“Last year,” said Mr. Barker, referring to 1909, “the pack was the highest in the history of the business, and amounted to 5,340,000 cases. It was all readily sold. The consumption of tinned salmon in this country is increasing, of course, with the rapid growth of population. Then, too, the English market is again brisk, while we find it impossible to keep pace with the demand from New Zealand and Australia, where the salmon does not occur. This year we could have sold five and a half million cases, but the pack only reached a little over four millions. You may be surprised to note the difference in the quantity caught and canned in 1909 and the quantity caught and canned in 1910. But that was a normal and expected difference. The year 1901 witnessed a tremendous run of salmon, as did the year 1905. There will be another great supply of fish in 1913. It occurs every fourth year with such absolute regularity that we prepare for it by making an extra number of tins. Moreover, new canneries are always set up in the recurring ‘fat’ year, which is invariably followed by a ‘thin’ year. The life history of the salmon—from the time spawn is laid in the river to the return into that river of the full-grown fish—is four years; and it is natural, therefore, that the productiveness of each year should be echoed, as it were, in the fourth following year, and in each succeeding fourth year. That may or may not be the explanation. Some people, indeed, seek to identify the recurring ‘fat’ year and ‘lean’ year with a corresponding variation in the rainfall. But whatever the cause, it is constant and can be depended upon. “Apart from that fluctuation in the available quantity of salmon, the supply of fish of almost all sorts on the Pacific coast is beyond anyone’s power to gauge. I have seen 35,000 salmon caught in one haul of a seine net. That was in Alaska, where the bulk of the salmon are caught. There is, of course, a tendency for that fish to retire before the advance of a human population. Pollution of the rivers is the actual cause of that retirement, and in British Columbia pollution takes the form of sawdust from the lumber industry. Here, then, we touch the reason why, in my opinion, the Fraser must rank as the finest salmon river in the world. You simply cannot pollute the Fraser.” CHAPTER XIX BRITISH COLUMBIA AND SOME REFLECTIONS