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Spring reached the limit of her feeding migration within a hundred miles of Alaskan waters. The furious frenzy of feeding and searching for food had been developing into quieter more deliberate movement. Something new inside of Spring now ruled her. There was a gradual shifting of pressures and changing of shapes within her body cavity as eggs developed inside of her. Spring and her school began their southward movement in January. The maturing chinooks followed the coast the way they had come and by April they had reached the influence of the Columbia.
Spring's Migration Map to the Left
The school worked up the Columbia until they came to a great resting place in a deep hole behind a sandbar. This resting place was well known by anglers as well as commercial trollers. Spring had stopped feeding and her stomach was even contracting, but her senses were still conditioned to react to small things that moved within reach. Once a red-and-white plug crossed Spring so closely that she had only to move a few inches and open her jaws to suck it into her. She became a fury of action, running up toward the surface of the water. She leapt twice, her body half out of the water, then clear out so that the weight of the drowned line flung tail over head in a somersault that broke the hookhold. Free of the hook she went back to the bottom of the resting place to lie in exhaustion.
By the time Spring reached Puget Sound she and the fish travelling with her were swimming four or five miles a day. At one point the large school separated into two. Spring and the other tagged fish left the Columbia, facing into the pollution which she had so hardly come as a yearling.
They came upon a great dam and at first could not find a way through. Fishermen waited with dangling hooks while the school gathered before the dam. Finally Spring felt a light flow of water from a salmon ladder, and she passed up the ladder almost without resting, sometimes jumping from one step to another, sometimes swimming through the rush of water.
The school became smaller as the salmon drew nearer to their home streams. Eventually Spring came up against the rack that was meant to hold back the spawning salmon. The hatcheries would collect the fish and hold them until their eggs were fully ripe and strip the eggs from them. Spring was struggling to find a way through the rack while Senator Evans sadly watched. The salmon were the river, they were the country. The river is there for their use, they are its yield, growing from it, growing on it, giving themselves back to it in a cycle that no mere human farming has yet been able to match.
Once more for the fifteenth or twentieth time, Spring came up to the rack. The current was getting stronger as large clouds released windy rain. The rain found piled snow exposed on sloping rock. Snow broke away from the hanging slope and crashed downward, melting in the air as it fell. It came rushing down to the river, past the Senator's house, and piled over the dam. It washed the cut banks, drawing sand and boulders down and away from the roots of the heavy cedars. It came in steadily to the salmon rack and collected heavily and solidly against it until part of it cracked.
A large cedar tree was eventually uprooted by the rising flood. It crashed into the salmon rack leaving a thirty-foot gap in the slats through which water poured in solid force. Salmon found the gap at once and poured through it, Spring knew a stronger delight than she had ever known, boring up against the strong water with all the frenzy of eagerness pent inside her by the delay.
Spring was feeling her body change as she swam closer to Canyon pool. The eggs inside her were growing and filling more of her body.
She felt restless once in the Canyon Pool. Other females were already digging nests for their eggs. Soon Spring was well on her own nest-making and two males sat in patient waiting below her. The larger male chased away a smaller one and came along side Spring to release his milt as her eggs settled into the completed redd.
Spring immediately covered the eggs and then began digging a new nest a little further upstream. She continued this for nearly a week as the old Senator was watching and waiting, hoping to catch sight of the fish he had marked six years before. He was looking for a salmon who had a missing adipose fin, as that was how he had marked his little Spring when she was only a fry.
Then one day he saw a tired fish roll by at his feet. She had no adipose fin; he saw that clearly and knew he had seen it. It could only be an image for him alone, closed within himself, to be summoned to vivid life whenever he wished to see it.
The strong current caught Spring as she went down from the surface. It drew her to itself, rolled her over and swept her on and she no longer resisted. Her tail moved once or twice, feebly, but all the urgencies, all the desires that had driven life through her were spent. So she lay quietly across the stream flow, drifting, as no strong salmon does; and the water opened her gill plates and forced under them and she died.
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