Early in July the salmon enter the river in immense numbers from the sea, and are caught by the natives in gill-nets, baskets, seines, weirs, traps, and a dozen other ingenious contrivances—­cut open, cleaned, and boned by the women, with the greatest skill and celerity, and hung in long rows upon horizontal poles to dry.  A fish, with all the confidence of sea life, enters the river as a sailor comes ashore, intending to have a good time; but before he fairly knows what he is about, he is caught in a seine, dumped out upon the beach with a hundred more equally unsophisticated and equally unfortunate sufferers, split open with a big knife, his backbone removed, his head cut off, his internal arrangements scooped out, and his mutilated remains hung over a pole to simmer in a hot July sun.  It is a pity that he cannot enjoy the melancholy satisfaction of seeing the skill and rapidity with which his body is prepared for a new and enlarged sphere of usefulness!  He is no longer a fish.  In this second stage of passive unconscious existence he assumes a new name, and is called a “yukala” (yoo’-kah-lah).

It is astonishing to see in what countless numbers and to what great distances these fish ascend the Siberian rivers.  Dozens of small streams which we passed in the interior of Kamchatka, seventy miles from the seacoast, were so choked up with thousands of dying, dead, and decayed fish, that we could not use the water for any purpose whatever.  Even in little mountain brooks, so narrow that a child could step across them, we saw salmon eighteen or twenty inches in length still working their way laboriously up stream, in water which was not deep enough to cover their bodies.  We frequently waded in and threw them out by the dozen with our bare hands.  They change greatly in appearance as they ascend a river.  When they first come in from the sea their scales are bright and hard, and their flesh fat and richly coloured; but as they go higher and higher up stream; their scales lose their brilliancy and fall off, their flesh bleaches out until it is nearly white, and they become lean, dry, and tasteless.  For this reason all the fishing-stations in Kamchatka are located, if possible, at or near the mouths of rivers.  To the instinct which leads the salmon to ascend rivers for the purpose of depositing its spawn, is attributable the settlement of all north-eastern Siberia.  If it were not for the abundance of fish, the whole country would be uninhabited and uninhabitable, except by the Reindeer Koraks.  As soon as the fishing season is over, the Kamchadals store away their dried yukala in balagans and return to their winter quarters to prepare for the fall catch of sables.  For nearly a month they spend all their time in the woods and mountains, making and setting traps.  To make a sable-trap, a narrow perpendicular slot, fourteen inches by four in length and breadth, and five inches in depth, is cut in the trunk of a large tree, so