As I started back, about a quarter of an hour before the full tide, headlights swept over where the road ended at the shore, and in a minute or two a couple of fishermen lurched down the sand with high rubber waders on, carrying their casting rods. They stood on the beach in the dark, one of them coaching the other in baiting his hook. I came up and spoke to them, hardly able to make out their faces. The older one, he who did the coaching, told me that they had just got a pail of herrin’ from the Brewster run to use as bait. They had hopes that there would be some bass here, the famous “stripers” chasing the alewives in. They brought their long rods sideways and back to sling the bait out into the black and silver waves. The older man spoke low words against the wind, and I strained to hear him. Suddenly he thought he felt what must be alewives nosing his line and bumping against it on their way by into the mouth of the inlet. Last year, he told me, he had seen hundreds of them dead on the flats, and the gulls, he said, had slit their sides open as if with knives to get the roe. The waves had begun to slacken off when I left, and the fishermen were still casting, but without much hope of a strike. IX The Hunt For a little while I felt satisfied that I knew the alewives only chose to come in on the night or late evening tides, until they proved me wrong. I say _they_ proved me wrong because I give myself no credit for more than moderately ignorant perseverance in following up a hypothesis. The alewives did a good deal of proving and disproving for me. They would probably show me up again. At the beginning of the third week in May there had been a fresh run of fish crowding into the Herring Run, if not as heavily as those that came in a month before. After the migration starts there are very few days in either April or May when some fish are not to be seen in the brook waters. One man can only judge by eye plus the amount of barrels being hauled out as to how many there are in any period, but there may have been a climactical run during the week after the nineteenth of May when the high tides came at night. On the twenty-first I had been taking temperature readings, out of curiosity and to keep up with the advancing season. It had been around 40 degrees Fahrenheit during the night and rose to 47 at 7:30 A.M., 53 at 9:00 and 55 at 9:30 as the sun’s rays heated the land. Just offshore, down the beach from Paine’s Creek, at around 9:30, high tide being at 9:57, the temperature of the salt water, more consistent than the land, was 49, and the reading I then took of the brackish water at the mouth of the creek was 51. I noticed a small crew of alewives in the tea-dark channel. Had they come in the night before? They were schooling back and forth, as though getting accustomed to the waters in which they newly found themselves.