never come before.

More winds began to blow from the southwest, the prevailing wind during late spring and summer. Yellow fingertips of bloom showed on the whip-long branches of the forsythias. The temperature edged toward the fifties, and there were deep new meetings between the moles and the worms. One day many tree swallows began to flit and dive low around the Herring Run. They skimmed along the surface of the water, then sailed up again. Their bellies were as white as a frog’s or horned pout’s, dark wings and tails trimly cut, backs almost a tropical blue in the light above the water, reflecting green at some angles, or a green-blue-purple the color of mackerel. Their flight dipped with the up and down flying insects they were chasing. When some insect, unseen to me, spiraled straight up along the banks, a swallow would leave its water gliding, twist suddenly, beating its wings, and almost spiral after.

That original source of energy the sun, which men might still worship in good faith, was bringing out new facets to shine abroad. The web of life was stretching to its light. Birds, insects, plants, and fish were beginning to move to its changing measure; though if some days were warm with a budding, fringing, easing expectation, others were still raw, wet, and contracting, bringing winter back to flesh and fiber. We kept looking for the alewives. Cars would slow up at the Herring Run. The drivers peered down to see the curving, dark forms of a few fish holding up against the current. Then they drove on. Or they got out, saw nothing, and went away in disappointment. But suddenly one morning toward the middle of April the crowd of alewives had so increased as to cause an inescapable excitement in the vicinity. The water was thick with fish, their fins showing on the surface. It was almost as it had been a hundred years before when the whole population would cry out at their coming, “The herring are running!”

III

Dried Fish:

An Informal History

“The herring are running!” must have been a great cry once, for men, women, and children over the whole Cape. There was a deep meaning in this seasonal event, since the fish were a part of the local livelihood the year around. Nowadays, so far as commerce is concerned, the alewives lack their former importance. In Massachusetts, although they come into a number of streams and rivers few alewives are taken for the market. I understand that in recent years only the runs at Brewster and Middleboro have been open for commercial use, the fishing rights having been sold to the highest bidder.

For all that, it still seems a live, high, and social morning when you wake to the gabbling of gulls in the distance and know that the alewives have finally arrived. The sun spreads down new warmth. There are cool sweeps of breeze, broad runs of blue in sky and sea past the gray and white houses, with those silver hordes starting to enter inland veins in a bold reminder of perpetuity.

This season the rights to fish the stream had been bought from the town by a firm that wanted them for lobster bait. On the eighteenth day of the month a big red truck had pulled alongside the seining pool and the old mill. Three men were down in the pool, with their rubber boots on, putting a wide net in place. It was rimmed with cork floats and roped at the center to a hoist fixed to a small dock on the bank. A little wire gate was closed at the stream entrance on the upper side of the pool, so that the fish could go no farther. The run was officially on; and until it thinned out two months ahead, the fish would be hauled from the pool four days a week, thrown into barrels, and trucked away to be sold as lobster bait.

A sign was posted at Stony Brook, reading: “No herring may be taken or molested in Stony Brook on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays in accordance with state law. Residents of Brewster are entitled without charge to one dozen herring daily on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays during the open season, and should obtain them from J. B. Salvadore, Jr., who has purchased the Herring Fishery Rights for this year, or may take them from the brook on these days if he is not present.” It was signed by the selectmen of the town of Brewster.

On the down side of the road a bunch of children were celebrating the coming of the fish. The alewives, crowding, resting, circling, and slipping up through the pools and falls of the fishway--their bodies a fretted-lavender brown in the bubbling waters--were now fair game for the inland world they had come back to. Three boys were competing for a crab net they were dipping into the water, scooping after the fish, and as often as not heaving it up empty. One of them was professionally pinching the belly sides of a fat, gleaming alewife to see if it was a female and would emit some of its roe. Then he flung it back into the water with furious energy; and it slapped hard when it hit, and he cheered.

Were they under the law, these predators? Well, this play, or hunt, this spring jubilation had been going on for several hundred years.

“Let the kids play around there, I say,” said Herring Harry. “We were kids too. We didn’t start out old.”

In barer, colder, perhaps simpler days, days when men lived closer to their natural surroundings and were more dependent on them than they think they are now, the alewives meant food and revenue, an abundance returning to your own back yard. They came under the heading of useful acquaintances. But now the roe, or fish eggs, is the only part of the alewife that is highly considered locally. It is a very bony fish and most people reject the idea of eating it, forgetting the days of “good salt herring” when the children ate them on sticks like candy. So the Brewster resident gets his allotment for the roe, to be fried in butter. An ambitious gardener can bury the rest under his corn plantings to serve as fertilizer, if the cats permit, though it is still a very good way to make corn grow tall in unreceptive soil. A hundred years ago or more, when it was done extensively, it resulted in rich yields. I have heard that one acre set with a thousand fish would produce three times as much corn as an acre without them. It is a practice that we inherit from the Indians, although the Indian agriculturist was likely to be plagued by wolves instead of cats.

