PACIFIC SALMON 7

than a hundred and five pounds. One specimen
which was caught by professional fishermen scaled
ninety-eight pounds, while fish of eighty pounds were
fairly common. The biggest Tyee on record to be
caught on sporting tackle at Campbell River was, if I
remember right, seventy-two pounds; but I have it
on good authority that it is with fish as with the game of
British Columbia, that if one wants to catch really
big fish, one must now seek further afield and go to
less disturbed waters.

Besides this large kind of salmon there is the
“Cohoe” (O. kisutch), running to between three and
fifteen pounds in weight. It is a pretty silvery fish
and offers good sport. Further there are the “Sockeye”
(O. nerka) and the “Humpback” (0. gorbuscha), the
latter having a hump on its back and a head formed
something like the beak of an eagle. But these last
mentioned kinds cannot be compared to the Tyee and
Cohoe as sporting fishes.

Let us glance at the life story of a Spring Salmon,

hatched from a tiny egg, which the female fish has -

carefully deposited with thousands of others in the
sandy bed of some “salmon creek” far away in the
fastnesses of the Rockies.

When it leaves the river in which it was hatched
it swims about in the depths of the Pacific Ocean for
a period of four years, and with plenty of food of all
kinds it has grown into a big, strong, silver-lustrous
fish. Then comes the moment when its natural
instincts are awakened, and with millions of others
of its kind it crowds in towards the coasts and up the
many rivers to the far-away spawning grounds in
order to consummate the eternal round of propagation.