The run

The fish kept moving up. I watched them swinging back and forth with the current, great-eyed, sinewy, probing, weaving, their dorsal fins cutting the surface, their ventral fins fanning, their tails flipping and sculling. In the thick, interbalanced crowd there would suddenly be a scattered dashing, coming as quickly as cat’s-paws flicking the summer seas. They may have moved by “reflex” rather than conscious thought, but what marvelous professionals they were in that!

The cold raw winds of April had heeled back, and May swung on. There were an increasing number of days with the wind from the southwest, smelling of sunny springtime. The local paper had it that the temperature averaged a high of 66.6 degrees Fahrenheit and a low of 44.2 in the week between the second and the ninth of May. The following week the average rose a little, going to between 67.5 and 47 degrees. The first reported striped bass, a three-and-a-half-pounder, was caught on the Cape the eighth of the month.

The willows that hung over the Herring Run were budding and flowering out, lacing and fringing with many beads, a yellow-green; and leaves of the red maples began to unfold, a light coppery russet color, hanging like limp claws—and elsewhere, on higher ridges and other roads, the oaks in their leafy variety of pink, yellow, gray and pale green, were starting their fires with tenderness. Clouds of the shad-blow’s lacy white blossoms came out everywhere between pitch pines and oaks, to last only a few days and be replaced by beach plums whose flowers burst out of their sheaths like popping corn.

The procession, down the brook and around its bend, made other rushing sounds above the noise of the flow itself. The gulls in the valley were crying out with “ho!” and “ha!” and “yi!” The shadow of a gull flying high over us fell across the water and the alewives rushed to the side. The backs of some of them were cruelly gashed. There was a dead one on the bank, stiff and dry, flatly reflecting the blue in the sky like an unpolished knife blade.

They were close-packed going up through the ladders, herding, slipping, slanting, struggling in relation to each other. I grabbed one out with my hands. It shuddered, was almost still for a second or two, like a man with his wind knocked out, then plunged in my hands and slipped out onto the bank. It thrashed there in the grass, a twelve-inch fish, with a gray-green back, and silver sides and belly that reflected the magnificent surfaces of May, with grass, sun, and blue sky intruding through the overhanging leaves and the brown earth. It shone with violet, yellow-green, white and brown, pink and blue. It had an inclusive majesty, a great natural art.

Its silver scales are large, like iridescent reflecting coins: and in the water the alewife is able to alter the pigmentation of its skin so as to blend with the background. It is able to do this very quickly, so that it changes in color as it moves up the stream to correspond with a darker or lighter bottom ... part of the whole various pattern of adaptation which the fish show to the water around them.

During the course of evolution brain development among the fishes has been slow. What brain power they have is closely related to their sense organs, concentrated on their whole bodily co-ordination; in which, so far as water action is concerned, they are man’s superiors. An alewife’s body is marvelously fitted to situation—peace or turbulence, light or dark, flood and ebb, ripple or rile. This inhabitant of the sea weaves up through the overhanging springtime, and seems a part of it, experienced as to its flowering.

For it is a salt-water fish, as I sometimes had to remind myself later between the ponds and the Bay, although there is a landlocked variety; and as such it is part of a prodigious tribe. As a member of the herring family—the Clupeidae, it is related to the sea herring, sprats, shads, pilchards, and menhadens. The sea herring is one of the most important food fish in the world. In Europe whole societies were affected by its shifts in abundance. Loss of control over herring fisheries was instrumental in the breakup of the Hanseatic League. In 1881 Thomas Henry Huxley said: “Man, in fact, is but one of a vast co-operative society of herring catchers.” The yearly catch is enormous. One school of herring may run not into millions but billions of individual fish; though Huxley may have exaggerated the capacity of the herring population to keep its level in the face of human demands.

To mention another important relative of the alewife, the common or American shad is also a food fish, being something of a delicacy, prized highly for its flesh and roe. It is a larger fish, weighing between six and nine pounds; but it is not so abundant as the alewife.

The menhaden fishery is the largest in the country in terms of weight. Some 800,000,000 pounds of this fish are harvested annually from the Atlantic and Gulf coasts; its present fate is to be turned into fish meal, scrap, and oil. In addition many tons of ground-up menhaden, or “pogies,” are used by salt-water anglers to attract bluefish, tuna, or mackerel.

All these herring species are similar in appearance, with silvery scales, easily rubbed off, thin, deep bodies, and tails quite deeply forked.

The alewife belongs to a group of great age in the earth’s history, and one which has survived, for one thing, by reason of its numbers, and not by any skill in speed or individual pugnacity. It depends on the crowd rhythm for perpetuation. Its salt-water whereabouts are comparatively unknown, although it is thought it may not go very far afield; but in a run of alewives you might sense not numbers only, but something of the sea’s capacious demands that made these fish to measure. Green, gray, silver, they wear its colors, and seem built to nose into its space, or be carried with its moods.

