Were they under the law, these predators? Well, this play, or hunt, this spring jubilation had been going on for several hundred years. “Let the kids play around there, I say,” said Herring Harry. “We were kids too. We didn’t start out old.” In barer, colder, perhaps simpler days, days when men lived closer to their natural surroundings and were more dependent on them than they think they are now, the alewives meant food and revenue, an abundance returning to your own back yard. They came under the heading of useful acquaintances. But now the roe, or fish eggs, is the only part of the alewife that is highly considered locally. It is a very bony fish and most people reject the idea of eating it, forgetting the days of “good salt herring” when the children ate them on sticks like candy. So the Brewster resident gets his allotment for the roe, to be fried in butter. An ambitious gardener can bury the rest under his corn plantings to serve as fertilizer, if the cats permit, though it is still a very good way to make corn grow tall in unreceptive soil. A hundred years ago or more, when it was done extensively, it resulted in rich yields. I have heard that one acre set with a thousand fish would produce three times as much corn as an acre without them. It is a practice that we inherit from the Indians, although the Indian agriculturist was likely to be plagued by wolves instead of cats. Cape Codders, even so comparatively short a time ago as fifty or sixty years, would not have liked to hear this farming method belittled. Some of them may even have regarded it with delight. I recently talked with a man who was a boy in the 1890’s and remembers walking behind a wagonload of “very dead” fish in a field made ready for corn. A man in the wagon pitched out a forkful of herring into each prepared hole as they creaked along, while another, walking behind, shoved dirt over them and planted the seed. He can remember a relative cocking a keen ear one night and saying, “Listen! You can hear it growing. By God, when their feet hit that stinking mess don’t they start up and go!”