“Shiners” some call them, confusing alewife fry with fresh-water shiners, of which there are a great many species, but shine they do. In the summer at low tide the bathers try to catch them with their hands, or jump after them where they glitter in the pools. Sometimes there are trails of the little fish left behind by those gluttons the gulls. In death they look frail, limp, almost diaphanous. No longer so reflecting and vibrant, their bodies are a pale silver-white like the underside of fallen poplar leaves. Some of the heads are left uneaten along with the headless bodies strewn in the rivulets along the ridged sands. Sometimes their bodies are ripped down, gashed, leaving raw stripes on them. These wounds look no less cruel and vivid because of their tiny size. XVIII Going Out The first alewife I saw in early spring was wild and new to me, feeling its way upcurrent alone, cautiously, as if testing out an old trail. Down Stony Brook there were long patterns in the water dappled like fish scales. In the sky above there were cloud tosses and wind turns during a break toward spring that the fish itself exemplified. Later on the fry in the apparently indiscriminate times they moved out and headed for salt water seemed to be pulled as if by moon tides and turning earth. The course I followed was full of natural complexity. Forms and patterns were endlessly co-ordinate and suggestive, but with the mystery of their making, the universal power, at once ordered, vast, fluid, out of reach. The alewife migration taught me how to start. Had we been two and a half miles up from salt water to the farthest pond, then back again, or was it three thousand? I had learned that measurement was indefinite. I still knew next to nothing about their lives in salt water. And what was ahead on land? I could expect them to follow certain rules of behavior. They would come back year after year unless the run was so consistently overfished that the population dwindled. I knew where to look for them now, and had some acquaintance with laws of supply and demand, plus the effects of management or the lack of it. Perhaps alewives could be expected in general to do what they had done before. But those laws that lead all migrants on have more in store for us than we can anticipate. The variations I had found in action and circumstance, following those fish, variations like the changes of air and water, leaves, grass and ground, intermoving light and shadow, were unexpected and perpetual. If the alewives ever proved that anything was static, it could only have been in me. There is no personifying the unknown fish. I am not acquainted with it yet; but now we are on a run together.