Children's Literature

"I did not know how it would come," she said; "I only knew it would come, for I prayed and believed."

We know that it came when it meant the most. The house was saved. It was the turn in their fortune's tide, and the crucial moment of the change was when those three bright sulphur spots were lined with the living lamps in the head of the Silver Fox. Yes! Josh was a poacher. Just once.

395

David Starr Jordan (1851--) was for many years president, now president emeritus, of Leland Stanford Junior University, and is known internationally for his books on science and on the prevention of war; he also is author of several books for children. The story that follows is taken from his _Science Sketches_, by permission of the publishers, A. C. McClurg & Co., Chicago. It may stand as a perfect ill.u.s.tration of the modern informational story based on recognized scientific facts. "The Story of a Stone," from the same book, is equally good. These stories may be taught in the seventh or eighth grade.

THE STORY OF A SALMON

DAVID STARR JORDAN

In the realm of the Northwest Wind, on the boundary-line between the dark fir-forests and the sunny plains, there stands a mountain,--a great white cone two miles and a half in perpendicular height. On its lower mile the dense fir-woods cover it with never-changing green; on its next half-mile a lighter green of gra.s.s and bushes gives place in winter to white; and on its uppermost mile the snows of the great ice age still linger in unspotted purity. The people of Was.h.i.+ngton Territory say that their mountain is the great "King-pin of the Universe," which shows that even in its own country Mount Tacoma is not without honor.

Flowing down from the southwest slope of Mount Tacoma is a cold, clear river, fed by the melting snows of the mountain. Madly it hastens down over white cascades and beds of s.h.i.+ning sands, through birch-woods and belts of dark firs, to mingle its waters at last with those of the great Columbia. This river is the Cowlitz; and on its bottom, not many years ago, there lay half buried in the sand a number of little orange-colored globules, each about as large as a pea. These were not much in themselves, but great in their possibilities. In the waters above them little suckers and chubs and p.r.i.c.kly sculpins strained their mouths to draw these globules from the sand, and vicious-looking crawfishes picked them up with their blundering hands and examined them with their telescopic eyes. But one, at least, of the globules escaped their curiosity, else this story would not be worth telling. The sun shone down on it through the clear water, and the ripples of the Cowlitz said over it their incantations, and in it at last awoke a living being. It was a fish,--a curious little fellow, not half an inch long, with great, staring eyes, which made almost half his length, and with a body so transparent that he could not cast a shadow. He was a little salmon, a very little salmon; but the water was good, and there were flies and worms and little living creatures in abundance for him to eat, and he soon became a larger salmon. Then there were many more little salmon with him, some larger and some smaller, and they all had a merry time.

Those who had been born soonest and had grown largest used to chase the others around and bite off their tails, or, still better, take them by the heads and swallow them whole; for, said they, "Even young salmon are good eating." "Heads I win, tails you lose," was their motto. Thus, what was once two small salmon became united into a single larger one, and the process of "addition, division, and silence" still went on.

By-and-by, when all the salmon were too large to be swallowed, they began to grow restless. They saw that the water rus.h.i.+ng by seemed to be in a great hurry to get somewhere, and it was somehow suggested that its hurry was caused by something good to eat at the other end of its course. Then they all started down the stream, salmon-fas.h.i.+on,--which fas.h.i.+on is to get into the current, head up-stream; and thus to drift backward as the river sweeps along.

Down the Cowlitz River the salmon went for a day and a night, finding much to interest them which we need not know. At last they began to grow hungry; and coming near the sh.o.r.e, they saw an angle-worm of rare size and beauty floating in an eddy of the stream. Quick as thought one of them opened his mouth, which was well filled with teeth of different sizes, and put it around the angle-worm. Quicker still he felt a sharp pain in his gills, followed by a smothering sensation, and in an instant his comrades saw him rise straight into the air. This was nothing new to them; for they often leaped out of the water in their games of hide-and-seek, but only to come down again with a loud splash not far from where they went out. But this one never came back, and the others went on their course wondering.

At last they came to where the Cowlitz and the Columbia join, and they were almost lost for a time; for they could find no sh.o.r.es, and the bottom and the top of the water were so far apart. Here they saw other and far larger salmon in the deepest part of the current, turning neither to the right nor to the left, but swimming right on up-stream, just as rapidly as they could. And these great salmon would not stop for them, and would not lie and float with the current. They had no time to talk, even in the simple sign language by which fishes express their ideas, and no time to eat. They had important work before them, and the time was short. So they went on up the river, keeping their great purposes to themselves; and our little salmon and his friends from the Cowlitz drifted down the stream.

