mon. In those three bays no other
purse seiner could shoot his gear. Folly Bay held them under exclusive
license. Gill nets could be drifted there, but the purse seiner was
king.

A gill net goes out over a boat's stern. When it is strung it stands in
the sea like a tennis net across a court, a web nine hundred feet long,
twenty feet deep, its upper edge held afloat by corks, its lower sunk by
lead weights spaced close together. The outer end is buoyed to a float
which carries a flag and a lantern; the inner is fast to the bitts of
the launch. Thus set, and set in the evening, since salmon can only be
taken by the gills in the dark, fisherman, launch, and net drift with
the changing tides till dawn. Then he hauls. He may have ten salmon, or
a hundred, or treble that. He may have none, and the web be torn by
sharks and fouled heavy with worthless dogfish.

The purse seiner works in daylight, off a powerfully engined sixty-foot,
thirty-ton craft. He pays the seine out over a roller on a revolving
platform aft. His vessel moves slowly in a sweeping circle as the net
goes out,--a circle perhaps a thousand feet in diameter. When the circle
is complete the two ends of the net meet at the seiner's stern. A power
winch hauls on ropes and the net closes. Nothing escapes. It draws
together until it is a bag, a "purse" drawn up under the vessel's
counter, full of glistening fish.

The salmon is a surface fish, his average depth seldom below four
fathoms. He breaks water when he feeds, when he plays, when he runs in
schools. The purse seiner watches the signs. When the salmon rise in
numbers he makes a set. To shoot the gear and purse the seine is a
matter of minutes. A thousand salmon at a haul is nothing. Three
thousand is common. Five thousand is far below the record. Purse seines
have been burst by the dead weight of fish against the pull of the
winch.

The purse seine is a deadly trap for schooling salmon. And because the
salmon schools in mass formation, crowding nose to tail and side to
side, in the entrance to a fresh-water stream, the Fisheries Department
having granted a monopoly of seining rights to a packer has also
benevolently decreed that no purse seine or other net shall operate
within a given distance of a stream mouth,--that the salmon, having won
to fresh water, shall go free and his kind be saved from utter
extinction.

These regulations are not drawn for sentimental reasons, only to
preserve the salmon i