Читать книгу Rogue River Feud - Zane Grey - Страница 3

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Deep and dark green, swift and clear, icy cold and as pure as the snows from which it sprang, the river had its source in the mountain under Crater Lake. It was a river at its birth; and it glided away through the Oregon forest, with hurrying momentum, as if eager to begin the long leap down through the Siskiyous. The giant firs shaded it; the deer drank from it; the little black-backed trout rose greedily to floating flies. And in sunlit glades, where the woods lightened, the wild lilac bloomed in its marvelous profusion of color, white and purple and pink, scenting the warm drowsy air with sweet fragrance.

Then suddenly, with a gurgling roar, the river performed a strange antic. It sank underground to reappear far below, bursting from a great dark hole at the head of a gorge and sliding down in glancing green inclines that ended in silvery cascades. Below Prospect the river tumbled off the mountain in mellow thundering music, to meet its main branch, and proud with added strength and beauty, it raced away between its timbered banks down the miles to the sheltered valley, through Burnham’s Ranch, and by Gold Hill, slowing in a long still reach that ended in Savage Rapids. Then on to Pierce Riffle, and skirting Grant’s Pass, the river twisted and chafed and fought its way through Hell Gate, and rushing over the Alameda rocks, and the ledges of the Argo Mine, it entered the canyoned wilderness of the Coast Range.

Long before the towering crags above Horseshoe Bend looked down upon the hurrying green and white stream it had grown to superb maturity, and flowed on, here with brooding peace and there with eddying poise, yet ever and oftener breaking into fierce rapids, down into the thundering cauldron of Reamy Falls and through the Plowshare, a white furrow in the mighty boulders, and over the constricted Graves Creek Rapid.

Tyee Bar and Russian Bar and China Bar, where the miners had washed away the sand for gold, and shed their blood and left their strange graves, made wide curves for the river. It raced and eddied by turns; it tarried under the high golden meadows that shone like jewels on the black mountain slopes; it glided on in glancing ripples around Winkle Bar, gentle and reluctant and sweetly vagrant, as if to lull and deceive, only to bellow sudden rage at the confines of Blossom Bar, and to prepare itself for a sullen surrender to treacherous Mule Creek Canyon. When it emerged from that narrow black-walled crack it was a subdued and chastened river, yet glad to be free once more, and to receive graciously the amber brook that tumbled off the mossy cliffs, on to the winding beauty of Solitude, where the black firs encroached to the water’s edge, and the sun shone only at midday down upon the ledged and barred river, and the wild ducks played among the reeds, and the weird and lonely water ouzels built their mud nests under the overhanging rocks, and the eagles screamed aloft, and the deer and bear made trails along the shores. But at last the leaps of Clay Hill and Two Mile Rapids released the river from the hundred-mile grip of the mountains.

Here it opened out and slowed down and spread wide over shallow gravelly bars, and ran on merrily, its fury spent, its mood changed, its age realized, on through the pastoral country of the coast, past the picturesque farms of the Indians and the rude shacks of the fishermen, broadening and meandering, smiling from its shiny pebbled bed at the retreating banks and the low colorful hills, and so on down to Gold Beach, assuming a deep, calm majesty when it found its home in the infinite sea.

Outside the mouth of the Rogue lurked a motley swarm of salmon, steelhead, forked-tails and silversides, and the hungry wolf-jawed jacks.

They began to gather early in the spring and every day thereafter the specked ranks grew. A marvelous instinct of nature brought them from out the ocean depths to the river which had given them birth. That same strange instinct actuated them with this restless waiting urge. Sharks and seals moved them to and fro, but never drove them from this inevitable wait at the river’s mouth. In great shadowy shoals they drifted close to the gateway through the breakers and listened for that mysterious call. When it came it was as if an irresistible command had united them. It was the first rise in the river, the freshet from mountain rains, and the water carried a sweet cold scent of the springs and the gravel beds. The run was on. First over the bar were the great brown leather-backed, white-bellied salmon, and the others followed, in a long endless stream, like deer migrating from north to south.

Their next obstacle was a man-made one, the wall of nets stretched across the wide river to intercept and capture and kill. Thousands strangled by the gills in the close meshes, but hundreds got through or around or over. The run was on and only death could end that instinct to survive and to reproduce. All day fish came over the bar into the river, but it was at night when they ran in heavy numbers. The fishermen knew this and cunningly spread their nets across the deep channels.

Those fish that escaped went up the river, steadily while the high water was on, sooner or later, when it fell again, to be halted by shallow bars over which they could not swim, or by rapids which they could not mount. Here in deep pools and where cool springs bubbled out of the ferny banks they waited again for another rise in the river, and ever their number grew. Days, sometimes weeks, passed before they could resume their journey. But most years nature provided the means by which the fish could move on upstream. At last they climbed above the region of obstructing shallows, and from then on the progress depended on strength and endurance. They shot the rapids and leaped the falls.

Gradually their number thinned out. The long two-hundred-mile climb was beset by perils and obstacles. The forked-tails and steelhead had no such battle for life that faced the salmon. They were smaller and nature had endowed them with endurance to get back to the sea. But the great scar-sided salmon sacrificed life in this struggle. Many weakened on the way, only to drop back; others, leaping high to get over the falls, sometimes hit rocks and crippled themselves; all rested longer and longer in the still pools above the rapids; none ever reached the spawning beds without the wounds of battle.

Upon the shallow gravel bars of the upper reaches of the river the surviving salmon made their spawning beds. When the sun shone brightly they could be seen almost motionless, huge brown-and-silver shapes, heroically absorbed in their task of procreation. And below them, wavering in deeper water, like wolves on the edge of a flock, hung the predatory jacks. They were salmon, too, but the cannibals of the species. Often one of these would glide forward, suddenly to shoot head on into the plump side of a spawning salmon, to burst from her eggs that floated down. And the wolf would drop back to fight his fellows for these floating eggs.

Nevertheless the spawning proceeded, perhaps inscrutably benefited by this cruel preying of nature. Salmon eggs were laid and fertilized and hatched—a procedure which ended in death for the progenitors. Out of millions of tiny little salmon, almost too small to be seen, some survived. And this survival was a monstrous and marvelous thing, in that the little fish lived off the rotting carcasses of their parents. As if by magic they grew.

When the time came the same mysterious call that had brought their parents up the river drew them instinctively down toward the sea. In shiny schools they glittered on the surface, sometimes leaping like a swarm of silver minnows. And they went on down the river to be swallowed up by the fertile salty sea, into which they vanished until maturity roused the same urge that had given them existence, when, strong with life and immutable to extend it forever, they sought the rolling Rogue to fulfill their part in the cycle.