they have penetrated the salmon, come off from the spear, and the fish is held by the cord.  A squaw stands ready on the shore to haul him in, and he is beaten over the head with a club until he ceases to struggle, then cleaned, and roasted on hot stones.  When the meat is done and dry it is picked off the bones, and the squaws rub it to a fine powder between 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 pools within reach of his house, and, if you are a mountaineer, will take you a dozen miles through the woods to other streams, where you may fish and hunt for days or weeks with great success, for these woods and waters are as yet visited by but few sportsmen.