this moment? Why should he rise again five minutes from now, as I trust he will, when the fly swings around the lower left-hand curve of that blue rock? Will it be a proof of hunger? Of curiosity? Of irritation? Of the play instinct? There are dozens of scientific chapters written on this topic, and no two of them agree. And why should he rise to-day to an artificial fly of one special color and pattern, and to no other, when none of the flies resemble closely any natural fly that can be seen in New Brunswick this month? And - apparently a far simpler question why should salmon after salmon, in an endless procession, prefer the north side of that special blue rock? I took one there last night, and here is another! (I lost him; but we will forget that.)

Where the Clearwater joins the Miramichi, there is a flat white rock on the sandy bottom, so low and level that your eye cannot perceive that it gives any shelter; and yet for the last score of years, if there have been grilse in the river, one has been lying beside that white rock. Two summers ago I watched for an hour a superb salmon under Ross's Bridge on the Margaree. A piece of white cardboard had blown off the bridge and sunk to the bottom, in about fifteen feet of water. That king salmon hovered just above it, moving twenty feet upstream at intervals of about two minutes, turning always at precisely the same point, like a restless tiger in a cage, and then drifting back downstream to his post above that sodden bit of paper. Was it a landmark for him? Or was there a dead point in the current which had allowed the paper to sink, and which made it easier for the salmon to hover exactly there? We may have our guesses on all these matters, but we do not know. It is ninety years since the wisest of American writers gently reminded us that

'we are as much strangers in Nature as we are aliens from God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us.'

IV

Many nature-lovers are keenly conscious of the impression of changelessness, of timelessness, conveyed by any running stream. Carlyle writes of Annan Water in Sartor: 'It struck me much, as I sat by the Kuhbach, one silent noontide, and watched it flowing, gurgling, to think how this same streamlet had flowed and gurgled, through all changes of weather and of fortune, from beyond the earliest date of History. Yes, probably on the morning when Joshua forded Jordan; even as at the midday when Cæsar, doubtless with difficulty, swam the Nile, yet kept his Commentaries dry, this little Kuhbach, assiduous as Tiber, Eurotas, or Siloa, was murmuring on across the wilderness, as yet unnamed, unseen.'

One has this feeling often in the northern wilderness, where Indians are spearing and netting fish to-day from the same rocks on which Indians were standing when the canoes of the first coureurs de bois paddled up the St. Maurice or the the Ottawa. Nothing seems to change, if you are only far enough north. The learned Cambridge chemists and physicists are now inclined to put the age of our planet — on the evidence furnished by the intricate and unhurried process by which nature manufactures radium at about 1,600,000,000 years. Reflecting on their calculations, last summer, and watching the huge glacial boulder left stranded on the point near the head of Lake Nicotaus, I remarked to old John Sibley, the guide, 'John, that rock has been there a long time.' 'Yes, sir,' said John

even one

confidently, 'I don't see that that rock has changed any in the fifty years that I've known it.' If I had had a trained captive geologist in the canoe, he could have taught John that fifty years in the world of his science are less than a moment in the life of a lumberman. Yet one of the discoveries that one makes in revisiting a river whose banks and bed are largely worn out of the solid rock is that the river is altering visibly from year to year. It is not the fact that we are now grown up which makes the 'old swimming hole' of our boyhood days so strangely shallow. The truer explanation is that the hole has filled up with sand and gravel, in the ceaseless process of erosion. On a swift river like the Miramichi there are ice jams and freshets to be reckoned with, to say nothing of the occasional dynamite used in the spring drive. "That pool has been no good since the freshet of 1923,' say the guides, meaning that the rocks have been rolled down the ancient channels, filling in here and scooping out there, altering the currents, and disturbing, in some way we cannot fathom, the preferences of the fish. Five years, in fact, have made more changes in certain favorite pools of ours than I should have supposed were possible in five hundred. Some of the humble have been exalted and some of the mighty have been brought low. I confess that I have never noticed until this year, and then only when Donald pointed it out, that the big rocks which survive this age-long annual pressure of the ice jam are the ones whose upper surfaces slope upstream. The descending ice slides on up and over them, whereas a square rock which took the full force of that terrific impact would be torn from its bed. It is a curious instance of fitness for survival.

