The new chum, having still "tender feet," hesitated about putting his foot in, and merely looked the inquiry which he was unable to conceal.
"Well, you may believe me or not, sir, but it is God's truth that I once saw a man standing on the bank of the river at ----," and he named a village near New Westminster in the delta of the Fraser, "and he was flinging the salmon out on the bank with an ordinary hay-fork, and he was working so that the sweat rolled off him."
"But what did he want so many fish for as that? Surely he could not eat them all?"
"No, sir; his meadow was in want of fertilization, and fish manure, even when it consists of the carcasses of salmon, is not to be despised."
Other stories about the enormous numbers of salmon in the Fraser River of British Columbia tell how the fish are so crowded together that it is impossible for a man to thrust his hand in between them, and how they form such a solid mass that it almost looks as if you could walk across the big broad river on their backs, and could reach the opposite bank dryshod.
The tinned salmon that is such a familiar object in grocers' shops is captured, killed, cooked, and sealed down in those tins in big factories called "canneries," which stand pretty thick beside the river in certain parts of the lower course of the Fraser.
[Illustration: BIG FOREST TREES, BRITISH COLUMBIA. CHAPTER 11.]
On the eastern side of Canada, again, off the coasts of Nova Scotia, Newfoundland (which, by the way, is an independent colony, and does not yet form part of the Dominion of Canada), Cape Breton, and Prince Edward Island, there is a large population of hardy fisher-folk, who for generations have fished for cod on the inexhaustible "banks of Newfoundland." And even before their ancestors settled on American soil the hardy fishermen from Brittany, in France, and from the Basque country on the borders of France and Spain, used to dare the perils of the stormy Atlantic that they might go and reap the silvery harvest of the sea in the same fish-teeming waters. And for over 300 years great fleets of fishing-boats from both Europe and the maritime provinces of Canada have continued to brave the terrors and perils of the deep in pursuit of cod, mackerel, lobsters, herring, and haddock.