The Spell of the White Sturgeon

by Jim Kjelgaard

  CHAPTER TEN

  _THE GREAT FISH_

  The great White Sturgeon was not, in the truest sense of the word, anative of the lake. More years ago than any living thing could remember,he had been born, along with thousands of brothers and sisters, halfwayup one of the many rivers that emptied into the lake. The sturgeonremembered little about that time, but just the same it had helped toshape him and make him what he was.

  The spawning sturgeon, a vast number of them, had started up the rivertogether. It was a journey as old as the lake itself. Side by side theyswam, in such numbers and so many evenly-spaced layers that none of themany Indians who fished along the river was able to thrust his spearwithout striking a sturgeon. Preying bears, otter, panthers, lynx andother creatures that liked fish, thronged the river's banks and struckat the horde as it passed. So little did all their raids combined matterthat it was as though they had taken nothing. No creature that wantedone lacked a sturgeon to eat. But the great mass of fish, impelled bythe desperate necessity of laying their eggs in the river, swam on.

  Only when miles were behind them and they were about a third of the wayto the river's source, did the vast schools start to thin out. Then itwas not because their enemies took too many, though they caught a greatnumber. The schools started to lessen because many, too exhausted to gofarther or content with spawning grounds already reached, dropped behindto spawn.

  Finally only a few, not necessarily the biggest but invariably the mostvigorous, were left. Day after day, night after night, stopping only torest or feed, they went on up the virgin river. Buck deer, drinking, sawthe fleeting shadows pass, snorted and leaped skittishly away. Drinkingbuffalo raised their shaggy heads and, with water dribbling from theirmuzzles, stared after the migrating fish.

  Everything seemed, in some small way, to sense the mystery that wentwith the swimming sturgeon. They were part of the abundance of thiswealthy land, and when they were through spawning, that abundance wouldbe increased. The very presence of the fish was within itself a promisethat more were to follow.

  Finally there were only half a dozen sturgeon left.

  One was a very strong female whose spawn-swollen body even now containedthe egg, the cell, that was to be the great White Sturgeon. Swimmingclose beside her was an equally vigorous male. All the sturgeon that hadbeen able to come this far were among the finest and best.

  They stopped in a quiet pool which, within itself, was almost a littlelake. A third of a mile wide by a mile and a half long, the pool rolledsmoothly down an almost level course. It was shaded on either side bygloomy pines that marched like soldiers in disordered rank for a verygreat distance. There were no grunting buffalo here, though anoccasional white-tailed deer tripped daintily down to drink from thesweet, unpolluted water.

  On either side of the pool was a mat of green sedges and water-lilies,and in them a great horde of ducks were rearing their young. Theyskittered foolishly over the water, seeming to pay no attention toanything save the sheer joy of being alive. Now and then the waterbeneath them would dimple and ripple in widening circles towards eitherbank; and when it did, invariably there would be one less duckling.Nothing paid any attention whatever to such casualties. Life teemed inthe pool, and there life also fed on life. It was meant to be, and themighty pike that lived in the pool had to eat, too.

  Weary, but far from exhausted, the female carrying the WhiteSturgeon-to-be pushed herself into the sedges and lay quietly while sherid herself of the burden that she had carried so far. A million or moreeggs she left there, and almost before she was finished two little pikethat made their home in the sedges had started gobbling them up.

  The female sturgeon paid absolutely no attention, and neither did hermate, when he came to fertilize the eggs. They were here to do, and knewhow to do, only one thing. Finished, they had no thought as to whatmight happen next. The two sturgeon swam back into the pool and restedbefore beginning their long return journey to the great lake. But theyhad chosen wisely and well.

  Almost before the parent fish left, a mink that had long had his eye onthe small pike swam quietly down to take one while it was feeding. Theother one fled. Though other things came to eat them, in due time whatremained of the spawn hatched. The White Sturgeon was the first toappear.

  The baby fish came of strong parents, so that there were almost noinfertile eggs, but such inroads had already been made among them thatnot one in twenty ever knew life. Immediately they were singled out byhungry enemies.

  The White Sturgeon should have died first for, though all his brothersand sisters were almost the color of the water in which they foundbirth, he was distinctly different. He was lighter--perhaps a throwbackto some distant age when all sturgeon were white--and thus he was theeasiest to see. But he seemed to have been born with compensatingfactors.

  When a foot-long bass, a very monster of a thing compared with the babysturgeon, swam among them, they scattered in wild panic. The feedingbass had only to snap here and there to get all he wanted, but the WhiteSturgeon did not flee with the rest. Instead, he sank down beside acattail and did not move. A tiny cloud of mud-colored water driftedaround and covered him.

