The run

I think one of the greatest challenges is to watch each bounded living thing with care for its particularity, as far as we can go, to find out we can go no farther. Flower, fish or leaf, child or man—they take none of our suggestions as to rules. Each has a strong language that we never quite learn. No matter how many times I try to describe the alewife by the uses of human speech, or classify its habits, its intrinsic perfection resists me. It is something else. It goes on defying my own inquiring sense of mystery.

The beauty of a little alewife held between the fingers, struggling out of water, dying, by human arbitrary reach, becomes the subject of thought and language, creative protestation in themselves. But the two-inch creature makes a mightier protest than my conscious sight of it ... wild, fragile, vibrant, shivering with a quickness that will die out in a matter of seconds. It is a marvelously knit animal, compact, flexible, shining, with its tiny meshed scales that interlock the light, iridescent silver like the adults, green, yellow, purple, receiving earth and sky. And the eyes, wholly black, interminably deep. By a chance scoop of my hand it is out in the long killing air, the little vibrancy out with the bird-gray clouds, a leashed arrow straining for the stars, that have their running too in the circle of immensity.

Fragile they are, and powerful, a wonderful work of which so many are made as to afford them death as well as life. Let us say, arbitrarily, that 150,000 female alewives lay their eggs in the ponds above Stony Brook each year. After the pond suckers take their share and the remaining eggs hatch out, then the young alewives run the gauntlet of their first few days and weeks of life. The toll taken would seem incredible if it were not also natural and expected. From billions the young are reduced to millions.

If a run is to keep up over the years, there has to be an annual survival, or “escapement,” of somewhere between 3 and 7 per cent. Say a hundred million hatched, out of the original nine billion eggs. Five per cent of that, or five million, have to reach salt water in order to assure a normal spawning migration in three or four years’ time. From that figure, of course, you subtract the alewife mortality during their years of growth in the sea. I claim nothing for my calculations, but, rough as they are, they may help to indicate how much potential goes into the end result.

It is not only the alewives that are provided for by these great numbers, but the predators which hunt them. The alewives are only part of a great complex of need. Sometimes I have watched the fry as they swam out across the Brewster flats on an ebb tide, running in shallow water from the mouth of Paine’s Creek. In September, before they have migrated south, crowds of terns, along with the resident herring gulls and ring-billed gulls, would be hovering over the water and diving or flocking in as the alewives appeared. I watched the constant, sinewy beat of their wings as they held against a west wind. The sky was swept way up with long cirrus clouds. The young alewives were running into death and beyond it, in a windy world that teemed with risk and creation.

A friend of mine, who worked in the vicinity some years ago, watched the tiny fish coming down above the old mill one autumn day. He saw some night herons standing in the lip of the dam gobbling the “poor little devils” up as they went over. He was amazed at their stomach capacity. Then he noticed that at the rocky falls where the pool ended above the water wheel and seining pool only a few were dropping over as compared to the thousands coming in from the pond, and the toll the quawks took did not account for it. Somehow, somewhere, in this short stretch of water, they were disappearing into a gulf, or, more properly, a maw. It didn’t seem right. It made him angry, although: “You can’t get mad at nature because that’s the way it is.” He got a hook and line, baited it, threw it into the pool; and in two hours he had fished out seventy-six eels.

These slithering, hoselike creatures are still there in season waiting to prey on the fish. It does not take long as a rule to see one coming up at the edge of the bank, though I have never seen them in any great quantity, because they usually lie hidden in the muddy bottom. Sometimes you can see a small group of eels of varying sizes in one of the resting pools of the fishway below the road, where the little alewives as they go down must almost fall into their mouths. With broad-ribboned tails on one end of their long-finned bodies and pointed snouts on the other, they weave and flip over, arch and float in the water. Partly because of the narrow space, and their tendency to stay or be caught in the turbulent pools, many of the little fish cannot avoid being eaten. They have only the safety of numbers.

Having developed a certain affection for the race by this time, I must say I had feelings of pity for these little ones, helplessly tossed in and out of death. They are fragile, like the young of other animals. They will not last more than about three-quarters of a minute out of water. But they are not ones to know or care whether I think of them or not. They are parts of a great ordered hunger, and a vast provision for things. They are both victims and executioners, the feeders and the fed upon, in the intercommunication of every single plant and animal in the natural world. There is nothing for affection in that order perhaps, unless we conceive of it in terms of love as well as annihilation.

I have followed them out and seen where their consistent motion, their automatic reaction to the waters they swim in, has brought them to grief. It serves for survival and also for disaster. When the young alewives get out to salt water on an ebb tide, they are not able to calculate how long it will last, or so we presume, and whether they should move out soon or stay behind. The result is that many are left stranded and wildly skittering in the rivulets that thread the sandy flats at extreme low tide. From the time the outgoing waters of Paine’s Creek begin to get low, they are also subject to attack by crowds of herons and gulls—but supposing they survive that and still have a chance in a matter of an hour or an hour and a half to reach deeper water? It is very often the case that because of their habit of heading back against the current they delay too long and lose their chance of escape. They are caught high and dry on the sand or in water so shallow that they are unable to move on, and so are easy prey for the birds. I have followed them through low water and seen them turn back, just as they had a chance to follow one waning current to join another and so out to safety; but when I use the word safety I have to remind myself that the flow goes where it will.

Now it is possible that you might interpret this behavior as a reluctance to leave the inland waters. They have a drive in them to go to salt water eventually, but they may be in no hurry. In some areas they stay in estuaries or tributaries for a long time. At Paine’s Creek and the channel above it they may have no alternative but to be carried out on the ebb tide.

When they finally reach Cape Cod Bay they probably school in fairly shallow shoal areas where the water is warmest, inviting bass or bluefish of course, to “come and get it.”

“Shiners” some call them, confusing alewife fry with fresh-water shiners, of which there are a great many species, but shine they do. In the summer at low tide the bathers try to catch them with their hands, or jump after them where they glitter in the pools. Sometimes there are trails of the little fish left behind by those gluttons the gulls. In death they look frail, limp, almost diaphanous. No longer so reflecting and vibrant, their bodies are a pale silver-white like the underside of fallen poplar leaves. Some of the heads are left uneaten along with the headless bodies strewn in the rivulets along the ridged sands. Sometimes their bodies are ripped down, gashed, leaving raw stripes on them. These wounds look no less cruel and vivid because of their tiny size.