“Goddam,” Hank exclaimed. “After all our work!”
“Veil,” Sven said mildly, “God sure didn’t promise fish every time.”
When the skiff was safely secured, Ivan strode past them straight to the cabin without a word. Jones gave the boat full throttle, and spray began to kick around the sides. Hank’s legs were heavy just to lift. Maybe open the sleeping bag, maybe find that much energy before crawling in.
“Get to the dishes from lunch, Hank. Shake it! I got dinner coming.”
“Oh. Sure, Sven.” The sweet odors of a roast filled the living space. All that showed of Ivan were two huge dirty socks sticking from the shadow of his bunk. There were no shortcuts to washing dishes on the Rondelay. The only fresh water came by pumping a handle that kept slipping its screw, and hot water had to be heated on the stove in competition with Sven s pots. Moreover, he could use only a trickle for the big soapy dishes since the boat carried a small tank. It made luxury of the washtubs at the Kodiak beanery.
“So, how you like svimming in dis vater?” Hank laughed, grateful to have it become a mere joke. Sven sang a Norwegian song in a high voice that penetrated over the engine noise. Evidently singing and whistling were not the same. Hank’s clothes from the dunking hung over the stove. The dungarees and flannel shirt were still wet. The rest had disappeared. He looked around, fearing Sven might have slung them outside or in a comer, and found them folded dry on his bunk.
Hank had just wiped the last dish when the engine slowed. Ivan in one grunting motion slid upright into his boots and went on deck. “Better hurry put on your rain gear,” said Sven.
“Aren’t we through for the night?”
“Get out here, Hank!” yelled Steve.
In the dark they approached a cluster of masts and lights that shimmered in the water. The night was vast except for this patch. “Here, pump the bilge,” said Steve. Hank dutifully took over a long pipe handle as Steve and Ivan coiled mooring lines to throw from the bow and stem. The fish bilge slurped up with a sharp stench. Ahead, mast and deck lights separated from the mass as they came closer, but the dark spaces between still made it hard to define individual boats. Around the center climbed one man in a plaid shirt and watch cap, another in a red T-shirt. A large brailer of fish rose in the air, stayed suspended for a few seconds, then swung over and dropped out of sight.
“Put your fenders to starboard,” called Jones.
The main vessel was bargelike, with square housing aft and a long foredeck fenced by boards. “She’s built like the Billy Two,” said Hank.
“Then I guess it is the Billy Two
Hank strained to see faces he recognized. There stood Spitz outside the wheelhouse operating the controls, his white hair and tight-set mouth recognizable even in the shadowed lights. Beside him stood the captains girlfriend.
“Hey, where’s Nick?” he called to the red-bearded man who received their lines.
“Quit. I took his place. Don’t I know you?”
“Your voice is familiar but the light’s bad. My name’s Hank Crawford.”
“Well, shit, man, I’m Pete Jorgenson. You didn’t think I was going to wash dishes back in that beanery all my life?”
Hank leaped over to shake his hand and pound his back.
To unload, he joined Steve and Ivan in the cramped hold among the fish. (“Cook don’t have to pitch fish,” as Sven had said.) He knew the rancid green odor from the cannery, but it surprised him that the beautiful salmon should have acquired it so soon. Their bodies were now hard and stiff, and the silver had disappeared. A brailer lowered through the hatch as they backed against the sides of the hold to avoid being hit.
“Okay,” said Pete with authority, “we’ll take ’em about two hundred at a time, and make sure you separate out the dogs.”
For once Hank knew what he was about. From experience in the cannery bins he slung the dead fish by their tails into the brailer as fast as the others, tossing an occasional dog salmon aside as he worked, and counting as he went. He strained to be the first to load his quota of seventy-five, but even though he was the only one racing they beat him each by at least eight fish. For the final loads, Hank crawled on all fours into the slippery comers under the deck boards and pushed out the fish with his hands and feet.
With the salmon gone, several inches of gurry still sloshed around their feet, and red clots of it clung to the sides. Sven handed down a pressure hose from the tender. They first scrubbed the hold until the white enamel walls shone clean, while the bilge pump sucked the mess away. Then they climbed back on deck to hose and scrub each other.
