water or deep, those myriads of tiny fish, herring and nameless smaller
ones, there the blueback would appear, and when he did so appear he
could be taken by a spoon hook.

Away beyond the Sisters--three gaunt gray rocks rising out of the sea
miles offshore in a fairway down which passed all the Alaska-bound
steamers, with a lone lighthouse on the middle rock--away north of Folly
Bay there opened wide trolling grounds about certain islands which lay
off the Vancouver Island shore,--Hornby, Lambert Channel, Yellow Rock,
Cape Lazo. In other seasons the blueback runs lingered about Squitty for
a while and then passed on to those kelp-grown and reef-strewed grounds.
This season these salmon appeared first far south of Squitty. The
trolling scouts, the restless wanderers of the fleet, who could not
abide sitting still and waiting in patience for the fish to come, first
picked them up by the Gulf Islands, very near that great highway to the
open sea known as the Strait of San Juan. The blueback pushed on the
Gray Rock to the Ballenas, as if the blackfish and seal and shark that
hung always about the schools to prey were herding them to some given
point. Very shortly after they could be taken in the shadow of the
Ballenas light the schools swarmed about the Cove end of Squitty Island,
between the Elephant on Sangster and Poor Man's Rock. For days on end
the sea was alive with them. In the gray of dawn and the reddened dusk
they played upon the surface of the sea as far as the eye reached. And
always at such times they struck savagely at a glittering spoon hook.
Beyond Squitty they vanished. Fifty and sixty salmon daily to a boat off
the Squitty headlands dwindled to fifteen and twenty at the Folly Bay
end. Those restless trollers who crossed the Gulf to Hornby and Yellow
Rock Light got little for their pains. Between Folly Bay and the
swirling tide races off the desolate head of Cape Mudge the blueback
disappeared. But at Squitty the runs held constant. There were off days,