Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/220

210 day and night, when the sun goes away for months, the men sail recklessly in their boats and canoes to their anchoring-places far up in the north, and their spacious houses are quickly filled with guests. Obeying the resistless drift, come hosts of fishes out of the deepest deeps of the sea, so that the net cast for them mocks the strength of the Herculean men, or is torn under the burden. The throng of the foolish fish is so dense that an oar pushed perpendicularly through it remains upright. Millions are caught, and millions go on, so that there is no sign of a decrease in the number. This migration of the fishes reaches its extreme point at about Christmas-time. No pencil could reproduce the picture which the polar sea exhibits at this season. Hundreds of craft, manned with stalwart fishers, are being incessantly filled with speckled prey; as far as the eye can reach, nothing but fish, which crowd and press upon one another to get to the breeding-place; the massive glaciers and rock-built shores in the background, and, as illuminants to the scene, the ghostly moon and the crackling northern lights. All this time there is also twilight on the southern horizon, and toward February a narrow strip of the sun shows itself again, gradually to rise higher. With the first appearance of day the fishes begin to sink slowly in the fathomless depths. As the sky becomes brighter, the sea and its bays become more quiet. The boats cease to glide over the surface of the waters, the fishermen go home with their spoil, and the northern world lies silent, basking in the beams of the returning sun. But this quiet only lasts for a few weeks, when new noisy, swarming hosts come to the islands. They are the birds, which come up from the sea to the land. It is a deeply poetic trait in the lives of these creatures that only two causes determine them to seek terra firma—the power of love and the approach of death. The sea-bird, weather-proof, lives on the sea. He hunts his food by diving, swinging over the billows, and sleeps and dreams with his head hidden under his wings. But there comes a time when the earlier sunbeams kiss the northern islands; then he is mightily moved in his soul, and hastens to the coast to celebrate there his annual wedding. And, when he feels that death is near, he swims with his feeble limbs back to the place of his birth, there to close his life. It is the same feeling that inspires in aged men that ardent desire to return to their old home to die and be buried there. To the naturalist who goes to the north to study the ways of the birds this trait in their character is of peculiar interest. Of one of the tribes of these colonists of the northern bird-mountain I must make particular mention. It is the eider duck, the producer of down. It belongs to the family of the ducks, and forms, so far as bodily stature is concerned, one of the largest species of the group. The plumage of the male is handsome and brilliant. In it black, red, ashen-gray, ice-green, white, brown, and yellow are mingled with splendid effect. His head and back are snow-white, his neck is rose-red, and the lower part of his body is deep black. The