Part 8

Then two black ducks flew off quacking in their deep, wild way. I saw where a deer had left fresh hoofprints in the mud; looking down at them made me notice many tiny shells, newly hatched whelks perhaps, carried in by the tide, strewn between the stiff spikes of the marsh grass; and I found a couple of empty pint bottles, sometimes as common in these parts as Kleenex beside the highways of America. Insects, shells, ducks, geese, crabs, wind, cloud rack overhead, brilliance and shadows on the tidal ground--many lifetimes of learning. Is there any man who knows the length and breadth of anything, let alone a creek? Yet such a place keeps announcing its novelties and exacting from us whatever love and discipline we are capable of; or so I felt, challenged in the keen air and the high glitter of the light.

Several hundred yards around another bend in the inlet, where it was some twelve to fifteen feet wide, I looked down into the water and saw them again. The dark channel was alive with them. It had a floor of turning, slowly moving alewives. A few at the end of this school would run quickly back, revealing their shadows on the bottom. The procession moved back and forth, as smoothly as the flow of the water, and across the entire width of the channel. They were more numerous in the areas where the sun hit the water directly.

Some of them looked torn and scarred. On that basis, and because many thousands had either been trucked off from the Herring Run in barrels by this time, or had reached the ponds, spawned, and returned to the Bay, you could not say categorically that they were all moving inland. As the season develops you can always find spent fish on their way to salt water running through those still heading up to the spawning areas. Aside from watching their movements, one method of distinguishing between the two classes of fish is to see if they bear any white patches on their backs and sides. A certain number of the spent fish will show fungus growths after a period of time in fresh water. What seems to happen is that an alewife, attacked by a gull or predatory fish or flung against sharp rocks, will at first show a “scaling” from the damage. This scaling, unless it is more than that, a mortal wound, is likely to develop into a fungus growth, which sometimes covers a large part of a fish’s body; but without, apparently, any added injury. I believe experiment proves that the fungus disappears fairly soon after the fish affected are back in salt water.

The returning alewives will stay for a while in the brackish water of the inlet, resting and feeding. They are spare and hungry and will feed on shrimp, small eels, and small fish. Alewives that by chance stay longer than the others in fresh water have been known to chase and eat their own young, if they were small enough to swallow.

Their basic salt-water diet is plankton. The copepods and amphipods--tiny animals similar to the well-known sand hoppers, beach fleas, water fleas, or small shrimp--provide the staple part. On their inland migration they will not eat much of anything. They are in the service of a mission, and they fast. Still there may be occasions when they snap at lures. I have heard of some, migrating inland, that were caught by fishermen casting with flies at the Herring River in Harwich, on the south side of the Cape.

Those herds now in the brown waters of the channel seemed to be gradually moving inland as the day advanced, and I guessed that for most of them it was the journey up.

As I watched them there was a slight, quick change of wind, a shift in the breeze that flicked the water, and in the crosshatches this made on the bright surface all the fish disappeared. Then the surface cleared and I could see them again, swimming through a rippling weave of light that was reflected on the channel floor.

They meandered along, an occasional lively one dashing through the rest, or rushing up to the surface. I could hear light plops, faint flips along the water. I walked closer to the edge so that my shadow fell across them, and they turned back in one quick and graceful stampede, some of them dashing to deeper water under the opposite bank. That so many separate entities should have such an immediate response to one another that they all moved like the beat of a wing was hard for one individual to understand.

Alewives are able to stand the quick change from salt to fresh water without any trouble. It would kill some other kinds of fish, but neither the alewife fry growing up in fresh water nor adults growing up in the sea seem to mind being taken out of one medium and plunged into another. They are adapted to both. On the other hand, repeated changes, such as occur sometimes under certain conditions in tidal estuaries, are said to be able to kill them.

These changes, incidentally, are registered in an alewife’s scales. To read them is difficult and requires a competent biologist. In general they mark physiological changes, such as occur when young alewives go from fresh to brackish water, or when the adults spend some time in fresh water before returning to the sea. An alewife’s age can be determined because a record of each spawning migration is etched on the scales.

I had seen them flashing and swarming inland up in the Herring Run area, but in this wide channel were new motions that needed more patience and information to be understood. For example, where the fish eddied and wheeled under the dazzling rays, I noticed one group idling in front of a submerged sand bar or reef that ran across the channel. I waited there for three-quarters of an hour before the fish showed signs of any common impulse to cross over it. One or two dashed over sportively to chase a minnow and then sped back, but the rest of them--a hundred or more--would make no move. Finally, after many circling approaches by the whole crowd, the measure of their circle came closer and closer out of the brown water to the brightly lit, coppery bar, until some of the vanguard spilled over. Then more and more sped and skittered over until the move was accomplished. Why? Were they afraid of the brightness? Did the contrast in light stop them in some way? This would hardly seem consistent with what I had found out so far. Perhaps it was just routine to their motion. Evidently alewives idle in the deeper channels where the velocity of the water is slower and easier to swim in. They respond to the relative force of the flow. Where the current is more uniformly rapid, and they are going up against it, they progress steadily. And perhaps the bar formed an eddy behind it, so that the water where they swam moved against the current in the channel and they were unable to tell their direction.

