Part 7

About eight o’clock, an hour before high tide, the tide was running strongly in at Paine’s Creek. The channel in the marshes flooded over its banks and marsh grasses were floating and stirring as the swaying waters rose around them. It was near dark. I could see some seaweed flinging by against the sandy bottom at the mouth of the creek, and a big, ghostly green eel slithered up at the edge of the bank the waves were licking, seemed to look up at me, looped back into the water, and disappeared; but it was too dark to see much more than those black clumps of seaweed racing by. I saw a group of gulls standing in shoal waters beyond the beach, where waves were rolling in hard under a steady northwest wind. The sun’s cauldron had dropped down, a raw, glistening orange-red, into the sea and back of the curved horizon, leaving its horizontal flush behind.

I walked back under the lee of the sand banks bordering the curving creek. The tide was pulsing and roaring, its waters loping in to the creek which began to turn a harder, darker blue under the sky. Then I began to hear the innumerable soft slaps of fish breaking the surface. The alewives were making their entry from the sea.

And the gulls proclaimed their coming. Out in the Bay, they began to gather by the hundreds, clambering up with a scrambled yelping and hollering. The last smoky, red line of sunset was disappearing and they hovered over it in a maddened, high, wide swarm like huge bees. It grew darker, and a black-crowned night heron, or “quawk,” sometimes “quok,” a name true to the sound it makes, flew by with rounded wings against a star. The gulls began to disappear, streaming faintly like ashes against the last fires on the sea, but still crying vastly and collectively toward a world of distances. And in terrible simplicity, the alewives were swimming toward the inland gauntlet they would have to run, having a title, by their common, wild, and ancient advent, to all great kindled things. Who will see more than that in his short life, with its many meetings and separations?

I by an old and natural right felt a fierce water-deep wonder of the spirit. The beyondness in me went back to its beginnings. I thought of the nights on which children I have known were born, and of the voyages of war, leave-takings at railroad stations and at ports of embarkation, and of dreams in which I struggled toward new meetings and other lives. The wind blew through the arches of the stars, and the surfaces of the dipping earth, water, and sky in their lasting communion made me dizzy. I felt a cold inevitable grandeur, below consciousness, a swim and go in an uttermost wild world, past home or my life’s memory.

So by this evidence the alewives came in at night, and, as a further discovery not to be denied, so had I. Perhaps it was the closest I would ever get to the non-human fish in a darkness where all the components of existence ran the same race. That real depth, fish-oriented, nakedly omnipotent, fills men when they recognize it with more awe than their limited worlds can encompass.

As I started back, about a quarter of an hour before the full tide, headlights swept over where the road ended at the shore, and in a minute or two a couple of fishermen lurched down the sand with high rubber waders on, carrying their casting rods. They stood on the beach in the dark, one of them coaching the other in baiting his hook. I came up and spoke to them, hardly able to make out their faces. The older one, he who did the coaching, told me that they had just got a pail of herrin’ from the Brewster run to use as bait. They had hopes that there would be some bass here, the famous “stripers” chasing the alewives in. They brought their long rods sideways and back to sling the bait out into the black and silver waves. The older man spoke low words against the wind, and I strained to hear him. Suddenly he thought he felt what must be alewives nosing his line and bumping against it on their way by into the mouth of the inlet. Last year, he told me, he had seen hundreds of them dead on the flats, and the gulls, he said, had slit their sides open as if with knives to get the roe. The waves had begun to slacken off when I left, and the fishermen were still casting, but without much hope of a strike.

The Hunt

For a little while I felt satisfied that I knew the alewives only chose to come in on the night or late evening tides, until they proved me wrong. I say they proved me wrong because I give myself no credit for more than moderately ignorant perseverance in following up a hypothesis. The alewives did a good deal of proving and disproving for me. They would probably show me up again.

At the beginning of the third week in May there had been a fresh run of fish crowding into the Herring Run, if not as heavily as those that came in a month before. After the migration starts there are very few days in either April or May when some fish are not to be seen in the brook waters. One man can only judge by eye plus the amount of barrels being hauled out as to how many there are in any period, but there may have been a climactical run during the week after the nineteenth of May when the high tides came at night. On the twenty-first I had been taking temperature readings, out of curiosity and to keep up with the advancing season. It had been around 40 degrees Fahrenheit during the night and rose to 47 at 7:30 A.M., 53 at 9:00 and 55 at 9:30 as the sun’s rays heated the land. Just offshore, down the beach from Paine’s Creek, at around 9:30, high tide being at 9:57, the temperature of the salt water, more consistent than the land, was 49, and the reading I then took of the brackish water at the mouth of the creek was 51.