Even when your eye can detect no

difference in the pool, the salmon find causes for dissatisfaction or for content. Sometimes, of course, you can reason the thing out, after a fashion: you can see that the colder water pouring in from Burnt Hill Brook, for instance, and traceable for two or three miles down the north shore of the river, has been diverted by some new heap of boulders, so that the salmon in search of the 'brook water' — which the guides distinguish sharply from what they call the 'sour' river water — will now shelter themselves under a different ledge or hover in a deeper or shallower 'run.' Every trout fisherman knows that there are certain favorite places in a stream where the fish find the right food and shelter, and that these spots are moved into like the best rooms in a hotel. When one trout 'checks out,' either upstream or by capture, another promptly takes possession. Now a salmon, who almost certainly takes no food while in the river, except perhaps the juice of some fly squeezed between his jaws and rapidly ejected, chooses his temporary quarters in an apparently arbitrary fashion, with far less obvious attention to shelter than a trout. Many a skillful fly-caster who does not know these changes in the pools will be tempted to cast 'over the fish's head' for a salmon that may be lying not fifteen feet away from him. In fact anybody who has fished a strange salmon river alone, and then gone over the ground again with a competent guide, will admit his humiliation at having fished so stupidly at first, though his only real error lay in not knowing what it was impossible that he should know.

V

And no two summers are just alike. A year ago this week, according to C. E. B. C.'s log book, under precisely

the same conditions as to weather and water, the Burnt Hill salmon were rising plentifully to dry flies. This year they take the wet fly when they are taking anything. Last year there was only an average run of grilse; this year the river is full of them, and they are bigger and stouter in battle than for a score of years. What happened to them out in the mysterious Atlantic? Anglers will always have their moments of glory and their hours, or it may be whole days, of shame, but the moods of one visit to a river can never be repeated in the next. I am not sure, however, that the pleasures of recognition are not as deep as the joys of discovery. One remembers exactly where a big fish rose, it may be five years ago or thirty, and as you put your fly over what looks like the same ripple, you expect, in defiance of the laws of logic, that the miracle will happen again. And it often does - though this proves, perhaps, that fishing is an art and not a magic. An angler is bound to believe in the causes of effects. There was a reason for that fish's rising, once before, and now it is your privilege to juggle with the causes until you can reproduce the effect. Yet what inconsistent reasoners we are! If the fish comes up in accordance with your carefully worked-out plan of campaign, it seems a triumphant demonstration of the beneficent laws of the universe. If he does n't rise, how easy it is to slip back into the psychology of the gambler or the medicine man, and to content yourself with phrases about luck! Or you may turn materialist, blaming the wind or the light or the barometer, or settle down into the hopeless fatalism of declaring that they are not 'taking' to-day.

When this last mood is on you, the remedy is to say casually to the head guide, 'Donald, it's fifty cents to a

dime that you can't raise a salmon.' The Scotchman is game. He borrows your rod, glances through your disorderly fly-book, selects a fly as different as possible from the one you have been using, and in a minute he is at it, with that inimitable coaxing, wheedling, teasing cast, very light and not too long, covering each yard of water once and once only, until suddenly there is a flash, an oath, 'Holy Lazarus!' and before your duller senses have registered either the flash or the oath, Donald has struck him! Donald will lose that half dollar playing forty-five with the other guides to-night, but what of it? He has cured your fatalism.

I missed old John S. on the river this year. He must be nearly eighty, and being a notoriously reckless and shiftless guide, I suspect that no one engaged him and that he was forced to stay in the settlements. But I could have put up with his poor cooking for the sake of seeing again his unique method of fly-casting. As he starts his backcast, he inhales a long rapt breath as if he were going into a trance, lifting his ribs and his elbows very high, like some strange old bird about to take flight. As the cast starts forward, he seems to breathe it out softly across the river, as gently as a child blowing dandelion seed. He gets an incredible distance, but I never saw him raise a fish.

Yet the story of John S.'s salmon at the mouth of the Clearwater deserves to be set down. Improvident as ever, he was fishing with a frayed leader and with the one fly he owned, when he hooked and lost a big salmon - the leader parting. John was cast down but not destroyed. In his hat was a rusty long-shanked pickerel hook, and in the sand bank above the pool was the hole of a kingfisher. John puts in his hand cautiously and captures the mother bird on her nest, pulls out two or three

hurt her feelings as little as possible, and replacing her gently on the eggs, ties those feathers on the pickerel hook in imitation of a big Blue Doctor, and at the third cast he hooks and lands the identical runaway salmon, with the other fly and the broken leader still in its mouth! Whether there were reliable witnesses to this exploit I cannot say, but the sand bank is still there, and on the thirtieth of July, 1926, there was a hole in it which strongly suggested a kingfisher.

I miss also, this year, the companionship of a painter with whom I have fished many a stream, and whose eye was far quicker than mine in noting the changing colors of the water. There are no claybanks here, or rich alluvial meadows to help stain the river ten minutes after a shower. The Miramichi alters little at first, except to turn a slightly darker brown, while the bubbles and raindrops spoil its transparency. But as the rain comes more heavily, and the Burnt Hill Brook and the Clearwater begin to pour their brighter torrents into the main river, you can distinguish the brook water for a long distance on the north bank, and on the spring drive, I am told, the rivermen can trace it for a dozen miles

only they do not have, like my painter friend, a color vocabulary, any more than trout or salmon.