  Thus, from the very first, the White Sturgeon seemed to have a keenerbrain, or a sharper instinct, that made up for his distinctive coloring.Though he should have been the first to die, he did not die. He learnedhis lessons well, and saw how many of his brothers and sisters perished.Thus he discovered how to stay alive.

  For weeks he lived near his birthplace, swimming scarcely two yards fromit and feeding on minute particles of both vegetable and animal life.Most of his time he spent feeding, and he grew very fast. Not untilencroaching winter drove him there did he move out into the pool.

  Most of the ducks were gone before the first thin shell ice formed onthe borders of the pool, and those that lingered after that flew outwith the first snow. The snow blew in from the north on the heels of anunseasonably early winter wind, and the White Sturgeon saw the mightypines heaped with feathery snow. Snow lay deep on the ground, and thedeer that came down to the pool seemed almost jet-black against itsvirginal whiteness.

  Lingering in the shallows, the White Sturgeon held very still. His wasthe accumulated wisdom of ages. Ancestors almost exactly like him hadswum in antediluvian seas when huge, scaley monsters roamed the earth,and perhaps the White Sturgeon knew that, as long as he held still nearthe snow-covered bank, he would be hard to see. Or perhaps he merelyfound the snow, his own color matched at last, interesting.

  Right after the snow stopped there was a spell of sub-zero weather thatthrew a sheathing of ice clear across the pool and froze the shallows tothe very bottom. Only then did the White Sturgeon move out of them.

  He did not move far because it was not necessary to move far, and anywaythe great pike lingered in the center of the pool. Almost one third jaw,the pikes' mouths were edged with needle-sharp teeth that never let goand never failed to rip what they seized. Of the young sturgeon thatlived until fall, perhaps two hundred and fifty in all, the pike hadhalf before the winter was well set. The rest were too wary to be easyprey.

  All winter long, living on the edge of the ice and finding all the foodhe needed in the soft mud floor of the pool, the White Sturgeon led asolitary existence. But it was not a lonely life because, as yet, it wasnot in him to be lonely. All he knew, and all he had to know, was thathe must survive. Every effort was bent to that end.

  In the spring, shortly after the ice broke up and moved sluggishly downthe river, the White Sturgeon followed it. With him went three of hisbrothers and two sisters, and if more than that had survived he did notknow about them or where they were. Nor did he care. In his life therewas no room for or meaning to affection; he traveled with his brothersand sisters merely because, like him, they too were going down theriver.

  The journey was not at all hurried. The White Sturgeon, who by this timeknew much more about the various arts of survival than he had known whenhe left the pool, passed the next winter in another, smaller
pool, lessthan two miles from his birthplace. He chose the pool largely because itwas the home of a vast number of fish smaller than he, and they offeredan easy living to the pike, bass and other things that lived by eatingfish. Grown fat and sluggish in the midst of super-abundance, thesepredators were not inclined to chase anything that cared to avoid themor to work at all for their living. All they had to do was lie still andsooner or later the living would come to them.

  For his part, the White Sturgeon had no desire to hurt anything. Hissole wish was to be left alone, so he could peacefully pursue his ownpath of destiny. He grubbed in the mud for his food and idled when hewas not eating. But, because he had a prodigious appetite, he was eatingmost of the time. As a consequence, he continued to grow very rapidly.

  Again and again, while he pursued his lazy journey down the river, theWhite Sturgeon saw the lake sturgeon swim past him as they headedupstream toward the spawning grounds. Swimming strongly, they came inhuge schools. Spent from the spawning, they swam slowly past him ontheir way back to the lake.

  Vaguely the White Sturgeon identified himself with these fish. Never didhe have more than a passing wish to join them. He wanted only tocontinue his leisurely trip down the river, and time meant nothing atall.

  Though the White Sturgeon did not realize it, everything was part of amighty pattern and a vast scheme. Though there had never been a timewhen he was not in danger, the river had not been an unkind school.There he had learned how to avoid his enemies and how to become thepowerful fish which he must be were he to live. Then the river gave himhis last test.

  He was near the mouth, only a few miles from the lake, when he suddenlyfound himself face to face with a monstrous pike. The pike in the poolof his birth were big, but they were dwarfed by this one. Out of theshadows he came, a long, sinewy thing with the heart of a tiger and thejaws of a pike. Even wolves' jaws are not more terrible.

  The White Sturgeon did as he always did when danger threatened; he heldvery still. But this time it was futile because the pike had alreadyseen him. Thus the thing which must never happen, did happen. The WhiteSturgeon came face to face with danger in its deadliest form. If helived through this, then never again would he have to fear an enemy thatswam in the water.

