II
Arrival
A week or so later, early in April, I finally saw my first alewife of the season. It had the brook to itself where I caught sight of it—a cloudy form running upcurrent—and when I went closer I could see it probing the rippling, beating waters, with all that fish articulation of separate fins together, fanning slightly, waving, threading, and steering, the fixed eyes staring on, its whole body weaving with the flow. It is a surprisingly large fish, seen for the first time in a narrow stream. Its length may be anywhere between ten and thirteen inches, and it has a heavy look for those who are used to sunfish and minnows.
An alewife was no novelty to me, but this one seemed to decide the year’s direction. It started things out. I saw it for the first time, as child or genius does who finds some whole deep image in the air, or radiant clarity in the water. I had the feeling too that I was looking at a professional from an old water world, a new agent of old assurance, deserving profound respect. After all, it had been coming back here thousands of years before me, in the migrant history of its race, and by this time must have mastered its passage. And as a natural event, a part of the spring’s development, it seemed to announce that bud scales on shrubs and trees would start to crack and fall away to let the inner shoots out that unfold as leaves and feed on the sun. It said that flies and wasps and spiders would come out of winter hiding and sleeping, that the song sparrows would begin to sing in the willows and viburnum bushes along the banks of Stony Brook.
There is something exciting and strange about the sudden appearance of new life in the spring, coming from another region, another climate. The terns or plovers that appear along the shore bring an unknown experience with them. They seem to start in or to assemble according to some tremendous demand which is in no way restricted to seasonal lags. They recur; they are recognizable; and yet they bring in endless tides and vivid journeys, being a part of that remarkable projection of nature in which a multitude of lives use their skill in navigation, their plumage, their scales, fins, and various senses, their particular drives toward fulfillment.
Migration is universal. That which prompts animals to emerge from their burrows, or to start moving over the ocean floor, to fly north, to swim into brackish or fresh water from salt, or even, like a ladybird beetle, to move a short distance from a forest floor to a meadow, must have a world-wide energy to it, with lines of communication that reach everywhere ahead and invite the human drive for knowledge. But in a strict sense there are two accepted definitions of migration for the animals. There is return migration, of which the alewives provide an example. Fish or birds in this category travel seasonally from one area to another, usually coming back to some home region after varying lapses of time. Otherwise, there is emigration, in which animals leave their home base but never come back again, lemmings and locusts being good examples. Both definitions, I should think, can prove that home stretches farther than we know.
Why had this pioneer of an alewife, and the others that had come before it, arrived so soon? It is possible that they had migrated up Stony Brook before. All mature alewives—a majority seem to be four years old—are moved by sexual development and swim inshore when the temperature of the fresh or brackish water has turned warmer than the salt water from whence they came. The earliest comers often appear to be larger in size. This suggests, at least, that they may be older and that they have spawned in that run before. The latest to come seem to be the smallest, and therefore the youngest. Alewives, like other fish, seem to have a tendency to keep growing, though there may be a maximum size reached in their fifth or sixth year. The only conclusive way to tell their age is by microscopic examination of their scales, which reflect each spawning year and its physical changes.
Work done by Keith Havey on alewives in Maine shows a minimum of alewives spawning at three years of age and the largest number in the four- or five-year-old range. No scales were found which reflected more than two spawnings. As to size, he gives a sampling of their length in inches which graduates up from 11.25 inches in the three-year-old fish to 11.80 in the four-year-olds, 12.35 in five-year-olds, and 12.80 in the six. The female alewife, incidentally, is a little larger than the male.
Possibly then, these early alewives at Stony Brook were the oldest, and because of that they might have been the most practiced at finding their way. I am told that, with new fish ladders, observers have noticed the earliest arrivals seeking and passing through them more readily on the second year after construction than on the first, which leads to the belief that they have been through before. Age may improve the alewife in prowess, though it is a fish of crowds, and not one to strike out much on its own. The “homing instinct,” still unfathomed, but about which I will try to say more later on, brings them back to their streams of origin with almost united force.
So my lone alewife marked the greatness it preceded, though it was early, in early and still undecided weather. At first the sleet, hail, flurries of wet snow came in profusion, stabbing between the sunshine, as though nature, before making its next terms known, was full of passionate unease. Then wings of warm rain would beat in over the Cape, to slash and curve and follow along trees and houses, through inland ponds, across the ridges and hollows, and the wind poured behind in great gusts, trying, it seemed, to shake a tight world loose. Underneath the struggling air many things waited for more chances in the sun, but under the stars, on foggy evenings or bright days, the singing of peepers in pools, ponds, or boggy land would swell and widen everywhere.
Then as the month kept advancing, that which came out began to stay, and to expand, in variety, flexibility, and strength. The wheels of the world seemed to turn more brightly. I felt a suggestion in each changing tree, in the loosening ground, the kinetic light and air, of new unfoldings, kaleidoscopic discoveries. The formality, and power in the coming on of spring surprised me, as if it had never come before.
More winds began to blow from the southwest, the prevailing wind during late spring and summer. Yellow fingertips of bloom showed on the whip-long branches of the forsythias. The temperature edged toward the fifties, and there were deep new meetings between the moles and the worms. One day many tree swallows began to flit and dive low around the Herring Run. They skimmed along the surface of the water, then sailed up again. Their bellies were as white as a frog’s or horned pout’s, dark wings and tails trimly cut, backs almost a tropical blue in the light above the water, reflecting green at some angles, or a green-blue-purple the color of mackerel. Their flight dipped with the up and down flying insects they were chasing. When some insect, unseen to me, spiraled straight up along the banks, a swallow would leave its water gliding, twist suddenly, beating its wings, and almost spiral after.
That original source of energy the sun, which men might still worship in good faith, was bringing out new facets to shine abroad. The web of life was stretching to its light. Birds, insects, plants, and fish were beginning to move to its changing measure; though if some days were warm with a budding, fringing, easing expectation, others were still raw, wet, and contracting, bringing winter back to flesh and fiber. We kept looking for the alewives. Cars would slow up at the Herring Run. The drivers peered down to see the curving, dark forms of a few fish holding up against the current. Then they drove on. Or they got out, saw nothing, and went away in disappointment. But suddenly one morning toward the middle of April the crowd of alewives had so increased as to cause an inescapable excitement in the vicinity. The water was thick with fish, their fins showing on the surface. It was almost as it had been a hundred years before when the whole population would cry out at their coming, “The herring are running!”