Butterflied Smelts

“I took a canoe from below my window and paddling with a rake had in about an hour 600 smelts in the bottom of the canoe,” a British Columbian administrator wrote home to England in the nineteenth century. “You sit right forward and use the rake as a paddle, bringing it behind you into the boat each stroke[.] sometimes I would bring up 9 or 10 at a stroke very large smelts and delicious eating.” The herring rake, a long shaft of hardwood set with sharpened teeth or bones of whale or deer, H