UP HERRING RUN

The habit of migrating is not confined to birds. To some extent it is common to all animals that have to move about for food, whether they live in the water or upon the land. The warm south wind that sweeps northward in successive waves of bluebirds and violets, of warblers and buttercups, moves with a like magic power over the sea. It touches the ocean with the same soft hand that wakes the flowers and brings the birds, and as these return to upland and meadow, the waters stir and the rivers and streams become alive with fish. Waves of sturgeon, shad, and herring come in from unknown regions of the ocean, and pass up toward the head waters of the rivers and through the smaller streams inland to the fresh-water lakes.

Waves of herring, did I say? It is a torrent of herring that rushes up Herring Run, a spring freshet from the loosened sources of the life of the sea.

This movement of the fish is mysterious; no more so than the migration of the birds, perhaps, but it seems more wonderful to me. Bobolink's yearly round trip from Cuba to Canada may be, and doubtless is, a longer and a more perilous journey than that made by the herring or by any other migrant of the sea; but Bobolink's road and his reasons for traveling are not altogether hidden. He has the cold winds and failing food to drive him, and the older birds to pilot him on his first journey South, and the love of home to draw him back when the spring comes North again. Food and weather were the first and are still the principal causes of his unrest. The case of the herring seems to be different. Neither food nor weather influences them. They come from the deep sea to the shallow water of the shore to find lodgment for their eggs and protection for their young; but what brings them from the salt into fresh water, and what drives these particular herring up Herring Run instead of up some other stream? Will some one please explain?

Herring Run is the natural outlet of Whitman's Pond. It runs down through Weymouth about three fourths of a mile to Weymouth Back River, thence to the bay and on to the sea. It is a crooked, fretful little stream, not over twenty feet wide at the most, very stony and very shallow.

About a hundred years ago, as near as the oldest inhabitants can remember, a few men of Weymouth went down to Taunton with their ox-teams, and caught several barrels of herring as they came up the Taunton River to spawn. These fish they brought alive to Weymouth and liberated in Whitman's Pond; and these became the ancestors of the herring which have been returning to Whitman's Pond for the last century of Aprils.

As soon as the weather warms in the spring the herring make their appearance in the Run. A south wind along in April is sure to fetch them; and from the first day of their arrival, for about a month, they continue to come, on their way to the pond. But they may be delayed for weeks by cold or storms. Their sensitiveness to changes of temperature is quite as delicate as a thermometer's. On a favorable day—clear and sunny with a soft south wind—they can be seen stemming up-stream by hundreds. Suddenly the wind shifts, blowing up cold from the east, and long before the nicest instrument registers a fraction of change in the temperature of the Run, the herring have turned tail to and scurried off down-stream to the salt water.

They seem to mind nothing so much as this particular change of the wind and the cold that follows. It may blow or cloud over, and even rain, without affecting them, if only the storms are from the right quarter and it stays warm. A cold east wind always hurries them back to deep water, where they remain until the weather warms up again. Late in May, however, when they must lay their eggs, they ascend the stream, and nothing short of a four-foot dam will effectually stop their progress to the pond.

They are great swimmers. It is a live fish indeed that makes Whitman's Pond. There are flying-fish and climbing-fish, fish that walk over land and fish that burrow through the mud; but in an obstacle race, with a swift stream to stem, with rocks, logs, shallows, and dams to get over, you may look for a winner in the herring.

He will get up somehow—right side up or bottom side up, on his head or on his tail, swimming, jumping, flopping, climbing, up he comes! A herring can almost walk on his tail. I have watched them swim up Herring Run with their backs half out of water; and when it became too shallow to swim at all, they would keel over on their sides and flop for yards across stones so bare and dry that a mud-minnow might easily have drowned upon them for lack of water.

They are strong, graceful, athletic fish, quite the ideal fish type, well balanced and bewilderingly bony. The herring's bones are his Samson hair—they make his strength and agility possible; and besides that, they are vast protection against the frying-pan.

When the herring are once possessed of the notion that it is high time to get back to the ancestral pond and there leave their eggs, they are completely mastered by it. They are not to be stopped nor turned aside. Like Mussulmans toward Mecca they struggle on, until an impassable dam intervenes or the pond is reached. They seem to feel neither hunger, fear, nor fatigue, and, like the salmon of Columbia River, often arrive at their spawning-grounds so battered and bruised that they die of their wounds. They become frantic when opposed. In Herring Run I have seen them rush at a dam four feet high, over which tons of water were pouring, and, by sheer force, rise over two feet in the perpendicular fall before being carried back. They would dart from the foam into the great sheet of falling water, strike it like an arrow, rise straight up through it, hang an instant in mid-fall, and be hurled back, and killed often, on the rocks beneath. Had there been volume enough of the falling water to have allowed them a fair swimming chance, I believe that they could have climbed the dam through the perpendicular column.

