The food that Tom was accustomed to in his early days did not differ materially from his present fare. It was then, and is now, chiefly fish—boiled, steam-baked, spit-roasted, or smoked. In all his early haunts, in the houses and along the beach, everywhere he was immersed in grateful, fishy odors. From the earliest time that he can remember anything at all, he has been daily confronted by some aspect of the life of a fishing people, whether it be the catching of salmon trout by the boys with their two-barbed fish spears; or the spearing or trolling or netting of salmon by the older men; or the getting in the sea of herrings with herring rakes, of halibut with the peculiar, gracefully bent halibut hooks that every Indian even now has kicking around in his box of odds and ends, of cod with twirling decoys and spears that have two prongs of unequal length—“older” and “younger”; or the hanging up of salmon in rows to dry in the smoke houses, so that this all-important fish may still contribute his share of the food supply, long after the last salmon of the late fall has ceased to run; or the splitting up of the salmon by the women as a first preliminary to cooking; or any one of the hundreds of other scenes that make of a fisher folk a fish-handling and a fish-eating people.