Then two black ducks flew off quacking in their deep, wild way. I saw where a deer had left fresh hoofprints in the mud; looking down at them made me notice many tiny shells, newly hatched whelks perhaps, carried in by the tide, strewn between the stiff spikes of the marsh grass; and I found a couple of empty pint bottles, sometimes as common in these parts as Kleenex beside the highways of America. Insects, shells, ducks, geese, crabs, wind, cloud rack overhead, brilliance and shadows on the tidal ground--many lifetimes of learning. Is there any man who knows the length and breadth of anything, let alone a creek? Yet such a place keeps announcing its novelties and exacting from us whatever love and discipline we are capable of; or so I felt, challenged in the keen air and the high glitter of the light. Several hundred yards around another bend in the inlet, where it was some twelve to fifteen feet wide, I looked down into the water and saw them again. The dark channel was alive with them. It had a floor of turning, slowly moving alewives. A few at the end of this school would run quickly back, revealing their shadows on the bottom. The procession moved back and forth, as smoothly as the flow of the water, and across the entire width of the channel. They were more numerous in the areas where the sun hit the water directly. Some of them looked torn and scarred. On that basis, and because many thousands had either been trucked off from the Herring Run in barrels by this time, or had reached the ponds, spawned, and returned to the Bay, you could not say categorically that they were all moving inland. As the season develops you can always find spent fish on their way to salt water running through those still heading up to the spawning areas. Aside from watching their movements, one method of distinguishing between the two classes of fish is to see if they bear any white patches on their backs and sides. A certain number of the spent fish will show fungus growths after a period of time in fresh water. What seems to happen is that an alewife, attacked by a gull or predatory fish or flung against sharp rocks, will at first show a “scaling” from the damage. This scaling, unless it is more than that, a mortal wound, is likely to develop into a fungus growth, which sometimes covers a large part of a fish’s body; but without, apparently, any added injury. I believe experiment proves that the fungus disappears fairly soon after the fish affected are back in salt water. The returning alewives will stay for a while in the brackish water of the inlet, resting and feeding. They are spare and hungry and will feed on shrimp, small eels, and small fish. Alewives that by chance stay longer than the others in fresh water have been known to chase and eat their own young, if they were small enough to swallow.