Argosy All-Story Weekly, June 13, 1925 — page 156: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

628 and black, and the tail of him was forked— in short, he had attained to the style and title of a “ parr,” or “ smolt,” or ‘ samlet,” a young salmon who had never seen the sea, and his transverse dusky bars were his , badge. When once he had been to sea those bands would vanish. With greater strength and a new hunger came a greater desire for adventure. Our parr was no longer content fo cower under stones, living on a sack of yolk.. He would see the world. All around him were hundreds of parr do- ing the same thing, but, unlike him, not at all succeeding, for even at that age he gave promise of greater things than the majority, and was a bit more virile than they, if that were possible. The larva of some water insect, wriggling by on the current, caught his eye. He saw it across the ten-foot circle of light at the surface, and, shooting out like a drawn streak, caught it. In an instant he was back again behind his particular pebble. It was his first “kill,” cleanly done, too. A mature fish could have executed it no better. Three times he dashed out and made his kill at passing larva with like results, but at the fourth attempt the finger of Fate de- scended upon him. Without warning, a medium-sized trout— that had been lying under the bank, watch- ing the hundreds of adventurous young parr making their first kills—rushed at him with open mouth. It was, however, just precise- ly that gleam of golden-bronze, as the trout reflected the upper light, that saved our parr. That telltale gleam flashed to his quick eyes and—he was gone. The trout had done something in the way of getting from one place to another himself, but even at that stage our parr proved that the salmon is the king of swimmers, which none can beat. : He looked like a thin, dark line which had been precipitated from gravel to mid- stream, and the baffled trout, after following a few yards, turned back. There were plenty more parr where that one came from, anyhow. Our parr, however, was in diffi- culties instantly again. His rush had car- ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY, ried him out into midstream, where he had never ventured before. Here he got the full force of the current, and it was nothing to Jaugh at. It would have beaten a man. It did beat our parr. Instinct told him that to attempt to swim against it for any time meant suffocation— any fish will tell you this axiom, by the way—and he could not tread water, so he went whirling downstream, not pleased at all, but glad enough if he could steer end on, and not go helplessly twirling broadside, like a dead caterpillar, to strand on the nearest bank, or foolishly break his back on a bowlder. That journey was exactly two miles in length, and for a first journey not what one might call altogether dull. He missed the lunge of a red-throated diver’s beak—they would have called her a loon in America— nearly left one blade of his forked tail in the mandibles of a canary-capped widgeon —which is a species of wild duck—went clean between the jaws of a crafty old pike, hoary with accumulated sin—what was he doing there, anyway, I wonder?—-and exe- cuted a lightning glide and an electric quick ‘“ waggle’ in and out among half a dozen respectable sized trout anchored behind bowlders, like ships head to stream, just waiting right there until the flood floated down. Oh, no! That journey was no Sunday afternoon sleep, not by a hatful, and only about the slickest baby fish that ever flicked a tail-blade could have got through with it outside the folk he met. The stream was broader here down below, slower and deeper, and there were grand old buttressed trees that grew along the banks, and held out mighty, shadowing arms over the water, as priests that deliver a blessing —they did, a blessing of shade. But thicker and closer vegetation meant insects, and insects, some of them, are, from a baby fish’s point of view, the very devil, and our parr had soon to learn that the world held other “ die quicks ” beside fish and birds. Searching quietly under the bank for a “nifty ” hiding place, whence to swoop out upon anything killable that passed, he was aware of a phenomenon. It looked some- cCoOmiclbooks.c©