I noticed a small crew of alewives in the tea-dark channel. Had they come in the night before? They were schooling back and forth, as though getting accustomed to the waters in which they newly found themselves.

The tide began to turn. The waters going out at the creek mouth were yellow-green. I walked along the beach, and the surface of the Bay was long and smooth, a blue-green stretching and easing under a light wind with purple patches showing above seaweed and shelving banks of peat. I could hear the slow, gentle, labial sounds of the lightly ebbing waters. There was a small school of unidentifiable minnows turning and slipping-in-silver just offshore. A long frieze pattern of gull tracks showed, where the sand was damp, crisscrossed here and there by the little tracks of sandpipers and plovers. This cool, seaside world seemed full of equipoise to me, with a searching air of freedom playing over.

There had been several clumps of herring gulls standing in shoals in the creek where it flowed out into the Bay. I noticed that some of them had begun to fly up. Then I saw a great black-backed gull swoop at the water farther out, and a number of herring gulls beyond it plummeting down, then chasing each other over the surface. They were after fish, but what kind? I went off for twenty minutes to get some field glasses, and by the time I returned the gulls had increased by the hundreds. Big clouds of them were circling and moving in from up the coast, higher and higher like drifting paper, some of them way up in the blinding blue sky, but coming closer, joining the feast.

I could see that the gulls were diving straight down the course of the Paine’s Creek waters where they went out into the Bay, and that the fish they flung up between them clearly had the general size and shape of alewives. What was going on then was a great interception. The fish in their deliberate way had found the mouth of the creek, and made their instinctive move to go in, but as the water became shallower during the ebb tide they were ripe prey for the birds and there was no turning back.

The violent, reckless activity of the gulls went on all morning. In the way they have of riding each other: “You’ve got it. Show you can keep it!” they were picking up fish, dropping them, and running away with them again, in a scrambling frenzy. There seemed to be almost more excitement, more energy, spent in the chase than in the fruits of it, though they gobbled what they could. I could hear an over-all sound of struggle as their wings rushed and they yawked and screamed. This world seemed pantingly, gruntingly, wildly busy.

The victims of this natural slaughter seemed to have moved on a little, with their fatal determination, but as the tide and morning ebbed the white, frantic crowd above them seemed to stay in the same general area. It was not likely that many fish managed to reach the inlet. I imagined them dashing from side to side or circling in panic, the crowd knowing nothing but its own entity and safety. I talked to a man who was watching the scene from the window of his car. He told me that there had been a high bluff, washed away some years back, from which you could actually see the fish in the water as they struggled to swim in.

“We had a good stream went out there that wouldn’t a happened,” he said, suggesting that if there were a deeper channel meeting the Bay waters, most of the fish might be able to get up the creek in comparative safety.

Along this stretch of rhythmic work of greed and death little groups of gulls began to settle down on the water, glutted and loaded down. Then long lines of them, looking like white shoals, rested on the water upshore, digesting their meal. Low tide that afternoon came at 3:57. By two o’clock when the sands began to show, well out toward the weirs, the great tribal company of gulls were finished with the hunt. For a mile along the flats they were standing into a stiff wind. In the distance I could see a litter of dead fish along the bed of the creek waters. When I walked out I saw them, silver, blue, and white, with brassy tints from the sun, flung along, strewn on like debris through a wide city square.

Even though there may be no waste in nature--with everything used, fired, and consumed in the interactions of the living world--what an enormous, careless expenditure! The bed of the outgoing waters was paved with this alewife coinage for hundreds of yards. Each one I picked up, and there were thousands, had its body scraped and clawed, or its head torn, its eyes gouged out. For every one gobbled during the chase there must have been many more left uneaten. Remembering what the night fishermen had said, it seemed like an indiscriminate feast, and it was not clear to me that the gulls were primarily after roe. But since fish eggs are a delicacy to other animals, gulls may find a special enjoyment in them too.

So the alewives did not choose to come in by night or evening only, seeing that they chose to come in by day--provided there was much choice in the matter. I heard the theory put forward that they must have been chased in by bass; but if they were so chased, it did not seem likely that they would choose the narrow waters of this particular creek for refuge, or have that much calculation in them. That is not why they came in. Those thousands of years the alewives had migrated provided their own track. The fish knew instinctively when and where to go, and all risks were incidental to that. The only possibility was that they might have been schooling around in the farthest reaches of the creek waters in the bay and were hurried in by the bass; but they were there first. Many others may have gone in the night before. Those trying to come in during the morning waited their turn after an ebb tide. This rhythmic deliberation and then going seemed very characteristic of the fish as I had watched them in inland waters, and in a larger way it might be similar to their schooling in salt water. I found out subsequently that the alewives coming into the Bournedale run in the Cape Cod Canal do so both day and night, but that there is less chance of the gulls intercepting them there because of the deeper waters.

