A Wall Of Spruces And Hemlocks Draped And Tufted With Gray And Yellow Lichens And Mosses Embowered The Campground And Overarched The Little River, While The Camp-Fire Smoke, Like A Stranded Cloud, Lay Motionless In Their Branches.

Down on the beach ducks and sandpipers in flocks of hundreds were getting their breakfasts, bald eagles were seen perched on dead spars along the edge of the woods, heavy-looking and overfed, gazing stupidly like gorged vultures, and porpoises were blowing and plunging outside.

As for the salmon, as seen this morning urging their way up the swift current, - tens of thousands of them, side by side, with their backs out of the water in shallow places now that the tide was low, - nothing that I could write might possibly give anything like a fair conception of the extravagance of their numbers. There was more salmon apparently, bulk for bulk, than water in the stream. The struggling multitudes, crowding one against another, could not get out of our way when we waded into the midst of them. One of our men amused himself by seizing them above the tail and swinging them over his head. Thousands could thus be taken by hand at low tide, while they were making their way over the shallows among the stones.

Whatever may be said of other resources of the Territory, it is hardly possible to exaggerate the importance of the fisheries. Not to mention cod, herring, halibut, etc., there are probably not less than a thousand salmon-streams in southeastern Alaska as large or larger than this one (about forty feet wide) crowded with salmon several times a year.

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