By-and-by the water began to change. It grew denser, and no longer flowed rapidly along; and twice a day it used to turn about and flow the other way. Then the sh.o.r.es disappeared, and the water began to have a different and peculiar flavor,--a flavor which seemed to the salmon much richer and more inspiring than the glacier-water of their native Cowlitz. There were many curious things to see,--crabs with hard sh.e.l.ls and savage faces, but so good when crushed and swallowed! Then there were luscious squid swimming about; and, to a salmon, squid are like ripe peaches and cream. There were great companies of delicate sardines and herring, green and silvery, and it was such fun to chase and capture them! Those who eat sardines packed in oil by greasy fingers, and herrings dried in the smoke, can have little idea how satisfying it is to have a meal of them, plump and sleek and silvery, fresh from the sea.

Thus the salmon chased the herrings about, and had a merry time. Then they were chased about in turn by great sea-lions,--swimming monsters with huge half-human faces, long thin whiskers, and blundering ways. The sea-lions liked to bite out the throat of a salmon, with its precious stomach full of luscious sardines, and then to leave the rest of the fish to s.h.i.+ft for itself. And the seals and the herrings scattered the salmon about, till at last the hero of our story found himself quite alone, with none of his own kind near him. But that did not trouble him much, and he went on his own way, getting his dinner when he was hungry, which was all the time, and then eating a little between meals for his stomach's sake.

So it went on for three long years; and at the end of this time our little fish had grown to be a great, fine salmon of twenty-two pounds'

weight, s.h.i.+ning like a new tin pan, and with rows of the loveliest round black spots on his head and back and tail. One day, as he was swimming about, idly chasing a big sculpin with head so th.o.r.n.y that he never was swallowed by anybody, all of a sudden the salmon noticed a change in the water around him.

Spring had come again, and south-lying snow-drifts on the Cascade Mountains once more felt that the "earth was wheeling sunwards." The cold snow waters ran down from the mountains and into the Columbia River, and made a freshet on the river. The high water went far out into the sea, and out in the sea our salmon felt it on his gills. He remembered how

What our salmon did, we know. He did what every grown salmon in the ocean does when he feels the glacier-water once more upon his gills. He became a changed being. He spurned the blandishment of soft-sh.e.l.led crabs. The pleasures of the table and of the chase, heretofore his only delights, lost their charms for him. He turned his course straight toward the direction whence the cold water came, and for the rest of his life never tasted a mouthful of food. He moved on toward the river-mouth, at first playfully, as though he were not really certain whether he meant anything after all. Afterward, when he struck the full current of the Columbia, he plunged straight forward with an unflinching determination that had in it something of the heroic. When he had pa.s.sed the rough water at the bar, he was not alone. His old neighbors of the Cowlitz, and many more from the Clackamas and the Spokane and Des Chutes and Kootenay,--a great army of salmon,--were with him. In front were thousands pressing on, and behind them were thousands more, all moved by a common impulse which urged them up the Columbia.

They were all swimming bravely along where the current was deepest, when suddenly the foremost felt something tickling like a cobweb about their noses and under their chins. They changed their course a little to brush it off, and it touched their fins as well. Then they tried to slip down with the current, and thus leave it behind. But, no! the thing, whatever it was, although its touch was soft, refused to let go, and held them like a fetter. The more they struggled, the tighter became its grasp, and the whole foremost rank of the salmon felt it together; for it was a great gill-net, a quarter of a mile long, stretched squarely across the mouth of the river.

By-and-by men came in boats, and hauled up the gill-net and the helpless salmon that had become entangled in it. They threw the fishes into a pile in the bottom of the boat, and the others saw them no more. We that live outside the water know better what befalls them, and we can tell the story which the salmon could not.

All along the banks of the Columbia River, from its mouth to nearly thirty miles away, there is a succession of large buildings, looking like great barns or warehouses, built on piles in the river, high enough to be out of the reach of floods. There are thirty of these buildings, and they are called canneries. Each cannery has about forty boats, and with each boat are two men and a long gill-net. These nets fill the whole river as with a nest of cobwebs from April to July, and to each cannery nearly a thousand great salmon are brought every day. These salmon are thrown in a pile on the floor; and Wing Hop, the big Chinaman, takes them one after another on the table, and with a great knife dexterously cuts off the head, the tail, and the fins; then with a sudden thrust he removes the intestines and the eggs. The body goes into a tank of water; and the head is dropped into a box on a flat-boat, and goes down the river to be made into salmon oil. Next, the body is brought to another table; and Quong Sang, with a machine like a feed-cutter, cuts it into pieces each just as long as a one-pound can.

Then Ah Sam, with a butcher-knife, cuts these pieces into strips just as wide as the can. Next Wan Lee, the "China boy," brings down a hundred cans from the loft where the tinners are making them, and into each puts a spoonful of salt. It takes just six salmon to fill a hundred cans.