Cape Codders, even so comparatively short a time ago as fifty or sixty years, would not have liked to hear this farming method belittled. Some of them may even have regarded it with delight. I recently talked with a man who was a boy in the 1890’s and remembers walking behind a wagonload of “very dead” fish in a field made ready for corn. A man in the wagon pitched out a forkful of herring into each prepared hole as they creaked along, while another, walking behind, shoved dirt over them and planted the seed. He can remember a relative cocking a keen ear one night and saying, “Listen! You can hear it growing. By God, when their feet hit that stinking mess don’t they start up and go!”

Although to know them may have been to understand their worth, I find one early writer, Marshall McDonald Douglass, in his North America, 1740, who does not give the tribe much credit. “Alewives,” he says, “by some of the country people are called Herrings. They are of the Herring tribe but much larger than the true Herring. They are a very mean, dry and insipid fish. Some of them are cured in the manner of white Herrings and sent to the sugar islands for the slaves, but because of their bad quality they are not in request: in some places they are used to manure the land. They are very plenty, and come up the rivers and brooks into ponds in the spring.” None the less, they used to be smoked or pickled in brine and shipped out in barrels to the West Indies, and whether or not the quality was bad the demand was enough to make the trade in them into one of great volume, part in fact of the famous swap for molasses, later turned into New England rum, which was so important in our early history.

Before I try to defend these fish against any further imputations, I should explain their name. “Herrin’” is the name and pronunciation on Cape Cod. I don’t call them alewives just to defy such Cape Codders as might be fussy about it, but to differentiate them from their more famous cousins the sea herring, which spawn in salt water. Cape Cod has its alewives committees, and it may be that the fish were called alewives here before they were called herrin’.

You can still read statements to the effect that the original name “alewife” is a corruption of the Indian word “aloofe,” which meant bony fish. In 1871 a gentleman named J. Hammond Trumbull tried to scotch this bit of etymology by pointing out--in a government publication on Sea Fisheries, that the Narragansett and Massachusetts Indians called the alewife and herring “Aumsu-og,” as had been noted by Roger Williams. In any case, whichever Indianism we choose, it seems more likely that the name stemmed from English dialect. “Allizes,” not at all like aloofe, was one of the names applied to it in company with the allice shad. To quote Mr. Trumbull again: “The modern English ‘allis’ was in old French and old English ‘alouze’ or ‘aloose,’ nearer than the modern form of the name to the Latin ‘alausa.’” The latest in this chain of spellings is of course Alosa, the scientific handle now applied to the shad, and in some texts to the alewife.

To the English colonists an alewife was also an alehouse keeper. A Dictionary of Americanisms quotes a volume printed in 1675 which said: “The alewife is like a herrin’, but it has a bigger bellie, therefore called an alewife.” (Let that quotation be of some comfort to the proponents of herrin’. The name has a formal heritage.) The writer was surely not making a direct physical analogy between a woman and a fish. The original alewife he probably has reference to is a shad, but Pomolobus pseudoharengus does have a deep body and is heavily built forward, so perhaps a comparison with a hearty alewife of sixteenth- or seventeenth-century England would not be too far-fetched.

The poet Skelton described an alewife, Eleanor Rummying by name, who lived in the time of Henry VIII. She brewed a “hoppy ale,” and “her face was wondrously wrinkled, lyke a rost pigges eare bristled with here”--at which point I will let the analogy go on its merry way.

The alewife has had a variety of local and common names, the kind that indicate touch and sight, the handing on of natural meetings--the signposts of its contacts with man and his history on the eastern shores of this continent. It is known as “sawbelly,” for example, referring to the fine sharp little notches or teeth on the midline of its belly; and for the large eyes, set on each side of its small head, it has been called “wall-eyed herring,” “big-eyed herring,” or “blear-eyed herring.” It is also the “spring herring,” “branch herring,” “river herring,” or “fresh-water herring.”

This old New England name of alewife has its modifications in “Ellwife” and “Ellwhop” on the Connecticut River, and there were variant pronunciations in other regions. In the state of Rhode Island alewives were called “buckies” and in Maine “cat-thrashers.” In Canada the name is “Gaspereau,” sometimes “Gasparot.” The term “alewife” is uncommon in the maritime provinces. There seem to be three Gaspereau Rivers, two in New Brunswick and one in Nova Scotia, in addition to a town of that name in New Brunswick, and a lake in Nova Scotia. Apparently the place name derives from the fish, and not the other way around. In its 15th Report, for 1917, the Geographic Board of Canada says “after a fish,” in explaining the name of the Gaspereau River. Another Canadian term for alewife is “kyak” or “kyack,” which sounds like a derivation from northern Indians. Mr. A. H. Leim of the Biological Station at St. Andrews, New Brunswick, writes me that he has only heard “one or two fishermen call them ‘kyacks’; one of these was an old poacher on the Shubenacadie River in Nova Scotia who always used this name. I assume the word is of Indian origin.”

Finally the alewife is called “grayback,” a name that distinguishes it from a close relative often confused with it, which is called the “blackback,” “blueback,” or “glut herring” (Pomolobus aestivalis). The blueback shows up in a late spring run, and seems to spawn in the lower reaches of a stream, instead of migrating up to its headwaters. It has smaller eyes than the “grayback” and as its name indicates its back is dark blue, instead of greenish gray, but as colors fade at death, this is no sure test. The two species of alewife can only be told apart conclusively by dissection. The lining of the blueback’s body cavity is black instead of pink or gray.