upon the lower slopes, their sky-piercing summits crowned with snow caps which endure until the sun comes to his full strength in July. The Gulf is a vista of purple-distant shore and island, of shimmering sea. And the fishermen come out of winter quarters to overhaul boats and gear against the first salmon run.

The blueback, a lively and toothsome fish, about which rages an ichthyological argument as to whether he is a distant species of the salmon tribe or merely a half-grown coho, is the first to show in great schools. The spring salmon is always in the Gulf, but the spring is a finny mystery with no known rule for his comings and goings, nor his numbers. All the others, the blueback, the sockeye, the hump, the coho, and the dog salmon, run in the order named. They can be reckoned on as a man reckons on changes of the moon. These are the mainstay of the salmon canners. Upon their taking fortunes have been built—and squandered—men have lived and died, loved and hated, gone hungry and dressed their women in silks and furs. The can of pink meat some inland chef dresses meticulously with parsley and sauces may have cost some fisherman his life; a multiplicity of cases of salmon may have produced a divorce in the packer's household. We eat this fine red fish and heave its container into the garbage tin, with no care for the tragedy or humors that have attended its getting for us.

In the spring, when life takes on a new prompting, the blueback salmon shows first in the Gulf. He cannot be taken by net or bait,—unless the bait be a small live herring. He may only be taken in commercial quantities by a spinner or a wobbling spoon hook of silver or brass or copper drawn through the water at slow speed. The dainty gear of the trout spinner gave birth to the trolling fleets of the Pacific Coast.

At first the schools pass into the Straits of San Juan. Here the joint fleets of British Columbia and of Puget Sound begin to harry them. A week or ten days later the vanguard will be off Nanaimo. And in another week they will be breaking water like trout in a still pool around the rocky base of the Ballenas Light and the kelp beds and reefs of Squitty Island.

By the time they were there, in late April, there were twenty local power boats to begin taking them, for Jack MacRae made the rounds of Squitty to tell the fishermen that he was putting on a carrier to take the first run of blueback to Vancouver markets.

They were a trifle pessimistic. Other buyers had tried it, men gambling on a shoestring for a stake in the fish trade, buyers 

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