Are there no individuals among them? It is perhaps no term to apply with so manifestly united a company. In any case we are deceived if we try to translate ourselves, our ability to choose, our eyes for pattern and variation, into an animal that can see us at best as an occasional, strange, blurred image appearing above the bank, and to whom everything but the water world is unknown. In a sense we know too little, and so do they, to discuss the matter.

Yet anyone, with a slipping, plunging alewife in his hands, knows it in some degree for its uniqueness. This green-backed, silver-sided water animal, smooth, supple, and muscular, with a sail-like fin on its back is definite enough. Its body is convex-sided, coming to a thin edge at the belly, shaped like shellfish, seeds, or Indian artifacts. From its undershot jaw to its tail, it is clearly a tough fish, and in our experience an adaptable one that knows its way.

This is the “sawbelly” all right. You can very easily feel the serrations, or little teeth, with your fingers—it is one good way of telling alewives from sea herring in the dark. But the name “big-eyed” is perhaps most dramatically true of the alewife. Its black, round, shining eyes are very prominent in proportion to its small head and small mouth. They are large black disks like certain water-worn rocks, or they are great bubbles coming up from a dark depth. I fancied, seeing a tiny image of myself in the alewife’s eye, that I was reflected in a deep, impenetrable well.

It is known that a fish’s eye is somewhat like ours in that it has a lens, an iris, a cornea, retina, and optic nerve; but that it is designed to see under water, which ours is not. In J. H. Norman’s History of Fishes, he writes: “The eye, as is well known, acts after the manner of a photographic camera, the two essential parts being the screen or retina at the back, and the lens at the front, which projects an image of the outside world on the screen. The lens of a land vertebrate is somewhat flat and convex on both sides, but in the fish it is a globular body, the extreme convexity being a necessity under water because the substance of the lens is not very much denser than the fluid medium in which the fish lives. The space between lens and retina is filled with a transparent jelly-like substance, the vitreous humor. The transparent outer wall of the eye, the cornea, is somewhat flatter in fishes, and the space between this and the lens is filled by the watery, aqueous humor. In land vertebrates the iris of the eye is capable of great contraction, and, acting like the diaphragm of a camera, regulates the amount of light allowed to enter the eye. In fishes it generally surrounds a rounded pupil, and has comparatively little power of contraction.”

I should add that an alewife’s eye is somewhat fixed, and not capable of much movement.

Back of the eyes and mouth are the gill covers that protect the gills underneath, which are weak and blood-filled, dark-red overlapping layers, like petals, four on each side. As the fish’s gill covers open and close, water passes over the gills, taking oxygen into the blood stream. The alewife’s heart, which pumps blood to the gills, is located directly below them.

This is a plankton eater, although it will eat shrimp, small fish, or young eels, on occasion. It has no teeth, or such a semblance of tiny, weak ones, back in its mouth, that they are of little use. The particles of food that come through its mouth are strained through a device known as gill rakers, which act as sieves or filters, in the form of fine hairlike growths mounted on the gill arches, the bony structures on which the gills are also arranged.

A female alewife can be recognized fairly readily by its size. On the average the males run from ten to eleven inches and the females from eleven to twelve, and the males are of course lighter. The proportion of males to females on the inland run seems to be about fifty-fifty.

Alewives weigh anywhere between eight and ten ounces. Part of the weight of both sexes during their spawning migration is accounted for by the roe; in fact, their ovaries and testes may become so enlarged as to fill up a large part of their bodies. The egg sacs of the female vary in color from pink to yellow or yellow-orange, depending on their stage of development. The milt, sometimes called soft roe, of the male, is white and pink.

To sketch a fish so generally is scarcely to know it, but even if I were able to give a good account of its complex skeleton down to the last bone, or discuss all the actions of its nervous system as known so far, I would not have done enough. Our bodies may have chemicals in common with them, but we will never know the fish.

The alewife I took from the water eluded me. Cold-blooded fish, warm-blooded man, the water’s triumph caught by the alien air. It slipped my hand and knowledge. “An aquatic vertebrate?” A mystery, though I recognized a life that shone with vibrant persistence, one of nature’s particularized energies, a wild texture as old as the animal world, a food that was the beneficent matter of all struggle and greed.

Were there more connections between us that needed exploration? How much fright, how much nerve-threaded darkness, how much throbbing electric quickness might not be receiving me in the distance of that fixed eye? Perhaps we strangers all meet somewhere in each other’s sight.