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In the early spring, when he is thin and half starved, capelin and smelt in great numbers come to spawn along the north and south shores of the St. Lawrence. With high tide comes the beluga's chance to feed on the spawning fish and he will rush in quite near to shore for his favourite food. So voracious is he that with the fish he takes quantities of sand into his stomach.
When acres upon acres of the countless little capelin swim inshore to feed, and they themselves are preyed on by leaping acres of voracious cod, whose own rear ranks are being preyed on by hungry seals, sharks, herring-hogs, or dogfish, then indeed the troubled surface of a narrowing bay is literally thick with the silvery flash of capelin, the dark tumultuous backs of cod, and the swirling rushes of the greater beasts of prey behind.
"And they travel in such countless numbers that sometimes a storm will throw them ashore in long windrows like you see in a hay field, so that the farmers come and cart them away for manure. Well, it did not take long for the old whale to fill up even her great stomach, when the capelin were so numerous.
A twist or two of her mighty flukes, like the screw of an ocean liner, drove her clear of this obscurity, and carried her, a moment later, into a packed shoal of southward journeying capelin." The Babe's mouth opened for the natural question: "What's capelin?" But Uncle Andy got ahead of him. "That's a little fish something like a sardine," he explained hastily.
I allude more particularly to the Capelin or Salmo arcticus which we found in large shoals in Bathurst's Inlet and which not only abounds, as Augustus told us, in the bays in his country, but swarms in the Greenland firths.* The portion of the sea over which we passed is navigable for vessels of any size; the ice we met, particularly after quitting Detention Harbour, would not have arrested a strong boat.
Tucking her baby well under her fin, she made an hysterical rush at the unoffending stranger. His little pig-like eyes blinked anxiously, and, darting off at his best pace, he was speedily lost to view in the cloudy myriads of the capelin.
This fuel enabled us to make a hearty supper from a small deer killed this evening. The shallows we passed this day were covered with shoals of capelin, the angmaggoeuk of the Esquimaux. It was known to Augustus who informed us that it frequents the coast of Hudson's Bay and is delicate eating. The course and distance made was south by east-half-east, thirty-three miles.
She went ploughing through the shoal lazily, and stopped at last to rub her little one softly with her flipper. "All at once she caught sight of a curious-looking creature swimming just beneath the shoal of capelin, and every now and then opening its mouth to gulp down a bushel or so of them.
Malcolm had many friends and there had been great preparations in Capelin Bay. Every scrap of room was needed to accommodate the guests, and at night hardly an inch of floor space but lodged some sleeping form wrapped in a four-point blanket, while the hardier ones with sleeping-bags contentedly crawled into them out in the snow, as their fashion is when nothing better offers.
No one, therefore, had much to say of him, good or bad. In its kindly way the coast just left him alone, seeing that was what he wished. As the years went by it happened that hard tunes with a scarcity of food struck "Frying-Pan Tickle," the hospitable name of the cove where Sally was reared. Fish were scarce, capelin never struck in, fur could not be got.
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