Argosy All-Story Weekly, June 13, 1925 — page 154: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

By F. ST. MARS IS mother’s huge tail swished the last layer of gravel over him with a: ‘There! That’s all he’ll get from me’ sort of action, and, turning, she dropped slowly downstream with dozens of her sisters, big, spent fish, exhausted after the spawning. All that day the great steel-blue salmon, distended with roe and milt, had fought and courted in the narrow, shallow water of the “reds,” as the spawning grounds are called, whilst the sun marched slowly across the valley from crest to opposite crest of those eternal frowning mountains, who in their time must assuredly have witnessed this gay and animated scene thousands, aye, hundreds of thousands of times, and taken no notice. And by the time day dawned again all were gone. The river was left to itself; to its normal population. Really, if you come to think of it, there was no special reason why his mother should trouble her head overmuch about him. Why should she? He was something about— exactly counting as to units does not mat- ter in this case—the twenty-first thousandth egg she had laid at that spawning, and she had good right to her view that she had, for that year, at any rate, done her duty by the great and honored tribe to which she be- longed. She had slid downstream contented, she to rest in the females’ pools; her enormous husband—who was the largest “ kipper,” as she was the biggest “ baggit’’ on the spawning ground—to the males’ pools, for the sexes do not associate—if, indeed, they tolerate each other—after the honeymoon. Under three good feet of gravel, in the groove that his mother’s strong tail had scooped out, he lay, a pink salmon egg among thousands of other pink salmon eggs —in the next groove, belonging to another fish, they were white, and others were red— all about a quarter of an inch in size. And even there he was not safe; even here that terrible, grim battle of life, that awful strug- gle for existence, which is the grim motto of the wild, began in earnest, and never ceased till the day of his death. A big 626 GOMiGooo S