On the morning of June 10, after a lapse of a few days in which I had seen only a few returning, a boy who was weekending on the Upper Mill Pond told me he had seen thousands go by in the direction of the Herring Run. So they were still schooling for the return to salt water, progressing again by accumulative motion. In a few weeks some of the little ones, hatched out earlier, would start down too. I stood on a rock and looked down into the water along that peaceful stretch above the dam. This is an area where Indians gathered and camped when the alewives were running, spearing them, or taking them with nets made out of reeds. Many Indian artifacts have been found on the surrounding slopes. On this June day insects were settling down on the still surface. A shower was due--the air heavy. An alewife slanted slowly up to the surface and then dropped down again. It left a perfect circle behind it that gently widened over the blended images of clouds, leaves, and rocks. Then as other small circles, raindrops falling, began to show on the water, a belt of flying herons passed in reflection. A breeze corrugated the surface slightly and the fish swam slowly on toward the roar of the seaward-casting falls. The returning migrants now have a choice between two outlets: one at the top of the fish ladder, and the other at a board dam where the water drops into a long pool above the old mill. At the far end of the pool the waters fall again a short but precipitous distance, often roaring full and hard down the rocky slope into the seining pool. The alewives use both outlets, but the majority seem to prefer the falling second stream to the ladder by which they came up, perhaps because it is the point of greatest flow. Where they drop down over the falls it looks to the proportionate, or disproportionate, senses of a human being almost suicidal. Most go over tail first. Then they appear to be dashed headlong down the jagged incline that ends in rocky narrows going off at an angle to the pool. One after another they flip and fall, their bodies bent like bows, and flash finally, swift and vibrant--not, surprisingly, having been broken to pieces--at the bottom. Occasionally a fish near the end of the slope will frantically try to skitter back up. Presumably it is trying to reduce the speed at which the ground is going by it, in the way a man tries to brake himself when running downhill. But this almost helter-skelter falling reveals almost as much of the alewife’s supple strength as its leaping up against the current.