except for a few wild rosebushes on its crown, and its slopes were covered with a wild pink, moss campion, and patches of sorrel made more profuse by nitrogen and ammonia from gull droppings. On the other side of the valley there was a wood of twirling, gnarled, gray tupelo trees with the pink of their buds still showing. Bay waters and the curving, final shore carried distance out along with the gulls; while this valley with its dips and slopes and the migratory waves of life to which its land and water were hosts seemed wide enough for many worlds. As I clambered down a slope toward the stream, three ducks that were coming in to settle on marshy ground changed course, two black-crowned night herons flew out of a tree, clucking like hens, and a yellowlegs stalking through muddy peninsulas flew up and away, its sickle wings in reckless flight, with a cry both tremulous and sharp. Everything fled before me. I might be a part of these communities myself but as an itinerant, it seemed, and a dangerous one. How difficult it is to prove to anything but domestic animals, long since tamed and lost, that a man is not dangerous! Men have a hard time trying to prove it to themselves. I had come down near the point where Stony Brook started to turn to the east side of the valley. The banks behind me were streaming with spring water and the wet edges were lush with new growth: lettuce-green grass, succulent-looking leaves of skunk cabbage, fiddlehead ferns newly uncurling, and clumps of violets, flowers of a sky-delicate light blue. At this edge of the valley the water was full of thicketed islands, hummocks, and muddy shallows, but as the stream stretched on, ten to twelve feet wide, the current swung along at a man’s fast walk over a brown and sandy bottom, and in it, constantly eddying by and turning over, were innumerable silver fish scales, debris of the striving and death at the Herring Run, several hundred yards behind. Where the stream turned at right angles across the valley it was bordered by a low man-made dike. Halfway down the dike, at the end of a long narrow ditch bisecting the old bogs, was the remains of a _stop water_, a kind of three-sided dam designed to raise or lower the water in a cranberry bog to its desired level. I looked down into its still, dark square of water and there was a split-second rush of a fish, and perhaps two or three others coiling in the small space together. They may have been spawning. In any case, intentionally or not, they had come down the ditch instead of by the main stream and could go no farther. There are many areas in a run, side pools, ditches, marshy land, to which some alewives may be sidetracked, before the main spawning grounds.