The purse seine is a deadly trap for schooling salmon.  And because the salmon schools in mass formation, crowding nose to tail and side to side, in the entrance to a fresh-water stream, the Fisheries Department having granted a monopoly of seining rights to a packer has also benevolently decreed that no purse seine or other net shall operate within a given distance of a stream mouth,—­that the salmon, having won to fresh water, shall go free and his kind be saved from utter extinction.

These regulations are not drawn for sentimental reasons, only to preserve the salmon industry.  The farmer saves wheat for his next year’s seeding, instead of selling the last bushel to the millers.  No man willfully kills the goose that lays him golden eggs.  But the salmon hunter, eagerly pursuing the nimble dollar, sometimes grows rapacious in the chase and breaks laws of his own devising,—­if a big haul promises and no Fisheries Inspector is by to restrain him.  The cannery purse seiners are the most frequent offenders.  They can make their haul quickly in forbidden waters and get away.  Folly Bay, shrewdly paying its seine crews a bonus per fish on top of wages, had always been notorious for crowding the law.

Solomon River takes its rise in the mountainous backbone of Vancouver Island.  It is a wide, placid stream on its lower reaches, flowing through low, timbered regions, emptying into the Gulf in a half-moon bay called the Jew’s Mouth, which is a perfect shelter from the Gulf storms and the only such shelter in thirty miles of bouldery shore line.  The beach runs northwest and southeast, bleak and open, undented.  In all that stretch there is no point from behind which a Fisheries Patrol launch could steal unexpectedly into the Jew’s Mouth.

Upon a certain afternoon the Blackbird lay therein.  At her stern, fast by light lines to her after bitts, clung half a dozen fish boats, blue wisps of smoke drifting from the galley stovepipes, the fishermen variously occupied.  The Blackbird’s hold was empty except for ice.  She was waiting for fish, and the Bluebird was due on the same errand the following day.

Nearer shore another cluster of gill-netters was anchored, a Jap or two, and a Siwash Indian with his hull painted a gaudy blue.  And in the middle of the Jew’s Mouth, which was a scant six hundred yards across at its widest, the Folly Bay No. 5 swung on her anchor chain.  A tubby cannery tender lay alongside.  The crews were busy with picaroons forking salmon out of the seiner into the tender’s hold.  The flip-flop of the fish sounded distinctly in that quiet place.  Their silver bodies flashed in the sun as they were thrown across the decks.

When the tender drew clear and passed out of the bay she rode deep with the weight of salmon aboard.  Without the Jew’s Mouth, around the Blackbird and the fish boats and the No. 5 the salmon were threshing water. Klop. A flash of silver.  Bubbles.  A series of concentric rings that ran away in ripples, till they merged into other widening rings.  They were everywhere.  The river was full of them.  The bay was alive with them.