The injury suffered by Lieut. Schwatka, which led to a report of his death recently, recalls to mind his story of a wonderful feat which he saw performed by Alaska Indians during his raft journey of 1,300 miles down the Yukon River in 1883. The water of the river at the point where the incidents occurred was so muddy that if a tin cup were filled with it its bottom could not be seen. Yet an old man, a squaw or a child, standing on the bank in front of the Indian village, would cry out that a salmon was coming up the river, perhaps from a quarter to a third of a mile away.
Thereupon some young man would rush out of the log cabins and from his elevated position in front of them, identify the salmon's position. Running down the beach he would then paddle out his canoe, being directed in his course by half a dozen Indians
on the bank, all shouting advice to him at the same time. He evidently was guided by their directions rather than by his own power of vision until the fish was near him. When he had got his canoe near the point desired he would regulate his movements by using the paddle as a sculling oar with his left hand, grasping with his right a scoop-net, the handle of which was nine or ten feet long.
The Indian would plunge this to the bottom in front of the salmon, often leaning over the canoe and thrusting his arm far into the water. Of seven such attempts
within three hours which Schwatka saw two were entirely successful, while in two others
the salmon were caught but escaped before the net could be raised to the surface. The
fishes weighed from fifteen to twenty pounds, and the mouth of the net was about two square feet in dimensions. The Indians tried to point out tbe coming fishes to the white and red companions of Schwatka, but they could see nothing. Schwatka's original theory was that the salmon, swimming mear the surface, exposed their dorsal fine until they approached the canoe, when they became frightened and went to the bottom, but his interpreters assured him that this was not so, and that the fish communicated motion to the water even when swimming at the very bottom.
The salmon were taken about 200 or 250 yards from the shore, and success depended largely on giving the net a dexterous twist as soon as the fish had entered its mouth, so as to prevent his escape.