The alewife hordes puzzled me as they moved slowly but definitely through the channel. A new animal, moving to unknown needs is hard to understand. You grasp for some translation between you that will not come. Relationships in the water world seem to need other senses than your own. It could be said that to understand the transition of the alewives from salt to fresh water and back you must know about the effect of the endocrine glands on the reproductive system, as well as adaptations of the kidney, along with the temperature, the time of the tides, and the chemical composition of a particular stream--just to begin with. If you are wise and devoted enough to put all the known factors together, you may come out with a unified interpretation, and be abreast of the latest theories of process. Knowledge is the motion by which the human animal may come closest to a fish. Still I looked in my ignorance for another familiarity in which we shared. Where the sea pushed inland and the alewives moved ahead or returned, I saw an indefinite route, of surpassing, complex elaboration; but in their pulse and tempo I felt something that gave me present assurance, and a touch of joy.

Up the Valley

When you leave the channel that elbows through the tidal marshes and then goes under the shore road, Route 6 A, through the valley ending at the Herring Run, you go from one living community to another. You leave the thousands of fiddler crabs tunneling through marshy ground, the fat, olive-colored little salt-water minnows, or mummichogs, darting through green clouds of muck in the warm pools left by the tide, and muskrats, kingfishers, herons, ducks, or gulls. Some are permanent residents, others are itinerants, but all are presently bound together in the tidal grounds. They feed off one another, being both producers and consumers of food, and so sustain the balance of all their lives together. Such communities are the principal study of the ecologists--the interrelationship of living things in their environment.

The alewife migrates from sea to ponds through the inland vein, from crabs and shellfish to robins, and frogs beyond the tide. Its migration runs through several different life communities, of which it is not strictly a part, although its progeny, the fry, will be a part of the food chain all the way along, the prey of many different kinds of fish and birds, and eaters themselves of food the ponds provide. But the alewife’s migrant continuity is like the water itself that runs unceasingly down the valley, and ties all the life together that adjoins it.

The stream, on the north side of the shore road, used to run up the center of the valley where there is still a ditch dividing once cultivated cranberry bogs, but the watercourse was long since diverted to the eastern side of the valley. It was in that direction I went one half-showery, half-sunny day for a further exploration, but first by way of the short, bordering range of hills before going down again. Hills and scoured valley were left by the most recent continental glacier as it melted back from the terminal moraine of Cape Cod perhaps some twelve thousand years ago. I climbed the steep slope on the west side of the valley, nearest the Herring Run. Below me the long, snaky turns of the run went down from its rocky top where the waters were churning white and spilling over. As I walked up and down the slopes and across the small ravines between them, I could hear voices receding down by the Herring Run; and then a woodchuck whipped a whistle and dove when I came up, its brown rump disappearing into a freshly dug hole, which had an arc of sandy yellow dirt piled outside. On the way there were wild cherry, viburnum, hawthorn, pitch pine, and juniper sparsely growing, and I passed a dipping stone wall that marked an old boundary line. I picked up a wing from the remains of a dead herring gull on the ground, put it before the light wind, and was struck with what broad strength it held the air. As I came toward that knob of a hill where the gulls congregated, they flocked away with a simultaneous rush of wings and went crying high toward the Bay. The hill was bald, except for a few wild rosebushes on its crown, and its slopes were covered with a wild pink, moss campion, and patches of sorrel made more profuse by nitrogen and ammonia from gull droppings. On the other side of the valley there was a wood of twirling, gnarled, gray tupelo trees with the pink of their buds still showing. Bay waters and the curving, final shore carried distance out along with the gulls; while this valley with its dips and slopes and the migratory waves of life to which its land and water were hosts seemed wide enough for many worlds.

As I clambered down a slope toward the stream, three ducks that were coming in to settle on marshy ground changed course, two black-crowned night herons flew out of a tree, clucking like hens, and a yellowlegs stalking through muddy peninsulas flew up and away, its sickle wings in reckless flight, with a cry both tremulous and sharp. Everything fled before me. I might be a part of these communities myself but as an itinerant, it seemed, and a dangerous one. How difficult it is to prove to anything but domestic animals, long since tamed and lost, that a man is not dangerous! Men have a hard time trying to prove it to themselves.

