Clad in
their argent mail of blue and green, they worked the bay to madness; they
overwhelmed the waters, surging forward in great droves and columns,
hesitating only long enough to frolic with the shifting currents, as if
rejoicing in their strength and beauty.
At times they swam with cleaving fins exposed: again they churned the
placid waters until swift combers raced across the shallow bars like tidal
waves while the deeper channels were shot through with shadowy forms or
pierced by the lightning glint of silvered bellies. They streamed in with
the flood tide to retreat again with the ebb, but there was neither haste
nor caution in their progress; they had come in answer to the breeding
call of the sea, and its exultation was upon them, driving them
relentlessly onward. They had no voice against its overmastering spell.
Mustering in the early light like a swarm of giant white-winged moths, the
fishing-boats raced forth with the flowing tide, urged by sweep and sail
and lusty sinews. Paying out their hundred-fathom nets, they drifted over
the banks like flocks of resting sea-gulls, only to come ploughing back
again deep laden with their spoils. Grimy tugboats lay beside the traps,
shrilling the air with creaking winches as they "brailed" the struggling
fish, a half-ton at a time, from the "pounds," now churned to milky foam
by the ever-growing throng of prisoners; and all the time the big plants
gulped the sea harvest, faster and faster, clanking and gnashing their
metal jaws, while the mounds of salmon lay hip-deep to the crews that fed
the butchering machines.
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