The way of the blueback salmon might have furnished a theme for Solomon.  In all the years during which these fish had run in the Gulf of Georgia neither fishermen, canners, nor the government ichthyologists were greatly wiser concerning their nature or habits or life history.  Grounds where they swarmed one season might prove barren the next.  Where they came from, out of what depths of the far Pacific those silvery hordes marshaled themselves, no man knew.  Nor, when they vanished in late August, could any man say whither they went.  They did not ascend the streams.  No blueback was ever taken with red spawn in his belly.  They were a mystery which no man had unraveled, no matter that he took them by thousands in order that he himself might subsist upon their flesh.  One thing the trollers did know,—­where the small feed swarmed, in shoal water or deep, those myriads of tiny fish, herring and nameless smaller ones, there the blueback would appear, and when he did so appear he could be taken by a spoon hook.

Away beyond the Sisters—­three gaunt gray rocks rising out of the sea miles offshore in a fairway down which passed all the Alaska-bound steamers, with a lone lighthouse on the middle rock—­away north of Folly Bay there opened wide trolling grounds about certain islands which lay off the Vancouver Island shore,—­Hornby, Lambert Channel, Yellow Rock, Cape Lazo.  In other seasons the blueback runs lingered about Squitty for a while and then passed on to those kelp-grown and reef-strewed grounds.  This season these salmon appeared first far south of Squitty.  The trolling scouts, the restless wanderers of the fleet, who could not abide sitting still and waiting in patience for the fish to come, first picked them up by the Gulf Islands, very near that great highway to the open sea known as the Strait of San Juan.  The blueback pushed on the Gray Rock to the Ballenas, as if the blackfish and seal and shark that hung always about the schools to prey were herding them to some given point.  Very shortly after they could be taken in the shadow of the Ballenas light the schools swarmed about the Cove end of Squitty Island, between the Elephant on Sangster and Poor Man’s Rock.  For days on end the sea was alive with them.  In the gray of dawn and the reddened dusk they played upon the surface of the sea as far as the eye reached.  And always at such times they struck savagely at a glittering spoon hook.  Beyond Squitty they vanished.  Fifty and sixty salmon daily to a boat off the Squitty headlands dwindled to fifteen and twenty at the Folly Bay end.  Those restless trollers who crossed the Gulf to Hornby and Yellow Rock Light got little for their pains.  Between Folly Bay and the swirling tide races off the desolate head of Cape Mudge the blueback disappeared.  But at Squitty the runs held constant.  There were off days, but the fish were always there.  The trollers hung at the south end, sheltering at night in the Cove, huddled rubstrake to rubstrake and bow to stern, so many were they in that little space, on days when the southeaster made the cliffs shudder under the shock of breaking seas.  If fishing slackened for a day or two they did not scatter as in other days.  There would be another run hard on the heels of the last.  And there was.