About the tenth of June the salmon come in from the sea and work their way up the river until the lack of water bars their further progress. Salmon do not run up these rivers until they have attained their sixth year of growth. From the moment they enter the fresh water of the river, they get no food whatever. For this reason they must be caught near the river's mouth to be in good condition. The female, having gone far up the river, finds a suitable place, and deposits her eggs; after which the male fish hunts them out and fertilizes them. As soon as this has been accomplished there begins a mad rush for death. However many millions of salmon may run up the river, not one ever reaches the sea again alive. They race straight up the river, as if bent on finding its source. When the river narrows down to two hundred feet in width, and is about a foot deep, the fish are so crowded together that the water fairly boils with them. And still they struggle up and ever up. One can walk into the water and kill any number of them with a club. After the fish have gone up the river in this fashion for fifty or sixty miles, they are so poor that they are worthless as food, for they have been working all this time on an empty stomach. As they fight their way up, they seem to grow wilder and wilder. Whole schools of them, each numbering anywhere from a hundred to a thousand, will make a mad rush for the shore and strand themselves. This is what the gulls have been waiting for. They swoop down in immense flocks and feast upon the eyes of the floundering fish. They will not deign to touch any other part. Bears also come down the river bank and gorge themselves. I have seen as many as seven in a single day, huge black and brown fellows, feasting on the fish. They eat only certain parts of the head, and will not touch the body. They wade into the water and strike the fish with their paws and then draw them out upon the bank. Wolves, foxes, and sledge-dogs also feast upon the fish, and for the only time during the year get all they want. [Illustration: A River of Dead Salmon--August.] As the fish get further and further away from the sea, their flesh grows loose and flabby, the skin sometimes turning black and sometimes a bright red. They dash themselves against stones, and rub against the sharp rocks, seemingly with the desire to rub the flesh off their bones. The eggs of the salmon remain in the river during the winter, and it is not until the following spring that the young fish are swept down to the sea by the spring floods.