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 shift 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, shining 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 a head so thorny 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 the south-lying snowdrifts 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 the cold water used to feel in the Cowlitz when he was a little fish. In a blundering, fishy fashion he thought about it; he wondered whether the little eddy looked as it used to look, and whether caddis-worms and young mosquitoes were really as sweet and tender as he used to think they were. Then he thought some others things; but as the salmon’s mind is located in the optic lobes of his brain, and ours is in a different place, we cannot be quite certain what his thoughts really were.