Yet, even now, if in the month of November, when waters are red and
swollen, one stands by Selkirk cauld, the fish may be seen in numbers
almost incredible. By scores at a time you may see them, great and
small, hurl themselves into the air over the great wave which boils at
the cauld-foot. And the bigger fish, landing--if one may use the
term--far beyond the first upheaval of the wave, will rush stoutly up
the swirling, foaming rapid, perhaps half-way to the smooth water above
the cauld, ere they are swept back, still valiantly struggling, into the
seething pool below. The smaller fish less frequently succeed in
clearing the wave, but generally pitch nose foremost into the water
where it begins to rise, and are hurled back head over tail in impotent
confusion. Some of the heavier fish, too, after their jump may be seen
to come down with portentous skelp on top of the retaining wall of the
salmon-run in mid-stream, thence--apparently with "wind bagged"--to be
ignominiously hurried back into the deep pool from which they have but
the moment before hurled themselves. The general effect of the spectacle
is as if one watched an endless kind of finny Grand National
Steeplechase; one grows dizzy with the constant rise and fall of
innumerable fish over the big jump, and it is almost a relief to turn
and watch the bailiffs with their landing-nets lift from the shallow,
rushing water at the cauld-side fish after fish, which they carry up and
carefully put in the smooth water at top of the cauld.
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