The run

With a certain amount of half-determined knowledge behind me, I decided early one morning to follow up the question of how far the brackish waters of the Stony Brook outlet extended into Cape Cod Bay, and so went down to Paine’s Creek. This is the place where the stream, which has been winding through tidal marshes like a small river, ends in a basin where several dories are moored, then takes a last turn and long curve, cutting through low dunes anchored by beach grass that border the sands. I saw a kingfisher rising up over the creek, a green crab shifting along the shelving bank; and on the beach were the remains of a black duck, sodden, bedraggled, the feathers loaded with wet sand, the breastbone sticking up like the white prow of a helmet, flies buzzing over it—the smell of salted carrion around it.

The sound of the waters along the creek is constant and musical, following and followed up, broadly roaring, rushing, or slipping lightly, as they rise, pushed back by the incoming tide, or run out low and easy with the ebb. At low tide these creek waters spread their channels and fingered rivulets some three hundred yards straight out over the sands, to a point where they are joined by the waters of Quivett Creek which has an inlet a few hundred yards upshore to the west. Then the one channel finds its way past a fish weir until it is lost in the salt waters coming in over a long bar in the distance. The alewives also swim into the other creek; though not in the numbers that run up Stony Brook, because of less access to spawning grounds beyond.

The tide was well out when I started to follow, or rather taste the fresh water over the sands. The Brewster flats, as they are called, were alive with light and constantly changing where they stretched out on the earth’s curve. Minor investigation took place in maximum horizons. I walked toward the weir, or fish trap, one of three in the distance, long-poled stockades a quarter of a mile or so apart, hung with nets like veils or the peaked coifs of nuns. A silver sun was beginning to lift through sheets of low fog, and a cool wind blew across the sands. It made my ears boom with that hollow sound of deep marine that you hear in a shell. I saw a small flock of brant standing off, their heads alert for danger, ready to thrust up and go when I came. I approached lines of brown dunlins, red-backed sandpipers, sanderlings, black-bellied plovers, which stood and scurried, peeped and cried, flew forward into the wind for short stretches, and came down again.

As the sun rose farther up, clouds began to be reflected in the lanes between the ribbed sands, and there were thousands of gulls standing in a silver, immeasurable distance, while those sharp, light arrows, the terns, flew overhead. The flats with their brown deserts, their lakes, and pools, and veins, were like the patterned floors, the reaches of the great civilizations of man. The dawn fogs blew off. I was waking up to an architecture of space.

Now from these tidal areas the plains of the sea rove out indefinitely. You can get a look at the universal map without benefit of signposts, and the coming on of fish represents great standards of inevitability.

“But look,” a scientist might say, “in this unlimited space of yours, the mating animal only has a tiny area to travel in; a few miles at sea, if in the case of the alewives, they do stay offshore, and perhaps two or three miles inland. They are limited in space, and limited in numbers accordingly.”

True, but we might add that it is this limitation, in alewives at least, that makes increase possible. They are one of the most easily managed of all marine species. Clear out the obstructions in their way; restock a lake and river system, or pond and stream, and the fish return, the population rises. Alewife management depends on their almost relentless drive to go back where they came from. No life insists on its locality more strongly. Home in their case is a definite route, a round way, small if you like, but spinning in larger circles, where birth leads back to its necessity.

So I walked the sea lands, following the alewives’ avenue of approach. Well beyond the weir I began to get in too deep to qualify as an investigator. I judged that the brackish water of the outlet went at least five hundred yards out, and probably several hundred yards more than that, before it flowed into the salt waters of the Bay and then was lost in them. It seemed, during low tide at least, that the alewives might detect the fresh water reasonably far out in the Bay, disregarding the question of how they arrived at that point.

As I went back across the wind again, under the hovering, crying birds, and saw where the waters of the two creeks came out, that strange fish knowledge of where to go was still unbelievable. I imagined alewives coming in here, or to a shore where there were even more creek inlets fairly close together, and wondered whether the schools joined in the Bay like concentric circles and then separated, each going to the stream in which it grew up. I also wondered about that supposed chemical sense, or sense of odor, that might explain the alewife’s knowledge of its home stream. Would not the composition of the waters of any one stream change greatly at various times of the year? It must be very different in the hot summer, when the little alewives come down to salt water, from the cool months of spring when the adults came in. Would that not be just as important a factor as the stream’s difference from another close by?

Two miles farther up along the shore is another inlet at the mouth of Sesuit Creek. Many years ago the Sesuit and Quivett inlets were interconnected at some point back in their tidal marshes; and before the roads and banks were built that now divide them there was also more access to several ponds in the vicinity, both large and small. Since the glacial ponds of Cape Cod seem to fill up and dry out in time, turning to wooded or grassy hollows, it is possible too that the alewives had even more entryways, and went even farther inland, having longer fresh-water routes to travel—water veins open and flowing everywhere. In any event, the alewife population now starting up these two inlets is very small compared to that of Stony Brook, which shows that the fish are balanced in numbers according to the relative ease or difficulty of getting inland to adequate spawning grounds. In part, it also seems to be an added proof of the parent stream theory. The fish know their way. For whatever reason, and whether or not they are entirely consistent in coming back to the exact stream, it seems to us that they have a remarkable sense of direction, although, for all we know, it may not be any more remarkable than the accuracy of the tides or the timing of the sun.