I went down to Paine’s Creek the following morning, May 22, and the frenzied hunt was going on again. I had checked the previous night and did so the night of this day too and there were no fish coming in, so far as I could tell. There was no sign of them in the water during the late evening, no sound of their soft slapping on the surface later on.

It is my impression that though they start into the creek in the dark--perhaps not later than ten-thirty or eleven o’clock--they do not move upstream very much until daylight comes. Sunlight stimulates them, or, to be exact, its radiation. You can see them swimming up faster in Stony Brook after the bright sunlight warms the water in the morning.

They might enter the creek more successfully under the protection of fog, or darkness, combined with deep water, but did not prefer such conditions to broad daylight. When the temperature was right and they were physiologically ready, alewife schools began to move in from salt water on an incoming tide ... swing in might be a better term, since a circular movement is characteristic and sends them on. According to my observation, incidentally, this is very likely to be counterclockwise. In any case the power and direction of the migration came from their combined rhythmic impulses.

Alewives seemed to me to demand a study of universal motions and their interrelationships. The body of a fish must have in it the declination of the globe and all its years. If I had read some of my limited science reading correctly, there was a time system in the world of life which had nothing to do with clocks, and their specific minutes and hours. It was built into its creatures so that their stages of development, their growth and movements, followed the direction and change of all other forces affecting them. It is a running world; and who, in that context, is more automatic than another?

Transition: Salt and Fresh

The change, for those fish that make it in, is from salt to fresh, wide to narrow, deep to shallow. Watched at Paine’s Creek in the first sheltered inland curve, the movement of those I was able to see was like the movement of tides and estuary waters, a flowing back and forth, a waving and interweaving. Some dropped back like leaves, then swam up again with the rest as they all turned together. At the start of an incoming tide--when the salt water moved in under the fresh and the creek began to rise--the fish seemed stimulated and swam faster, back and forth against it. Then gradually, though it was hard to see them in the high tide waters, they appeared to move farther up the inlet.

It was an encounter at the dramatic approaches of sea and land, on the long shoreline where continuous transitions are made between water and earth and air.

If you say the “anadromous habit” started somewhere in geologic time, it is difficult to conceive of, and it is probably not accurate, in the sense that these adaptations to environment do not start so much as develop and evolve. In any event the incredibly long history of the earth is not broken down with any facility. First of all, leaving out the question of whether fish originally evolved in fresh waters or the sea, and then blithely skipping one hundred million years or so, you have an evolved race of alewives, established residents of the sea. As to their habit of spawning in fresh water, it is possible that alewives, like other coastal fish, may gradually have explored the inland rivers and streams, until they began to use their comparative quiet and refuge in which to spawn. Along the northern coasts their inland migration would have been interrupted during the glacial epochs, and their range would have started farther to the south. There are landlocked varieties of alewife in Lake Ontario and in New York State, which also suggests a period when the continental glaciers retreated, leaving an access by water to inland lakes from the sea which was later cut off. In any case this anadromous habit was arrived at gradually, involuntarily, over a very long time. But, in a sense, what you see now, your center of history, is a routine which is neither old nor new but both various and inexorable, having in it the pull of the land, the blood of the sea.

This starting, circulatory movement of the few small schools I had seen was succeeded by the swimming of steady herds in the brown water of the channel. I couldn’t find them at first. On the ebb tide, when the water had receded enough from the banks along the inlet I walked there for a while and then cut across the tidal marsh. The day was cool and fresh, with a light northeast wind lifting in, and it smelled of the sea. (You can live a mile or so inland on the narrow peninsula of Cape Cod, in the towns or oak woods, and never smell that rich combination of salt water, shellfish, and tidal marsh, unless the wind is from the right quarter, with a special condition of the atmosphere.) Light rippled up the broad inlet--the coppery waters seemed to move slowly and reliantly. The season had hatched its enthusiasms everywhere, from flies, to crabs, to birds. The tidal ground was pitted with holes made by fiddler crabs. They backed away in front of me, the males comically holding up their one big claw--little characters of a dull metal-blue, with bubbling mouths--and disappeared into the safety of their burrows. Ahead of me nine Canada geese, which had been resting and feeding in the marshes, unfolded their wings and lunged up and out toward the Bay.