I had come down near the point where Stony Brook started to turn to the east side of the valley. The banks behind me were streaming with spring water and the wet edges were lush with new growth: lettuce-green grass, succulent-looking leaves of skunk cabbage, fiddlehead ferns newly uncurling, and clumps of violets, flowers of a sky-delicate light blue. At this edge of the valley the water was full of thicketed islands, hummocks, and muddy shallows, but as the stream stretched on, ten to twelve feet wide, the current swung along at a man’s fast walk over a brown and sandy bottom, and in it, constantly eddying by and turning over, were innumerable silver fish scales, debris of the striving and death at the Herring Run, several hundred yards behind.

Where the stream turned at right angles across the valley it was bordered by a low man-made dike. Halfway down the dike, at the end of a long narrow ditch bisecting the old bogs, was the remains of a stop water, a kind of three-sided dam designed to raise or lower the water in a cranberry bog to its desired level. I looked down into its still, dark square of water and there was a split-second rush of a fish, and perhaps two or three others coiling in the small space together. They may have been spawning. In any case, intentionally or not, they had come down the ditch instead of by the main stream and could go no farther. There are many areas in a run, side pools, ditches, marshy land, to which some alewives may be sidetracked, before the main spawning grounds.

I saw a few later in a dead-end offshoot of the Herring River that looked very much as if they were trying to go back, though I have no reason to suppose they felt that they had made a mistake. If they were not ready to spawn they may have circled back with the ebb tide, which reached that point, and found the main flow where they had lost it on the way up.

I have idly wondered whether a single fish, isolated from its brethren, might not suffer some kind of unknown hell of estrangement. I have seen one swimming wildly down a narrow ditch off a tidal inlet as if it knew the crowd had left it behind, and was frantic to get back. Still, for all we can say about their lack of consciousness, they carry out their great decisions, their deep harmonies, together, by natural laws which we ourselves cannot completely explain, and by which we too may carry out our migrant purposes.

The creek flowed on through banks tangled with poison ivy, blueberry bushes, briars, and grapevines--at times almost impassable. Once, as I peered out from the tangle, I saw a bird I had never seen outside a field guide--a Virginia rail, moving along a muddy shelf under the opposite bank. It moved almost humped over, neck and head forward, like a great mouse, with a docked tail and red-orange beak. Then farther on I saw an egret with head and slender neck above some high pitch pines, pure sky-white, Grecian, out of a stately, impenetrable world, almost too secret for an ecologist.

Where the stream was wider and the shallow water flowed along, lightly and unobstructed, a group of some ten or twelve fish ran easily across it. Then they stopped and circled with the current like a nest of eels, in a slow, fluid mass.

I turned back. After light sunshine there was a faint shower, a spray of rain. The valley was full of sound. A slow plane flew over; a truck’s gears ground over the road; I heard a song sparrow staking out his territory; crows cawed; blue jays gave harsh and silvery shouts; I heard my own breath and the almost silent touch of cool air and rain spray on the ground--a narrow valley, but with melodious resources from everywhere. Why “back to nature”? I thought. Is there anything in it but forwardness?

In the stretch below the Herring Run again I suddenly saw, in the blank, dark water under gray skies, a wave, an eruption, a rushing ahead of a group of fish. Then they moved over to the side of the shallow stream, thirty or forty of them, and stayed there almost stationary for a while in deeper, slower currents where an overhanging shrub shaded the water. I threw a stick in their direction ... when it hit the water they wheeled wildly on their group axis, but stayed in the same place. Then in a minute or two they all made a break for open water at once, and I noticed that another group had come in unseen behind them. They would progress in this way, group after group, until they met the denser population below the fish ladders. One of them would come out first with a kind of flitting, darting, weaving forward against the current and the rest wheeled in behind it.

I took off my shoes and waded out into the stream. A lead fish working its way back and forth with the current swung around as I came and fled back. I stood still for a while, noticing that the gulls I chased out of the valley had returned and were hovering over, chuckling, crying, mumbling, or barking like seals. After a few minutes of waiting the fish came right through and around my legs. My slightest change in posture would send the ones in front looping back, but they still kept coming. It was a quickening thing to see a fish race up in a long reach and then drop part way back again--a tentative, fast exploration of the current, the living current as perpetual as its own communicated impulses.

One hundred yards or so upstream the alewives covered the stream bed where Stony Brook’s divided waters met. Some schooled slowly around below the unsurmountable falls, the rocks of death, the majority headed up the main stream toward the fishway where hundreds were massed, slipping and turning, arched in the white waters. Fishways are so designed as to allow the alewives an easier way to mount an incline, but they do have the effect of concentrating them in narrow quarters. The resting pools are compartments deep enough to check the velocity of the water and so permit the fish to wait before leaping on again. Even so the water roared down with great force on the alewives crammed in them. I could hardly hold my cupped hand against it. As they leaped up they were tunneled in spouts of water, and then they would flip through the boiling surface from one pool to the next, sometimes being thrown back to try again.

XII