e women,
with the greatest skill and celerity, and hung in long rows upon
horizontal poles to dry. A fish, with all the confidence of sea life,
enters the river as a sailor comes ashore, intending to have a good
time; but before he fairly knows what he is about, he is caught in
a seine, dumped out upon the beach with a hundred more equally
unsophisticated and equally unfortunate sufferers, split open with
a big knife, his backbone removed, his head cut off, his internal
arrangements scooped out, and his mutilated remains hung over a pole
to simmer in a hot July sun. It is a pity that he cannot enjoy the
melancholy satisfaction of seeing the skill and rapidity with which
his body is prepared for a new and enlarged sphere of usefulness!
He is no longer a fish. In this second stage of passive unconscious
existence he assumes a new name, and is called a "yukala"
(yoo'-kah-lah).

It is astonishing to see in what countless numbers and to what great
distances these fish ascend the Siberian rivers. Dozens of small
streams which we passed in the interior of Kamchatka, seventy miles
from the seacoast, were so choked up with thousands of dying, dead,
and decayed fish, that we could not use the water for any purpose
whatever. Even in little mountain brooks, so narrow that a child could
step across them, we saw salmon eighteen or twenty inches in length
still working their way laboriously up stream, in water which was not
deep enough to cover their bodies. We frequently waded in and threw
them out by the dozen with our bare hands. They change greatly in
appearance as they ascend a river. When they first come in from the
sea their scales are bright and hard, and their flesh fat and richly
coloured; but as they go higher and higher up stream; their scales
lose their brilliancy and fall off, their flesh bleaches out until it
is nearly white, and they become lean, dry, and tasteless. For this
reason all the fishing-stations in Kamchatka are located, if possible,
at or near the mouths of rivers. To the instinct which leads the
salmon to ascend rivers for the purpose of depositing its spawn, is
attributable the settlement of all north-eastern Siberia. If it were
not for the abundance of fish, the whole country would be uninhabited
and uninhabitable, except by the Reindeer Koraks. As soon as the
fishing season is over, the Kamchadals store away their dried _yukala_
in _balagans_ and return to their winter quarters to prepare for the
fall