How under-vocabularied are most fishermen, likewise, in recording the charm of the changing sounds as the river falls or rises! When it is 'holding,' it seems hushed at noon, louder at dusk and lower at dawn, but I am not sure. Certainly it grows hoarser and deeper with rising water, until the flood covers most of the boulders, and then it seems strangely quieter, except for the dull crumbling reverberation of the loose rocks as they are rolled along the deepworn channels. I wish that Thoreau,

whose ear was so acute for any sound in the woods, and whose 'tree fall' sentence in the Maine Woods volume is one of the most perfect things in literature, had spent more time on big rocky rivers and less on the quiet, brimming Concord streams. He could have detected tones and overtones that are too subtle for my ear to catch distinctly. But what happiness, even for a dullard, to wake at night in your tent on the bluff above the rapids, and guess by the sound whether the river is rising or falling, or by the sound again — whether the next day will be muggy or crystal-clear!

VI

The guides, naturally, are far more weatherwise than we. They accept philosophically the long days of waiting for the river to come up or go down sufficiently to give us the best fishing, for they are paid by the day and the work here is light. But they are as eager as we for a successful trip, and they like a cold night or a strong wind to stir up the fish and set them traveling; and they hate as much as we the ghastliness of very low water, where all the bones of the starved stream stick out, and you scan the northwest in vain for thunderheads. To these guides, infinitely more than to any transient sportsman, the river is a living, sentient creature. It is to them what 'Mother Earth' was to the Greeks. They were born on the river and they will die on it, like their fathers. They draw all their livelihood from it and from the forests to which it is the only path. Highlanders by race, and settled here since their ancestors drove out the French in the old wars, they keep alive the history and romance of the river by oral tradition. Nothing is lost, and it may be that here and there the Celtic imagination adds something.

What talk I have heard, in low tones,

as the camp fire burns out and the fog rises ghostlike along the river! Not that these Scotchmen believe in ghosts; but they do believe in 'forerunners.' Were not three of them playing cards one night in our cabin, when they heard Sandy W.'s step on the west end of the porch? The step neared the door, and paused. 'Hullo, Sandy,' said the guides, scarcely looking up from the cards. Then they dropped the cards. There was no one on the porch at all. And Sandy W. had died that night, in Boston. That was a forerunner. And how about the fellow that owned the old camp by the spring opposite the mouth of the Clearwater? Two guides camping at the outlet, one autumn night, heard him call: 'I want to come over!' They poled across in their log canoes, and as they poled he called again: 'I want to come over!' But there was nobody in the old camp, and the owner, as they learned a month later, was five hundred miles away that night, crossing a far darker and deeper river than the Miramichi! The cry they heard was a forerunner.

Did not Donald himself, a Scotchman with nerve enough to stay alone one winter as watchman of the now abandoned tungsten mine, across the river from our camp, hear, late one afternoon, a call for 'Help!' in the woods above the mine? It was thirty below zero, but he put on his snowshoes and climbed the hill, followed by his black cat. And there was just nothing, but as he neared the mine on his way back he heard that despairing cry once more. This time he stopped to make himself a cup of tea, and then took his rifle. And again there was nothing on the hilltop. But Donald did not sleep that night, and the next morning he tramped out to Maple Grove, to find that a friend of his had frozen to death the evening before, on top of his load of logs, some twenty miles from the

mine. Now no man's voice can be heard for twenty miles, even in the silence of the winter woods. Donald knows that well enough; what he heard was a forerunner.

Have you ever heard of a 'bloodstopper'? There are ghastly injuries every season in the logging camps, even among this race of skilled axemen, and the surgery is rude. When a man is bleeding to death, the only hope lies in the services of a blood-stopper a man who possesses the mysterious power of causing the flow of blood to cease. The secret of this power can be passed on from a man to a woman or from a woman to a man, but as I understand it only one person in a family can exercise it in any generation. He must be brought as near as possible to the wounded man, must whisper the charmed syllables, charmed syllables, I was told with awe that they were 'Bible words,' and then the blood instantly stops flowing. Only, mind you, if there is any running water between the bloodstopper and the wounded man, the charm fails. Not until the hastily summoned blood-stopper has crossed the last river or the last brook that lies between him and the sufferer does his magic gift prevail. magic gift prevail. What potency of evil, what enmity of healing power, can there be in a running stream? I do not know. But I have seen a blood-stopper and a man saved by him from death on last spring's drive-unless these Scotchmen are in error. Around the camp fire it is easier than elsewhere to indulge in that 'willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.'

The truth is that to these men of the Miramichi the love of the river and the fear of the river, the history and romance and superstition and toil and tragedy of the river, are blended inextricably. Their stories of Dead Man's Brook and of the Island