So it went on for three long years; and at the end of this time our
little fish had grown to be a great, fine salmon of twenty-two pounds'
weight, shining like a new tin pan, and with rows of the loveliest round
black spots on his head and back and tail. One day, as he was swimming
about, idly chasing a big sculpin with head so thorny that he never was
swallowed by anybody, all of a sudden the salmon noticed a change in the
water around him.

Spring had come again, and south-lying snow-drifts on the Cascade
Mountains once more felt that the "earth was wheeling sunwards." The
cold snow waters ran down from the mountains and into the Columbia
River, and made a freshet on the river. The high water went far out into
the sea, and out in the sea our salmon felt it on his gills. He
remembered how the cold water used to feel in the Cowlitz when he was a
little fish. In a blundering, fishy fashion he thought about it; he
wondered whether the little eddy looked as it used to look, and whether
caddis-worms and young mosquitoes were really as sweet and tender as he
used to think they were. Then he thought some other things; but as the
salmon's mind is located in the optic lobes of his brain, and ours is in
a different place, we cannot be quite certain what his thoughts really
were.

What our salmon did, we know. He did what every grown salmon in the
ocean does when he feels the glacier-water once more upon his gills. He
became a changed being. He spurned the blandishment of soft-shelled
crabs. The pleasures of the table and of the chase, heretofore his only
delights, lost their charms for him. He turned his course straight
toward the direction whence the cold water came, and for the rest of his
life never tasted a mouthful of food. He moved on toward the
river-mouth, at first playfully, as though he were not really certain
whether he meant anything after all. Afterward, when he struck the full
current of the Columbia, he plunged straight forward with an unflinching
determination that had in it something of the heroic. When he had passed
the rough water at the bar, he was not alone. His old neighbors of the
Cowlitz, and many more from the Clackamas and the Spokane and Des Chutes
and Kootenay,--a great army of salmon,--were with him. In front were
thousands pressing on, and behind them were thousands more, all moved by
a common impulse which urged them up the Columbia.

They were all swimming bravely along where the current was dee