Then twenty Chinamen put the pieces of meat into the cans, fitting in little strips to make them exactly full. Ten more solder up the cans, and ten more put the cans into boiling water till the meat is thoroughly cooked, and five more punch a little hole in the head of each can to let out the air. Then they solder them up again, and little girls paste on them bright-colored labels showing merry little cupids riding the happy salmon up to the cannery door, with Mount Tacoma and Cape Disappointment in the background; and a legend underneath says that this is "Booth's,"

or "Badollet's Best," or "Hume's," or "Clark's," or "Kinney's Superfine Salt Water Salmon." Then the cans are placed in cases, forty-eight in a case, and five hundred thousand cases are put up every year. Great s.h.i.+ps come to Astoria, and are loaded with them; and they carry them away to London and San Francisco and Liverpool and New York and Sidney and Valparaiso; and the man at the corner grocery sells them at twenty cents a can.

All this time our salmon is going up the river, eluding one net as by a miracle, and soon having need of more miracles to escape the rest; pa.s.sing by Astoria on a fortunate day,--which was Sunday, the day on which no man may fish if he expects to sell what he catches,--till finally he came to where nets were few, and, at last, to where they ceased altogether. But there he found that scarcely any of his many companies were with him; for the nets cease when there are no more salmon to be caught in them. So he went on, day and night, where the water was deepest, stopping not to feed or loiter on the way, till at last he came to a wild gorge, where the great river became an angry torrent, rus.h.i.+ng wildly over a huge staircase of rocks. But our hero did not falter; and summoning all his forces, he plunged into the Cascades.

The current caught him and dashed him against the rocks. A whole row of silvery scales came off and glistened in the water like sparks of fire, and a place on his side became black-and-red, which, for a salmon, is the same as being black-and-blue for other people. His comrades tried to go up with him; and one lost his eye, one his tail, and one had his lower jaw pushed back into his head like the joint of a telescope. Again he tried to surmount the Cascades; and at last he succeeded, and an Indian on the rocks above was waiting to receive him. But the Indian with his spear was less skillful than he was wont to be, and our hero escaped, losing only a part of one of his fins; and with him came one other, and henceforth these two pursued their journey together.

Now a gradual change took place in the looks of our salmon. In the sea he was plump and round and silvery, with delicate teeth in a symmetrical mouth. Now his silvery color disappeared, his skin grew slimy, and the scales sank into it; his back grew black, and his sides turned red,--not a healthy red, but a sort of hectic flush. He grew poor, and his back, formerly as straight as need be, now developed an unpleasant hump at the shoulders. His eyes--like those of all enthusiasts who forsake eating and sleeping for some loftier aim--became dark and sunken. His symmetrical jaws grew longer and longer, and meeting each other, as the nose of an old man meets his chin, each had to turn aside to let the other pa.s.s. His beautiful teeth grew longer and longer, and projected from his mouth, giving him a savage and wolfish appearance, quite at variance with his real disposition. For all the desires and ambitions of his nature had become centered into one. We may not know what this one was, but we know that it was a strong one; for it had led him on and on,--past the nets and horrors of Astoria; past the dangerous Cascades; past the spears of Indians; through the terrible flume of the Dalles, where the mighty river is compressed between huge rocks into a channel narrower than a village street; on past the meadows of Umatilla and the wheat-fields of Walla Walla; on to where the great Snake River and the Columbia join; on up the Snake River and its eastern branch, till at last he reached the foot of the Bitter Root mountains in the Territory of Idaho, nearly a thousand miles from the ocean which he had left in April. With him still was the other salmon which had come with him through the Cascades, handsomer and smaller than he, and, like him, growing poor and ragged and tired.

At last, one October afternoon, our finny travelers came together to a little clear brook, with a bottom of fine gravel, over which the water was but a few inches deep. Our fish painfully worked his way to it; for his tail was all frayed out, his muscles were sore, and his skin covered with unsightly blotches. But his sunken eyes saw a ripple in the stream, and under it a bed of little pebbles and sand. So there in the sand he scooped out with his tail a smooth round place, and his companion came and filled it with orange-colored eggs. Then our salmon came back again; and softly covering the eggs, the work of their lives was done, and, in the old salmon fas.h.i.+on, they drifted tail foremost down the stream.

They drifted on together for a night and a day, but they never came to the sea. For the salmon has but one life to live, and it ascends the river but once. The rest lies with its children. And when the April suns.h.i.+ne fell on the globules in the gravel, these were wakened into life. With the early autumn rains, the little fishes were large enough to begin their wanderings. They dropped down the current in the old salmon fas.h.i.+on. And thus they came into the great river and drifted away to the sea.

