As a picnic party comes round the bend a flock of startled ducks takes to the air, and like sea planes alighting they splash back again when the boat has passed. And there, upwind by the water's edge, is a deer with big eyes. Along with the boating goes the sport and fascination of the river's wild life. Geese and ducks flock the shallows in such numbers that at certain seasons you cannot count them. Not long ago a moose swam the St. John at Fredericton and spent some time wandering through the city's streets.
Deer emerge from the forests and eat the greens in gardens, as deer do everywhere in closed seasons.
C edric Cooper, of Fredericton, who has the rights on the largest pool on the river, tells me that in the St. John there are no fewer than nine salmon runs in the course of the year. The first comes up in early May a few weeks after the ice breaks, when the river is so widely flooded that the Maugerville district farmers sometimes have to put their cattle in the lofts of their barns. These fish are bound for the Serpentine branch of the Tobique, where they spawn. The last run comes up in November just before the river begins to freeze. Such was the first report of the agents of the Loyalists who had come to Annapolis in Nova Scotia in the fall of 1782, then had crossed the Fundy and proceeded up the St. John as far as the Oromocto in search of a new homeland for a desperate people.