en their hands, and in this shape it is packed for future use.

From one of these pools a dozen Indian spearmen frequently draw out four
hundred salmon in a day, and this fish forms an important part of their
food. Of course they kill a great many thousand female salmon during the
season; but so far, I believe, this murderous work has not been found to
decrease the number of the fish which annually enter the river from the
ocean, and go up to its head waters to spawn.

If you visit this region during the last of June or in July, you may watch
the salmon spawning, a most curious and remarkable sight. The great fish
then leave the deep pools in which they have been quietly lying for some
weeks before, and fearlessly run up on the shallow ripples. Here, animated
by a kind of fury, they beat the sand off the shoals with their tails,
until often a female salmon thus labors till her tail fins are entirely
worn off. She then deposits her eggs upon the coarse gravel, and the
greedy trout, which are extravagantly fond of salmon eggs, rush up to eat
them as the poor mother lays them. They are, I believe, watched and beaten
off by the male salmon, which accompanies the female for this purpose.
When the female salmon has deposited her eggs, and the male salmon has
done his part of the work, the two often bring stones of considerable size
in their mouths to cover up the eggs and protect them from the predatory
attacks of the trout.

And thereupon, according to the universal testimony of the fishermen of
these waters, the salmon dies. I was assured that the dead bodies often
cumber the shore after the spawning season is over; and the mountaineers
all assert that the salmon, having once spawned up here, does not go down
to the ocean again. They hold that the young salmon stay in the upper
waters for a year, and go to sea about eighteen months after hatching; and
it is not uncommon, I believe, for fishermen hereabouts to catch grilse
weighing from two to four pounds. These bite sometimes at the fly. The
salmon bite, too, when much smaller, for I caught one day a young salmon
not more than six inches long. This little fellow was taken with a bait
of salmon eggs, and his bright silvery sides made him quite different from
the trout which I was catching out of the same pool. His, head, also
had something of the fierce, predatory, hawk-like form which the older
salmon's has.

Fry is an excellent fisherman himself, and knows all the best p