I think one of the greatest challenges is to watch each bounded living thing with care for its particularity, as far as we can go, to find out we can go no farther. Flower, fish or leaf, child or man--they take none of our suggestions as to rules. Each has a strong language that we never quite learn. No matter how many times I try to describe the alewife by the uses of human speech, or classify its habits, its intrinsic perfection resists me. It is _something else_. It goes on defying my own inquiring sense of mystery. The beauty of a little alewife held between the fingers, struggling out of water, dying, by human arbitrary reach, becomes the subject of thought and language, creative protestation in themselves. But the two-inch creature makes a mightier protest than my conscious sight of it ... wild, fragile, vibrant, shivering with a quickness that will die out in a matter of seconds. It is a marvelously knit animal, compact, flexible, shining, with its tiny meshed scales that interlock the light, iridescent silver like the adults, green, yellow, purple, receiving earth and sky. And the eyes, wholly black, interminably deep. By a chance scoop of my hand it is out in the long killing air, the little vibrancy out with the bird-gray clouds, a leashed arrow straining for the stars, that have their running too in the circle of immensity. Fragile they are, and powerful, a wonderful work of which so many are made as to afford them death as well as life. Let us say, arbitrarily, that 150,000 female alewives lay their eggs in the ponds above Stony Brook each year. After the pond suckers take their share and the remaining eggs hatch out, then the young alewives run the gauntlet of their first few days and weeks of life. The toll taken would seem incredible if it were not also natural and expected. From billions the young are reduced to millions. If a run is to keep up over the years, there has to be an annual survival, or “escapement,” of somewhere between 3 and 7 per cent. Say a hundred million hatched, out of the original nine billion eggs. Five per cent of that, or five million, have to reach salt water in order to assure a normal spawning migration in three or four years’ time. From that figure, of course, you subtract the alewife mortality during their years of growth in the sea. I claim nothing for my calculations, but, rough as they are, they may help to indicate how much potential goes into the end result.