This was on May 25, as I have it in my notes, and when I started out from the Herring Run to walk up to the ponds above it, Salvadore was still there with his truck, barrels, and net; but he said he was going to quit soon and deal in some redfish (another name for rosefish, or ocean perch). The redfish made tougher, better bait for lobsters anyway. While he had been in Brewster he had netted forty barrels a day on the average, sometimes as many as eighty, but he told me that he had not yet reached the four-hundred mark. One barrel, weighing some two hundred pounds, might contain around three hundred fish or more, so that about 120,000 alewives might be pulled out of Stony Brook in a season, though I imagine this is a very low estimate. I have heard it said that there are a potential two thousand barrels in the Brewster run during the full season, taking all fish. In an abundant year there might be close to six or seven hundred thousand adult alewives migrating up the brook. Even so, subtracting the mortality, the necessary minimum of fish allowed through the gate during the week have a very heavy job to do to assure the return of hundreds of thousands of their race in three and four years’ time. Because of some kind of alewife caution or deliberation, not enough of them were going into the seining pool to make a good haul. They were delaying on the down side of the road. Salvadore waded in with his rubber boots on to drive them under and through the bridge, but they hardly budged, so he crouched down with little more than three feet of height for body room, and swashed in after them. They skittered before him, landing with a simultaneous series of quick dashes into the pool. It was a warm day. There was a new lassitude in the air, and the sweet smell of lilacs. The gulls were gone that had flocked in quarreling and screaming when the run was heaviest, hovering and rising over the waters and their hordes of fish, bold enough sometimes to perch on the bridge over the run, looking very large, with their pale-yellow eyes glaring as naked as stone. Once I saw a herring gull display its fantastic eating capacity by dropping down into the fish ladder, grabbing an alewife, and swallowing it whole. Down went the fat, foot-long fish in a few gulps, headfirst so that neither scales nor sawbelly would stop the progress. Then the loaded gull flew very heavily away as I came up, the alewife’s tail having barely disappeared.