The run

During the third week in May, when the run seemed about over I had still not seen them spawning, although I had heard a description of it from my local authority, Mr. Alexander.

“A kind of swish dance is what they do,” said he, giving a hula-hula motion with his hands.

Harry also described them as sidling up at the shallow edges of the ponds, rocking as you would rock a baby; and then shooting out the spawn, their fins lifting up with the effort. The pond suckers, as he related it, would swim up to grab the eggs almost as soon as they came out of their bellies.

What about that school I had seen running along the shore of the Upper Mill Pond?

“Well, they were kind of getting acquainted, you know. Just cuddling together!”

This was on May 25, as I have it in my notes, and when I started out from the Herring Run to walk up to the ponds above it, Salvadore was still there with his truck, barrels, and net; but he said he was going to quit soon and deal in some redfish (another name for rosefish, or ocean perch). The redfish made tougher, better bait for lobsters anyway. While he had been in Brewster he had netted forty barrels a day on the average, sometimes as many as eighty, but he told me that he had not yet reached the four-hundred mark. One barrel, weighing some two hundred pounds, might contain around three hundred fish or more, so that about 120,000 alewives might be pulled out of Stony Brook in a season, though I imagine this is a very low estimate. I have heard it said that there are a potential two thousand barrels in the Brewster run during the full season, taking all fish. In an abundant year there might be close to six or seven hundred thousand adult alewives migrating up the brook. Even so, subtracting the mortality, the necessary minimum of fish allowed through the gate during the week have a very heavy job to do to assure the return of hundreds of thousands of their race in three and four years’ time.

Because of some kind of alewife caution or deliberation, not enough of them were going into the seining pool to make a good haul. They were delaying on the down side of the road. Salvadore waded in with his rubber boots on to drive them under and through the bridge, but they hardly budged, so he crouched down with little more than three feet of height for body room, and swashed in after them. They skittered before him, landing with a simultaneous series of quick dashes into the pool.

It was a warm day. There was a new lassitude in the air, and the sweet smell of lilacs. The gulls were gone that had flocked in quarreling and screaming when the run was heaviest, hovering and rising over the waters and their hordes of fish, bold enough sometimes to perch on the bridge over the run, looking very large, with their pale-yellow eyes glaring as naked as stone.

Once I saw a herring gull display its fantastic eating capacity by dropping down into the fish ladder, grabbing an alewife, and swallowing it whole. Down went the fat, foot-long fish in a few gulps, headfirst so that neither scales nor sawbelly would stop the progress. Then the loaded gull flew very heavily away as I came up, the alewife’s tail having barely disappeared.

Now, in place of gulls, there were a few dove-gray, black and white quawks perched on the outer branches of overhanging trees like heavy sculptured ornaments, or standing in the water with their spear-head bills ready poised for a frog or small fish. I have heard it said, incidentally, that these night herons keep the gulls away. I have never witnessed any aggressive action between the two races. On the whole they seem to respect each other’s territory and to keep their distance from each other; but I have seen quawks and gulls together waiting for little alewives on the flats beyond Paine’s Creek.

In the brook there were still some fish ascending, but many more were going back. It is a little hard to tell the difference at first, since both face up against the current, but the returning alewives gradually drop back, and many of them have the characteristic white marks on them of fresh-water fungus infection. The strain of spawning and using up their store of fat makes them thin, slow, and weary. They have lost a good deal of their vigor, though not to the extent of preventing the return journey.

In spite of this “spring fever” day it was not that the greatness of events was over ... only the first great toppling of a wave, only the first violent forwardness with its illimitable sounds and changes. There was a steadier greenness on the trees, and blossoms on the high lilacs. The run waters went on with a constant wail and wah, if without the turbulence of a few weeks earlier. I left the Herring Run and walked up into the warm pine woods to try and find the culminative point of the migration.

A light wind was running straight down the long surfaces of the Upper Mill Pond when I reached it, and little waves scudded ahead. I walked on the north side where sandy banks descended to the shore, shaded by pitch pines and covered with viburnum bushes and bearberry, a pink-blossomed, shiny-leaved ground cover locally known as “hog cranberry.” There were stretches of amber sand, small stones, or gravel, along the pond’s edge. A fat sucker jumped for a fly and crashed heavily back into the water.

