III
American Salmon
The race is neither to the swift nor the battle to the strong;
but time and chance cometh to all.
I HAVE lived!
The American Continent may now sink under the sea, for I have
taken the best that it yields, and the best was neither dollars,
love, nor real estate.
Hear now, gentlemen of the Punjab Fishing Club, who whip the
reaches of the Tavi, and you who painfully import trout over to
Octamund, and I will tell you how old man California and I went
fishing, and you shall envy.
We returned from The Dalles to Portland by the way we had come,
the steamer stopping en route to pick up a night's catch of one
of the salmon wheels on the river, and to deliver it at a cannery
down-stream.
When the proprietor of the wheel announced that his take was two
thousand two hundred and thirty pounds weight of fish, "and not a
heavy catch neither," I thought he lied. But he sent the boxes
aboard, and I counted the salmon by the hundred - huge
fifty-pounders hardly dead, scores of twenty and thirty pounders,
and a host of smaller fish. They were all Chenook salmon, as
distinguished from the "steel head" and the "silver side." That
is to say, they were royal salmon, and California and I dropped a
tear over them, as monarchs who deserved a better fate; but the
lust of slaughter entered into our souls, and we talked fish and
forgot the mountain scenery that had so moved us a day before.
The steamer halted at a rude wooden warehouse built on piles in a
lonely reach of the river, and sent in the fish. I followed them
up a scale-strewn, fishy incline that led to the cannery. The
crazy building was quivering with the machinery on its floors,
and a glittering bank of tin scraps twenty feet high showed where
the waste was thrown after the cans had been punched.
Only Chinamen were employed on the work, and they looked like
blood-besmeared yellow devils as they crossed the rifts of
sunlight that lay upon the floor. When our consignment arrived,
the rough wooden boxes broke of themselves as they were dumped
down under a jet of water, and the salmon burst out in a stream
of quicksilver. A Chinaman jerked up a twenty-pounder, beheaded
and detailed it with two swift strokes of a knife, flicked out
its internal arrangements with a third, and case it into a
blood-dyed tank. The headless fish leaped from under his hands
as though they were facing a rapid. Other Chinamen pulled them
from the vat and thrust them under a thing like a chaff-cutter,
which, descending, hewed them into unseemly red gobbets fit for
the can.
More Chinamen, with yellow, crooked fingers, jammed the stuff
into the cans, which slid down some marvellous machine forthwith,
soldering their own tops as they passed.