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Probably no short-story writer now living is better known than Rudyard Kipling, an English author born in Bombay, India, in 1865. Among his many stories are some that may be cla.s.sed as juvenile romantic nature literature.

_Just-So Stories_ is a collection of humorous stories of this type, excellent for the fifth and sixth grades. _The Jungle Book_ and _The Second Jungle Book_, of a more serious nature, may be used in the seventh and eighth grades.

The story that follows, taken from one of his earlier volumes, ill.u.s.trates well Mr. Kipling's style of writing. It is suitable for the seventh or eighth grade.

MOTI GUJ--MUTINEER

RUDYARD KIPLING

Once upon a time there was a coffee-planter in India who wished to clear some forest land for coffee-planting. When he had cut down all the trees and burned the underwood, the stumps still remained. Dynamite is expensive and slow fire slow. The happy medium for stump-clearing is the lord of all beasts, who is the elephant. He will either push the stump out of the ground with his tusks, if he has any, or drag it out with ropes. The planter, therefore, hired elephants by ones and twos and threes, and fell to work. The very best of all the elephants belonged to the very worst of all the drivers or mahouts; and this superior beast's name was Moti Guj. He was the absolute property of his mahout, which would never have been the case under native rule: for Moti Guj was a creature to be desired by kings, and his name, being translated, meant the Pearl Elephant. Because the British government was in the land, Deesa, the mahout, enjoyed his property undisturbed. He was dissipated.

When he had made much money through the strength of his elephant, he would get extremely drunk and give Moti Guj a beating with a tent-peg over the tender nails of the forefeet. Moti Guj never trampled the life out of Deesa on these occasions, for he knew that after the beating was over, Deesa would embrace his trunk and weep and call him his love and his life and the liver of his soul, and give him some liquor. Moti Guj was very fond of liquor--arrack for choice, though he would drink palm-tree toddy if nothing better offered. Then Deesa would go to sleep between Moti Guj's forefeet, and as Deesa generally chose the middle of the public road, and as Moti Guj mounted guard over him, and would not permit horse, foot, or cart to pa.s.s by, traffic was congested till Deesa saw fit to wake up.

There was no sleeping in the daytime on the planter's clearing: the wages were too high to risk. Deesa sat on Moti Guj's neck and gave him orders, while Moti Guj rooted up the stumps--for he owned a magnificent pair of tusks; or pulled at the end of a rope--for he had a magnificent pair of shoulders--while Deesa kicked him behind the ears and said he was the king of elephants. At evening time Moti Guj would wash down his three hundred pounds' weight of green food with a quart of arrack, and Deesa would take a share, and sing songs between Moti Guj's legs till it was time to go to bed. Once a week Deesa led Moti Guj down to the river, and Moti Guj lay on his side luxuriously in the shallows, while Deesa went over him with a coir-swab and a brick. Moti Guj never mistook the pounding blow of the latter for the smack of the former that warned him to get up and turn over on the other side. Then Deesa would look at his feet and examine his eyes, and turn up the fringes of his mighty ears in case of sores or budding ophthalmia. After inspection the two would "come up with a song from the sea," Moti Guj, all black and s.h.i.+ning, waving a torn tree branch twelve feet long in his trunk, and Deesa knotting up his own long wet hair.

It was a peaceful, well-paid life till Deesa felt the return of the desire to drink deep. He wished for an orgy. The little draughts that led nowhere were taking the manhood out of him.

He went to the planter, and "My mother's dead," he said, weeping.

"She died on the last plantation two months ago, and she died once before that when you were working for me last year," said the planter, who knew something of the ways of nativedom.

"Then it's my aunt, and she was just the same as a mother to me," said Deesa, weeping more than ever. "She has left eighteen small children entirely without bread, and it is I who must fill their little stomachs," said Deesa, beating his head on the floor.

"Who brought you the news?" said the planter.

"The post," said Deesa.

"There hasn't been a post here for the past week. Get back to your lines!"

"A devastating sickness has fallen on my village, and all my wives are dying," yelled Deesa, really in tears this time.

"Call Chihun, who comes from Deesa's village," said the planter.

"Chihun, has this man got a wife?"

"He?" said Chihun. "No. Not a woman of our village would look at him.

They'd sooner marry the elephant."

Chihun snorted. Deesa wept and bellowed.

"You will get into a difficulty in a minute," said the planter. "Go back to your work!"

"Now I will speak Heaven's truth," gulped Deesa, with an inspiration. "I haven't been drunk for two months. I desire to depart in order to get properly drunk afar off and distant from this heavenly plantation. Thus I shall cause no trouble."