All at once I heard a light thrashing and noticed a large water snake under a blueberry bush. It had dropped a small salamander that was twisting over and over on the ground, its damp body collecting bits and shreds of dry leaves. As I came up, the snake hung over a low-lying branch and watched me, its mouth slightly open with a little toothed white and pink jawline showing. I picked up the salamander and dropped it into the pond, where it hesitated for a few seconds and then wiggled away into a patch of green ooze and deeper water. With a stick, I tossed the snake twenty feet away, thus establishing myself as universal arbitrator.

As I walked and watched along the shore I saw one group of alewives, and then another, running by, looking light-colored and bright in the sunny water. Sometimes these groups seemed to be made up of one female escorted by several males, but the closer they came to shore the more intermingled they were, and it was not clear to me that this was a definite pattern. When she is running upstream, the female’s eggs are unripe, but ripen soon after arrival in the ponds, provided the water temperature is high enough—between 55 and 60 degrees may be the average spawning temperature during the big April and early May runs. As to the act of spawning, the female, depending on her size, deposits anywhere between sixty thousand and a hundred thousand eggs (each some 0.05 inches in diameter) in shallow places; and because they are sticky they adhere to gravel, sticks, stones, or whatever they settle on. The males, who have been following the females closely, immediately cover the eggs with milt, thrashing and scattering it with their tails. The eggs hatch out in some six days’ time when the water is at 60 degrees, and in three days or less at 72.

When I first watched them spawn I saw a group of alewives run, circle, and weave offshore, sometimes slowing up at deeper holes on the bottom, or behind rock-protected water, and then come in close, with one quick impulse. They raced in together to the gravelly, shallow edge, through water not much more than ankle deep, with a sinewy, rippling motion. Then in the shadows under an overhanging shrub there was a flipping, whirling, and thrashing, a breaking of the surface. The female slapped up against the side of a rock with a rising, shuddering motion of the body as though it were shaking everything out of it, while the others simultaneously writhed, coiled, thrashed tails, and shimmered through. Then it seemed to me that there were a few seconds in which they slowly reassembled their senses to go elsewhere. The word “deposit” was hardly active enough.

A fat pond sucker was hanging around the center of activity, following the alewives slowly like a small sunken log. It was obvious that eggs, to this crude, crass, lazy taster of a fish, were the ultimate delicacy.

There were other occasions when the alewives, in greater numbers, swam next to the shore, spawning in what might have been concentric groups for several hundred yards. Some at the edge would be coiling and thrashing while others swam on or circled back. The fish that were farther out in the pond ran nervously, with eager movements, making quick turns as if reconnoitering, or practicing for a culminating turn. They collected suddenly when spawning, with quick, spontaneous decision. I noticed that the males while running in would often shoulder or press the females on. The characteristic thrashing whirl they make is sudden and amazing, almost like a pinwheel in a short burst.

Their attendants, the pond suckers, would loll in the slow rock of the pond waters. They are large, soft-looking fish, with round, pink fins, and white, fleshy lower lips with which they go nibbling and nuzzling with snail-like speed over the bottom. The alewives by contrast are small, gray, and quick. If alewife eggs are deposited between rocks the suckers go down in after them, and, if the water is shallow enough, present the odd picture of a large topheavy body sticking down with its tail above the surface.

It is not I think, incongruous to apply the word love to a cold-blooded fish. In this spawning act there is an imperative rhythm, with grace in its preparation and power in its fulfillment.

Sometimes the war cry of gulls, in small flocks settling on the shore waters or rising up, told me where the alewives were, but most of the time I found them in accustomed places like that stretch of shore on the Upper Mill Pond. Sometimes I could hear them splashing before I saw them. They seemed to be more inclined to spawn when the water was not too rough. On the other hand, I watched them spawning when the ponds were very choppy and the small waves were pushing them as they thrashed at the edge. Once, on the south side of the pond, I noticed the suckers before the alewives. There were twenty or more lined up as if they were giving the bottom a slow going over. When groups of alewives ran in and characteristically heaved, flipped, and writhed at the edge, the big suckers would move up closer. They were so oblivious to anything but their slow gluttony that I could tap them on the head with a stick.

Occasionally a couple of alewives would give a sucker a little rush, a brief chase, as much, so it looked, by way of sport as aggressiveness. They were certainly incapable of damaging it very much, and it could not be driven away for long. An overdose of suckers in any one area seemed to discourage the alewives a little and make them move on, but on the whole they too were so intent on what they were doing that they hardly noticed anything else. They had to fulfill themselves; then, stunned, go on. The eggs were expendable.