A Big Brown Head

As the day wore on it began to rain, and as the dampness soaked through us we amused ourselves by watching the salmon, which were splashing over the riffles, flopping, twisting, fighting ever onward up the stream. The silver horde was coming in. The procession was endless; the striving beyond anything else in the world. Overhead the eagles sat and watched. Once a large mink dashed across the stream. The winter wrens sang and scoop out salmon with their paws. "I never heard anything so ridiculous," our guide fumed. "They always catch them in the way you saw this morning. They dash out into the riffle and put one paw down on the salmon—if they're quick enough. Then they grab the fish in their mouths and walk off. Anybody who tells you anything else is crazy."

We mentally noted a number of would-be scientists for asylums. The next two days were uneventful. Then we moved the yacht to the mouth of Swan Cove and made it the base of operations. I had twisted my shoulder, which kept me from hunting, and Mrs. Pack, who had been waiting for her turn, took over my cameras. One day the hunters got into the canoe and paddled to the head of the cove. The tide was going out, but there was still enough water to reach the farther shore. As they landed the dense flocks of Bonaparte gulls that had lined the flats rose with a great clattering, ravens croaked, and crows, which had assembled as if a feast was soon to take place, noisily protested. The dozen or so bald-headed eagles that were soaring or perched upon isolated mussel-covered rocks wheeled away.

The three of us, with cameras adjusted for instant use, started across the flats toward the mouth of a little creek. Before they had reached the semi-protection of the tall waving sedges, first one big brown head and then another rose in the midst of the waving grasses. Like two huge woolly teddy bears out of some children's book they looked. Then they caught the human scent, and were off at full speed, their humping brown backs appearing and disappearing above the grass as they sped toward the protection of the timber. The first creek proved barren of salmon—hence no bears—so the little party went on to the next, where near the edge of the tall blue-gray spruces and by the side of the rushing stream, a halt was called and the three hunters crouched in the midst of the grass and cow parsnip.

There they constructed a hasty blind, cutting down the tops of any grasses that would be in the way of a clear view of any bear that might come out of the woods or across the flats. They prepared for bears only in the direction from which their scent could not be detected. Hardly was the blind completed when our guide whispered, "There comes one from up the stream!"