The tide began to turn. The waters going out at the creek mouth were yellow-green. I walked along the beach, and the surface of the Bay was long and smooth, a blue-green stretching and easing under a light wind with purple patches showing above seaweed and shelving banks of peat. I could hear the slow, gentle, labial sounds of the lightly ebbing waters. There was a small school of unidentifiable minnows turning and slipping-in-silver just offshore. A long frieze pattern of gull tracks showed, where the sand was damp, crisscrossed here and there by the little tracks of sandpipers and plovers. This cool, seaside world seemed full of equipoise to me, with a searching air of freedom playing over. There had been several clumps of herring gulls standing in shoals in the creek where it flowed out into the Bay. I noticed that some of them had begun to fly up. Then I saw a great black-backed gull swoop at the water farther out, and a number of herring gulls beyond it plummeting down, then chasing each other over the surface. They were after fish, but what kind? I went off for twenty minutes to get some field glasses, and by the time I returned the gulls had increased by the hundreds. Big clouds of them were circling and moving in from up the coast, higher and higher like drifting paper, some of them way up in the blinding blue sky, but coming closer, joining the feast. I could see that the gulls were diving straight down the course of the Paine’s Creek waters where they went out into the Bay, and that the fish they flung up between them clearly had the general size and shape of alewives. What was going on then was a great interception. The fish in their deliberate way had found the mouth of the creek, and made their instinctive move to go in, but as the water became shallower during the ebb tide they were ripe prey for the birds and there was no turning back. The violent, reckless activity of the gulls went on all morning. In the way they have of riding each other: “You’ve got it. Show you can keep it!” they were picking up fish, dropping them, and running away with them again, in a scrambling frenzy. There seemed to be almost more excitement, more energy, spent in the chase than in the fruits of it, though they gobbled what they could. I could hear an over-all sound of struggle as their wings rushed and they yawked and screamed. This world seemed pantingly, gruntingly, wildly busy.