The victims of this natural slaughter seemed to have moved on a little, with their fatal determination, but as the tide and morning ebbed the white, frantic crowd above them seemed to stay in the same general area. It was not likely that many fish managed to reach the inlet. I imagined them dashing from side to side or circling in panic, the crowd knowing nothing but its own entity and safety. I talked to a man who was watching the scene from the window of his car. He told me that there had been a high bluff, washed away some years back, from which you could actually see the fish in the water as they struggled to swim in. “We had a good stream went out there that wouldn’t a happened,” he said, suggesting that if there were a deeper channel meeting the Bay waters, most of the fish might be able to get up the creek in comparative safety. Along this stretch of rhythmic work of greed and death little groups of gulls began to settle down on the water, glutted and loaded down. Then long lines of them, looking like white shoals, rested on the water upshore, digesting their meal. Low tide that afternoon came at 3:57. By two o’clock when the sands began to show, well out toward the weirs, the great tribal company of gulls were finished with the hunt. For a mile along the flats they were standing into a stiff wind. In the distance I could see a litter of dead fish along the bed of the creek waters. When I walked out I saw them, silver, blue, and white, with brassy tints from the sun, flung along, strewn on like debris through a wide city square. Even though there may be no waste in nature--with everything used, fired, and consumed in the interactions of the living world--what an enormous, careless expenditure! The bed of the outgoing waters was paved with this alewife coinage for hundreds of yards. Each one I picked up, and there were thousands, had its body scraped and clawed, or its head torn, its eyes gouged out. For every one gobbled during the chase there must have been many more left uneaten. Remembering what the night fishermen had said, it seemed like an indiscriminate feast, and it was not clear to me that the gulls were primarily after roe. But since fish eggs are a delicacy to other animals, gulls may find a special enjoyment in them too.