Under the dam, and a little to one side, a "rest," or pen, has been constructed into which the herring swim and are caught. The water in this pen is backed up by a gate a foot high. The whole volume of the stream pours over this gate and tears down a two-foot sluiceway with velocity enough to whirl along a ten-pound rock that I dropped into the box. The herring run this sluice and jump the gate with perfect ease. Twelve thousand of them have leaped the gate in a single hour; and sixty thousand of them went over it in one day and were scooped from the pen. The fish always keep their heads up-stream, and will crowd into the pen until the shallow water is packed with them. When no more can squeeze in, a wire gate is put into the sluice, the large gates of the dam are closed, and the fish are ladled out with scoop-nets.

The town sold the right to a manufacturing company to build this dam in the Run, together with the sole right to catch the herring, on condition that yearly a certain number of the fish be carted alive to the pond in order to spawn; and with this further condition, that every Weymouth householder be allowed to buy four hundred herring at twenty-five cents per hundred.

A century ago four hundred herring to a household might not have been many herring; but things have changed in a hundred years. To-day no householder, saving the keeper of the town house, avails himself of this generous offer. I believe that a man with four hundred pickled herring about his premises to-day would be mobbed. Pickled herring, scaly, shrunken, wrinkled, discolored, and strung on a stick in the woodshed, undoes every other rank and bilious preserve that I happen to know. One can easily credit the saying, still current in the town, that if a native once eats a Weymouth herring he will never after leave the place.

Usually the fish first to arrive in the spring are males. These precede the females, or come along with them in the early season, while the fish to arrive last are nearly all females. The few that are taken alive to the pond deposit their eggs within a few days, and, after a little stay, descend the Run, leap the dam, and again pass out into the ocean. The eggs are placed along the shallow edges of the pond, among the reeds and sedges. At first they float around in a thin, viscid slime, or jelly, which finally acts as a glue to fasten them to the grass. Here, left without parental care, the eggs hatch and the fry wiggle off and begin at once to shift for themselves.

How hard they fare! In her sacrifice of young fish, nature seems little better than a bloody Aztec. I happened to be at Bay Side, a sturgeon fishery on the Delaware Bay, when a sturgeon was landed whose roe weighed ninety pounds. I took a quarter of an ounce of these eggs, counted them, and reckoned that the entire roe numbered 3,168,000 eggs. Yet, had these eggs been laid, not more than one to a million would have developed to maturity. So it is with the herring. Millions of their eggs are devoured by turtles, frogs, pickerel, and eels. Indeed, young herring are so important a food-supply for fresh-water fish that the damming of streams and the indiscriminate slaughter of the spawners now seriously threatens certain inland fishing interests. Many waters have been re-stocked with herring as a source of food for more valuable fish.

August comes, and the youngsters, now about the length of your finger, grown tired of the fresh water and the close margins of the pond, find their way to the Run, and follow their parents down its rough bed to a larger life in the sea. Here again hungry enemies await them. In untold numbers they fall a prey to sharks, cod, and swordfish. Yet immense schools survive, and thousands will escape even the fearful steam nets of the menhaden-fishermen and see Herring Run again.

If only we could conjure one of them to talk! What a deep-sea story he could tell! What sights, what wanderings, what adventures! But the sea keeps all her tales. We do not know even if the herring from Whitman's Pond live together as an individual clan or school during their ocean life. There are certain indications that they do. There is not much about a Whitman's Pond herring to distinguish it from a Taunton River or a Mystic Pond herring,—the Weymouth people declare they can tell the difference with their eyes shut,—though I believe the fish themselves know one another, and that those of each pond keep together. At least, when the inland running begins, the schools are united, for then no Whitman's Pond herring is found with a Taunton River band.

In late summer the fry go down-stream; but whether it is they that return the next spring, or whether it is only the older fish, is not certain. It is certain that no immature fish ever appear in the spring. The naturalists are almost agreed that the herring reach maturity in eighteen months. In that case it will be two years before the young appear in the Run. The Weymouth fishermen declare, however, that they do not seek the pond until the third spring; for they say that when the pond was first stocked, it was three years before any herring, of their own accord, made their way back to spawn.

Meantime where and how do they live? All the ocean is theirs to roam through, though even the ocean has its belts and zones, its barriers which the strongest swimmers cannot pass. The herring are among the nomads of the sea; but let them wander never so far through the deep, you may go to the Run in April and expect to see them. Here, over the stones and shallows by which they found their way to the sea, they will come struggling back. No mistake is ever made, no variation, no question as to the path. On their way up the river from the bay they will pass other fresh-water streams, as large, even larger, than Herring Run. But their instinct is true. They never turn aside until they taste the Run, and though myriads enter, a half-mile farther up the river not a herring will be found.

It is easy to see how the ox might know his owner, and the ass his master's crib; but how a herring, after a year of roving through the sea, knows its way up Herring Run to the pond, is past finding out.