I saw a few later in a dead-end offshoot of the Herring River that looked very much as if they were trying to go back, though I have no reason to suppose they felt that they had made a mistake. If they were not ready to spawn they may have circled back with the ebb tide, which reached that point, and found the main flow where they had lost it on the way up. I have idly wondered whether a single fish, isolated from its brethren, might not suffer some kind of unknown hell of estrangement. I have seen one swimming wildly down a narrow ditch off a tidal inlet as if it knew the crowd had left it behind, and was frantic to get back. Still, for all we can say about their lack of consciousness, they carry out their great decisions, their deep harmonies, together, by natural laws which we ourselves cannot completely explain, and by which we too may carry out our migrant purposes. The creek flowed on through banks tangled with poison ivy, blueberry bushes, briars, and grapevines--at times almost impassable. Once, as I peered out from the tangle, I saw a bird I had never seen outside a field guide--a Virginia rail, moving along a muddy shelf under the opposite bank. It moved almost humped over, neck and head forward, like a great mouse, with a docked tail and red-orange beak. Then farther on I saw an egret with head and slender neck above some high pitch pines, pure sky-white, Grecian, out of a stately, impenetrable world, almost too secret for an ecologist. Where the stream was wider and the shallow water flowed along, lightly and unobstructed, a group of some ten or twelve fish ran easily across it. Then they stopped and circled with the current like a nest of eels, in a slow, fluid mass. I turned back. After light sunshine there was a faint shower, a spray of rain. The valley was full of sound. A slow plane flew over; a truck’s gears ground over the road; I heard a song sparrow staking out his territory; crows cawed; blue jays gave harsh and silvery shouts; I heard my own breath and the almost silent touch of cool air and rain spray on the ground--a narrow valley, but with melodious resources from everywhere. Why “back to nature”? I thought. Is there anything in it but forwardness?