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and forth from fresh to salt as often and as rapidly as they need to. In Pennsylvania and Maryland, Kynard
helped the shad specialist Richard St. Pierre work out the restoration program that has to make its way through four huge dams in the Susquehanna River. As a representative of the United States government, he has worked with “high-level conservation officials” in China to illuminate the life histories of migrating Chinese fish. His research in Brazil has been similar. Willy Bemis has said, “When most people are confronted with new environments, their eyes glaze over. It’s all too much for a while. My impression is that Boyd goes into a new environment and begins making original observations immediately.”
    Kynard is the only American in the Danube Delta Research Institute. When I went shad fishing with him in South Hadley in May, 1999, he was still feeling traces of jet lag after flying home from Romania. Carrying 55—75-kilohertz hydrophones, he had spent three weeks tracking sturgeon up the Danube, with Dr. Radu Suciu and a three-man Romanian support team. Kynard was the river pilot. It was his boat. He had bought it in Arkansas and shipped it to Romania in a forty-five-foot box. The Romanians named it Sam, because it came from America. It had a seventy-five-horsepower outboard motor. Telling me some of this as he stood in the Connecticut that morning casting darts for shad, he said, “All my trips come back with some kinds of stories; they just don’t include a war.”
    Above river kilometre 130 is a zone of intense commercial fishing on the Danube, a drift gill-net fishery, where Kynard and company picked up—mainly from Gypsy fishermen—forty-four sturgeons on the spawning run. They were stellate sturgeons, averaging four and a half feet in length and fifteen to thirty pounds. In addition to fitting them with ultrasonic telemetry tags, it was highly advisable to get them out of the heaviest commercial gill-netting zone before releasing them back into the river. On Sam, which was six feet wide and twenty feet long, they could carry only six of the big fish at a time. They made a canvas sling, pinched it off at the
two ends like a brioche, rigged it to a twelve-volt pump that kept water in it, slung it from gunwale to gunwale, and carried six sturgeons upstream to river kilometre 178. They turned around and went back for more. When it was time for lunch, they ate green onions, feta, salami, bread, and jam. The Danube there is the border between Romania and Ukraine. They made the seven round trips in two days. When it was time for dinner, they ate green onions, feta, salami, bread, and jam. A hundred miles up the Danube from the Black Sea, all forty-four wired sturgeons went back into the river and most took off upstream. Kynard and the Romanians had no idea where stellates spawn in the Danube. Their purpose was to find out.
    Going up the river, they stopped at one-kilometre intervals and put the hydrophones over the side. The hydrophones, with their long arms, were like boom mikes on a movie stage. There was no sound from the sturgeons. Kynard heard only the soft rustle of sediment moving in the river. A 0-1,000-hertz hydrophone is so sensitive that it can hear sand grains in motion, even in very quietly moving water, as Kynard would demonstrate to Willy Bemis, me, and others one day in Willy’s boat in the Holyoke Pool. A relaxing and soothing sound, not unlike the recorded surf played above the cribs of infants, it was audible geomorphology—you were listening to mountains on their way to the sea. The sound is the signature of rivers, Kynard said. The Danube’s differs from the Yangtze’s, the Yangtze’s from the Connecticut’s. He had never heard the Yukon River. With its great load of glacial Hour—jagged particles of fresh-ground rock—the Yukon would sound like a chain saw.
    At the Danube River’s kilometre 250, he had not caught