  Suddenly the pike whirled, flipped a contemptuous tail, and drifted backinto the shadows out of which he had come. He was not afraid; no pike isever afraid of anything, but the White Sturgeon was nearly as large ashe and even the pike never killed wantonly, or destroyed that which hecould not eat. The White Sturgeon swam on. He had graduated with honorsfrom the river's school, and he seemed to know it. For the first timesince his birth, a mighty restlessness gripped him.

  Not again did he linger in the pools, or stop to feed for a week or amonth wherever he found a rich feeding bed. Urgings and commands withinhim that had been passive were suddenly active.

  With all this, he remained a harmless fish. Never born to battle, he hadno wish to fight and he did not abandon all his hard-won caution. If thepike had not hurt him, nothing that swam in the river or lake would hurthim; but the White Sturgeon retained a fear of those creatures not bornof the water. Aliens, they would not abide by the creed of the water.While heeding a sudden and great wish to get out of the river and intothe lake, the White Sturgeon stayed far from both river banks.

  A ghost figure in the murky water, he shot out of the river's mouth andinto the cold lake. For a while he sported like a dolphin, rising tothe surface, showing his white back, and diving.

  An Indian who was spearing fish from a canoe stared his astonishment.Trembling, he sheathed his spear and paddled back to his encampment. Hehad seen the White Sturgeon, the Ghost Fish, and that night a mightystorm knocked down a big pine near the Indian's camp. Two people werekilled when it fell.

  Knowing nothing of this, lying contentedly in thirty feet of water wherehe was aware of the storm only because his fine and deep senses made himaware of everything that occurred above, the White Sturgeon grubbed forfood in the lake's bottom.

  The next time his tribe left the lake to rush up the river, the WhiteSturgeon journeyed with them. He went because he must, because it was acall even stronger than hunger and he could not resist it. The strongestof sturgeon, he stayed in the fore-front of the spawning horde and stillremained away from the banks. The few Indians who saw him were soastonished that they forgot to strike with their spears, and he nevereven came close to the prowling bears and other beasts that waxed so fatwhen the migrating sturgeon came back to spawn.

  Guided by the most precise of instincts, the White Sturgeon went exactlyto that spawning bed in the sedges where he was born, and fertilized theeggs that a female left there. Wan and spent, caring for nothing, oncehis main purpose in life had been realized, he turned and swam back intothe lake. That was now his home.

  Again and again the White Sturgeon went up the river with his kind. Onlyonce, in all the trips he made, was he in real danger, and that time anIndian's spear scratched his side. The Indian, fishing with twocompanions, promptly fell into the river and drowned.

  Thus the legend of the White Sturgeon grew. Born in a red man's fertilemind, it was handed from red man to white and distorted in the transfer.Now none could trace its origin and none knew exactly how it had begun.Lake men knew only of the White Sturgeon, and he had learned much ofmen. But he lived in the present, not the past.

  Years had elapsed since Lake Michigan was shadowed only by canoes. Nowthere were the Mackinaw boats, the pound boats, the churningside-wheelers and the rowboats. Because it was his affair to knoweverything that went on in the lake, the White Sturgeon knew them all.

  He knew also that it was good to rest in the lake's gentler places. Notin years had he rushed up the river with his spawning comrades. Thefires of his youth had long since been quenched, and besides, he was nowfar too big to travel up any river. Perhaps the same quirk of naturethat had granted him his pigment had given him his size. Other sturgeonwere thought to be huge when they attained a weight of two hundred andfifty pounds. The White Sturgeon weighed almost a thousand pounds.

  He was still a gentle creature, though the sudden angers of age were aptto seize him, and on the morning that Ramsay, Pieter and Hans werecalled to Three Points, the Sturgeon was feeding quietly in the tunnelof the first pound net they had set. He stopped feeding when he sensedan approaching boat.

  It was a Mackinaw boat, used for setting gill nets, and it was shroudedin mist that sat like a fleecy blanket upon the lake. The White Sturgeonlay very still. He was not afraid but he had no wish to be disturbed,and if he remained very quiet, perhaps he would not be bothered. He wasaware of something coming into the lake and of the boat's withdrawalinto the shrouding mist.

  The White Sturgeon decided to move, but when he tried to do so he foundhis way blocked. A gill net was stretched across the entrance to thepound net, effectively preventing anything outside from getting in oranything inside from getting out, and the White Sturgeon was trapped byit.

  Gently he nosed against the gill net, seeking a way through. When noneoffered, he swam a little ways and tried again. A third, a fourth and afifth time he sought escape. There was none, and the White Sturgeon'sanger flared.

  He flung himself against the gill net, felt it cling to his mighty body,and twisted about. A hundred yards to one side, in a weak place, the netripped completely in half. The White Sturgeon threshed and twisted untilhe had reduced the entrapping folds to a mass of linen thread.

  Segments of the ruined net clung to him as he swam away.