The Spawning Run by William Humphrey

Author:William Humphrey [Humphrey, William]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781504006347
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2015-02-16T16:00:00+00:00

wales, may 25

Again all night long every few minutes that woman screamed, and again we were the only ones to notice it. Only long familiarity with it can explain the self-composure of our fellow guests. That, or the well-known British self-discipline. As for me, I don’t think I could ever get used to it. It curdles my American blood. The first time it happened I bolted from bed and into the hall again. I was still there listening for it to come again when poor old Holloway emerged from his room and went tiptoeing past in his pajamas. He gave me his wink, and, in my amazement, I believe I may have returned it.

The mating of salmon, concluded:

It is concluded, all but. That was it. A union without contact between the partners, a crouch, a quiver, a mutual gape. It not only doesn’t look like much fun, from the human point of view; when you remember what a long way they’ve come, past what snares and ambushes, over almost insuperable obstacles, how they have gone hungry and grown disfigured, and knowing as you do that it will prove fatal, it seems pitifully unworthy of the trouble. A cheat. There is worse to come.

Friends, if you have tears prepare to shed them now. I know I nearly did when I got to the chapter in Professor Jones’s book in which in cold ichthyological prose he relates the betrayal, the ignominy which now overtakes this grand fish.

For the sake of this moment the salmon has swum maybe fifteen hundred miles through nobody knows what perils of the deep. He has—and he is one of the few that have—eluded the trawlers’ nets and the fishmonger’s cold slate slab, or, more ignoble end still, the cannery. He will not have come this far without having felt the barb and fought free of some of the many Jock Scotts and Black Doses and Silver Doctors dangled temptingly before him. He has leaped twelve-foot-high falls. He has survived gill maggots, fin worms, leeches, boils, white rot, white spot, gill catarrh, fungus, carp lice, sea lice. For this he has fasted, for this he will die. Now he is about to achieve fulfillment of his desire. The female has finished her cutting. With her anal fin she has felt out the redd and found it satisfactory. He now hangs alongside her, quivering eagerly. She crouches. She gapes. He gapes. She sheds some of her eggs, about nine hundred of them. Now begins for him the release of some of that pent-up milt which in two ripe testes fills his entire body. And from out of nowhere, more often than not, some impudent little Holloway of a parr darts in and discharges his tuppence worth! This little delinquent may be no more than four inches long. He has swum no seas. He has leapt no falls. He has foiled no Englishman armed with two-handed rod of split bamboo. He has been nowhere, done nothing, cheeky little imp. Yet

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