The alewife is another of the amplifications and extensions of life. In the flip of its body, its communicable “Let’s go,” it offers to be followed. So that race with its recoil and approach, approach and recoil, circling in consonance with the forces of the earth has the lesson of migration in ourselves. When I watched them coming in on their old, persistent track and felt so much in my own senses of that exploring, through the growing and falling off of leaves, the wind charging and easing off, the bright waters, I knew there was an infinite sum in me of the unused. What _is_ migration? Is it to “pass from one place to another”--just that? And its causes may be the need for food or to reproduce in season; but surely the term comprises a great deal more. Whether the migration of animals seems random, or with definite intent, it leads across the earth. All the studies made of individual species result in new directions to be explored, new unknowns about the actions of other lives, and the ways they follow. The mystery about the travels of birds, eels, monarch butterflies, or alewives, is not only a matter of routes or seasonal behavior. It has to do with an internal response to this spinning globe and its unendingly creative energies. As a result of a respectful regard for other animals we may find that we are being led onto traveled ways that were once invisible to us, and in their deep alliance with natural forces we find a new depth in ourselves. This is the common ground for all living things, where migration has in it the blood of contact, the winds and waters of communication. On that July week when I first saw the young alewives coming down through the outlet, the roads of Cape Cod were roaring and humming with cars. The tourist season had suddenly come to its height. The population of the Cape had jumped from 60,000 to 200,000 or more. There were new demands, new pressures in the air. This was the yearly coming on of an immense, expanding world, a migratory phenomenon in itself. Voices and prices were rising. Man’s abundance vied with the natural summer. It was a hot day, though it had started out cool in the early morning, with drifts of fog along the shore and patches of it through the inland hollows. I had followed the alewife fry down from the Herring Run to the shore road. They had become increasingly hard to find; but when I reached the slow waters of the channel at Paine’s Creek I could see multitudes of them heading in the direction of the Bay. Farther on where the water ran out through the sands on the ebb tide there were groups of them moving with it like little clouds.