"No, I shot to attract you and Pieter."

"Well, that's all right, too. They won't be back tonight, or likely any other night. Come on."

They helped Ramsay into the house, bathed his head and put him to bed.

He awoke to a mist-filled morning.

No breath of air stirred. Visibility was almost non-existent; the mist was so heavy that it almost hid the lake. Ramsay, with all the elasticity of youth, had recovered quickly from last night's incident and he had a good appetite for the breakfast Marta had prepared.

Then Marta tossed her head defiantly. "All of you have been away," she announced, "and you have done many things. I have been nowhere and I have not done anything. But today I go to Three Points to shop."

"Sure," Pieter said. "I'll hitch the horse for you."

They cheered Marta on her way and went down to cast the seine. The pound nets, having been visited within the past two days, would not again be visited today. Aside from that, they had seined tons of whitefish and sturgeon out of the bay in front of Pieter's house. Naturally the catches were growing smaller. If they didn't take the seine too far out, and set it shallow, three men could work the windlasses.

Then, just as they were ready to fish, and just about when Marta should have reached Three Points, a man on a lathered horse came pounding down the sand beach. He drew his tired mount up. "Quick!" he gasped. "An accident! Marta is badly hurt!"

CHAPTER TEN

_THE GREAT FISH_

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

The spawning sturgeon, a vast number of them, had started up the river together. It was a journey as old as the lake itself. Side by side they swam, in such numbers and so many evenly-spaced layers that none of the many Indians who fished along the river was able to thrust his spear without striking a sturgeon. Preying bears, otter, panthers, lynx and other creatures that liked fish, thronged the river's banks and struck at the horde as it passed. So little did all their raids combined matter that it was as though they had taken nothing. No creature that wanted one lacked a sturgeon to eat. But the great mass of fish, impelled by the 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 way to the river's source, did the vast schools start to thin out. Then it was not because their enemies took too many, though they caught a great number. The schools started to lessen because many, too exhausted to go farther or content with spawning grounds already reached, dropped behind to spawn.

Finally only a few, not necessarily the biggest but invariably the most vigorous, were left. Day after day, night after night, stopping only to rest or feed, they went on up the virgin river. Buck deer, drinking, saw the fleeting shadows pass, snorted and leaped skittishly away. Drinking buffalo raised their shaggy heads and, with water dribbling from their muzzles, stared after the migrating fish.

Everything seemed, in some small way, to sense the mystery that went with the swimming sturgeon. They were part of the abundance of this wealthy land, and when they were through spawning, that abundance would be increased. The very presence of the fish was within itself a promise that 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 contained the egg, the cell, that was to be the great White Sturgeon. Swimming close beside her was an equally vigorous male. All the sturgeon that had been able to come this far were among the finest and best.

They stopped in a quiet pool which, within itself, was almost a little lake. A third of a mile wide by a mile and a half long, the pool rolled smoothly down an almost level course. It was shaded on either side by gloomy pines that marched like soldiers in disordered rank for a very great distance. There were no grunting buffalo here, though an occasional white-tailed deer tripped daintily down to drink from the sweet, 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. They skittered foolishly over the water, seeming to pay no attention to anything save the sheer joy of being alive. Now and then the water beneath them would dimple and ripple in widening circles towards either bank; and when it did, invariably there would be one less duckling.

Nothing paid any attention whatever to such casualties. Life teemed in the pool, and there life also fed on life. It was meant to be, and the mighty pike that lived in the pool had to eat, too.

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

The female sturgeon paid absolutely no attention, and neither did her mate, when he came to fertilize the eggs. They were here to do, and knew how to do, only one thing. Finished, they had no thought as to what might happen next. The two sturgeon swam back into the pool and rested before beginning their long return journey to the great lake. But they had chosen wisely and well.

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

The baby fish came of strong parents, so that there were almost no infertile eggs, but such inroads had already been made among them that not one in twenty ever knew life. Immediately they were singled out by hungry enemies.

The White Sturgeon should have died first for, though all his brothers and sisters were almost the color of the water in which they found birth, he was distinctly different. He was lighter--perhaps a throwback to some distant age when all sturgeon were white--and thus he was the easiest to see. But he seemed to have been born with compensating factors.

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

Thus, from the very first, the White Sturgeon seemed to have a keener brain, 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 learned his 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 from it and feeding on minute particles of both vegetable and animal life.

Most of his time he spent feeding, and he grew very fast. Not until encroaching winter drove him there did he move out into the pool.

Most of the ducks were gone before the first thin shell ice formed on the borders of the pool, and those that lingered after that flew out with the first snow. The snow blew in from the north on the heels of an unseasonably early winter wind, and the White Sturgeon saw the mighty pines heaped with feathery snow. Snow lay deep on the ground, and the deer that came down to the pool seemed almost jet-black against its virginal whiteness.

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

Right after the snow stopped there was a spell of sub-zero weather that threw a sheathing of ice clear across the pool and froze the shallows to the 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 anyway the 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 go and never failed to rip what they seized. Of the young sturgeon that lived until fall, perhaps two hundred and fifty in all, the pike had half before the winter was well set. The rest were too wary to be easy prey.

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

In the spring, shortly after the ice broke up and moved sluggishly down the river, the White Sturgeon followed it. With him went three of his brothers and two sisters, and if more than that had survived he did not know about them or where they were. Nor did he care. In his life there was no room for or meaning to affection; he traveled with his brothers and sisters merely because, like him, they too were going down the river.

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

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

Again and again, while he pursued his lazy journey down the river, the White Sturgeon saw the lake sturgeon swim past him as they headed upstream toward the spawning grounds. Swimming strongly, they came in huge schools. Spent from the spawning, they swam slowly past him on their way back to the lake.

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

Though the White Sturgeon did not realize it, everything was part of a mighty pattern and a vast scheme. Though there had never been a time when 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 the powerful fish which he must be were he to live. Then the river gave him his last test.

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

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

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

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

With all this, he remained a harmless fish. Never born to battle, he had no wish to fight and he did not abandon all his hard-won caution. If the pike had not hurt him, nothing that swam in the river or lake would hurt him; but the White Sturgeon retained a fear of those creatures not born of 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 into the 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 and into the cold lake. For a while he sported like a dolphin, rising to the surface, showing his white back, and diving.

An Indian who was spearing fish from a canoe stared his astonishment.