What further connections are there, say, between the sun and sight, between our tactile senses and the medium of earth and air in which we are born, between the moon and the tides and the rhythms of water and of blood? Who knows more about the universe--I with my conscious measurements, my personal faltering, or the poor fish with its unthinking precision through the various unknown? Can we not combine? In any case, whatever human beings decide about what is effective or ineffective, what shall stay or what shall go, the alewives know where they live. The crowd in the seining pool moved slowly, in a wide circle around its rim. Most of their inland enemies had gone now. The human hunters had driven away. The herring gulls had flown to other feeding grounds. Not that one enemy or another made much difference to them, except in terms of sudden fear. Like their eggs, they were expendable. Nature’s ruthlessness, the using and the building up of that which fed and that which was food, would keep them on the way of primordial energy. For the same reason they were also spenders--one of the great sacrificial coinages of the living world. Still this point in their migration before the return to salt water might be called a place of demobilization, a separation center. They swam slowly around in the pool, passing between each other, but always a part of the circle, each fish with its body and its large black eyes leading forward, obedient to it. They dispersed very gradually throughout the day. One small group after another broke off, sparks from a wheel, and the fish let themselves be carried back down the brook where the outlet of the pool led under the road. In the run below where they went back step by step to the sea--whose pull was in them--they faced up against the current, their orientation, with a tired, slow weaving. I noticed a little perch attendant on them. It ran down backward with the large procession, giving the alewives a look of ceremonial grandeur. I have seen sunfish join up too, although there could be a point on the approach to brackish water when they decide that home life is better than parades. These motions must be catching, communicating to other lives and races than those in which they originate. All have their way stations, or orbits, along a route that is being followed out with primal grace and power. XVI The Young Follow After