Hostages to Fortune by William Humphrey Read Free Book Online Page A

announcing that the herring were in. He would drop whatever he was doing and point himself northward. Cathy and Anthony came along, for so prodigious was the catch, and such the quantity of work it entailed, that all hands were needed. Besides, it was fun for all; they would not have missed out on it. It was spawning time for the Hudson’s shad too, and knowing that the river was pulsating with fish in their headlong millions bound for their orgiastic rendezvous, he could feel mount in him as he drove alongside it an anticipation akin to theirs.
    Like subway riders headed home at the evening rush hour the herring sped upriver and surfaced at their separate stations, their spawning grounds, creeks with old Dutch names like the Kinderhook, the Claverack, and the Roeliff-Jansenkill. To get over the rapids in which the creek, whichever it was, ended, they needed a full tide in the river. Tony knew the river’s tides to the hour every day. It would be rising when their party seated themselves among the plastic pails and scap nets and rubber boots in the bed of the old pickup truck and rattled off, and it would be at the full when they arrived.
    The blossoms of the valley’s many orchards were hardly more numerous than the herring. From near and far people came not to catch them but merely to marvel at the sight. Even after years of experience of it you were still awed by this example of nature’s prodigality. For the first few minutes after getting down the bank with all their gear they too stood and watched. No fear that the families already there, the father hauling up a full net with every dip of it, would leave an insufficiency for you and yours.
    All across the creek’s broad mouth, from their party’s vantage point all the way down to the river and for a hundred yards upstream to the first impassable falls, the surface bristled with fishes’ fins. Beneath these were more layers like stacks of coins. They packed themselves in so closely they rubbed scales off one another. The fins were aquiver as the fish struggled in the current and were thrust onward by those behind them and as the spawning urge wrought them to a frenzy. The water was shallow and clear and the throngs of fish were a silvery and scintillant stream like the stars of the Milky Way. Here, there, and everywhere, around some female running ripe, a swirl of bucks made the water boil. Then, before the one found the other and the two sank together to the bottom, the mingling milt and roe turned the water milky.
    Excitement succeeded wonder and while Tony and he were still rigging the nets Anthony and Christy were already in hip boots and in the water catching fish with their bare hands and tossing them onto the bank.
    Unchanged since antiquity, a scap net was simply a stout pole some ten feet long with four staves hanging from it to which was attached a square net of fine mesh six feet long to the side. On days when the fishing was slow the fisherman threaded a line through the nose of a herring and with it decoyed others over his sunken net. That fish was his “stoolie.” No need of a stoolie on good days. Tony and he waded into the water, dipped their nets, waited a couple of minutes, and it was all they could do to hoist and swing them ashore to be emptied. A hundred herring bellied the net, strained its staves. Others were making similar catches and the bank glittered with threshing mounds of silver.
    The full nets strained their muscles too, but tired as you soon were you worked on, for the herring must be harvested while they were there. Already around your feet spent fish were washing tail first back to the river, back to sea. You slithered and slipped among the rocks, fell in over your boot tops, and still you dipped and hoisted, dipped and hoisted until the plastic pails were brim full. Struggling back up the long steep bank with one of those in each hand you stopped often to rest, catch your breath.
    At home all hands