Pete, standing by the high boards on the tender that enclosed the fish, watched Hank with detachment. When Hank finished he sauntered over. The two looked each other up and down, grinning.
“Guess you like slopping in that muck,” said Pete.
“You must go ants, doing nothing but counting other people’s fish on that little gadget.”
“Getting paid overtime right now just to stand around and talk to you. Got a stateroom to myself, and you’ve never seen such grub.”
“If you ever miss not being on a real boat with a bow and stem, come visit us.”
“That one of those putt-putts where you dip your ass over the side to shit?”
Sven sent Hank to the tender s cook to fetch some groceries he had ordered. Hank remembered well the big galley and the array of pies with oozing berries. Spitz recognized him, but said without interest “Turned fisherman, eh?”
“Yup. And I’m grateful for the things you bothered to teach me in that wheelhouse.”
“Help yourself to pie.”
Hank in leaving passed around the flat stern of the tender, where there were toilets and showers for the fishing-boat crews. He wanted to use both, but not after Pete’s cracks about the Rondelay. Pete threw off their lines, and the two friends exchanged final insults as the black water stretched between them.
After a few minutes’ cruising, Jones anchored the Rondelay with the Billy II in sight. It was past one-thirty in the morning when they sat on their bunks around the engine cover and speared into the roast. With the engine off, there was no sound except the click of forks and the mouse-roar of the stove. Hank was reaching for thirds of the meat when Ivan declared: “He don’t steer zigzag from the plate to the pot, all right.” “Haw!” said Sven. “Ve almost lost Ivan in de loop-de-loops. Hank tink he give you a fun ride, eh?”
“Going to put one of them megaphones around his neck so he can broadcast a little louder what we catch,” said Jones.
Hank smiled and continued chewing. No place in the world would he rather be. When Sven produced a peach upside-down cake in his honor he knew it again.
He was not used to stuffing himself and then going to sleep immediately like a bear or dog. By the time he had finished the dishes the others were merely heads and feet in the shadows of their bunks, their clothes folded on the engine cover, their boots peeled down and lined by the stove to dry. Better face the bathroom arrangement and get it over. Outside in a light drizzle he lowered his pants and grasped the railing. In the distance he watched the haloed lights of the Billy II. She was moving out, taking the fish he had caught back to Swede Scorden’s cannery, where twenty-four hours ago he had slept in a dull bed dreaming dreams. Goddam this was good. Goddam! Why would you ever want to be anything but a fisherman? As he thought about it, he even liked this way of taking a crap, straight into the water.
His bunk was practically on the deck, with only a two-foot clearance beneath Steve’s sagging mattress above. To enter, he had to brace his elbows on the deck and first slither his feet in, then the rest. However he turned, one side of him pressed into the curve of the bow. The water lapped quietly against the hull, an inch away. Inside, the air was close with fish and sweat. Somebody began to snore. It rose in a choking crescendo, then mercifully sputtered and subsided into heavy breathing. He heard the tattoo of rain on the housing, and again the persistent lapping of water an inch away. B
eautiful.
CHAPTER 6
The Fated Salmon
HANK dreams his dreams, and the Rondelay rides gently at anchor in a summer harbor. Underneath, in the world that fishermen invade with nets, pots, and hooks but never see except through the ravaged tatters they bring to the surface, swim the salmon.
It would be sentimental, and dangerous to the economy, to humanize a species of fish. Yet the salmon, by its fight and strength when hooked, by the beauty of its colors and by its flavor in the pan, is among lower creatures at least one of the most respected by man.
The Pacific salmon bears—rather, has had imposed on it by Nature—an aura of tragic destiny. A cruel instinct drives this creature in from the ocean at spawning time, then goads it to beat upstream against all odds and pain, to reach again the identical area it swam as a fresh-hatched fingerling years before, there to lay and fertilize its eggs, and die.
As with humans, some Pacific salmon have it tougher than others. Those whose karma it is to be hatched in the gravel of the upper Yukon River must fight their way from the ocean, where they have lived, back against two thousand miles of swift-flowing water. Columbia River salmon make at least a thousand-mile return through the connecting Snake and Salmon rivers of Idaho. What other creature has the cosmic tuning to perform so specific a final act?
To the salmon s peculiar instinct is applied the word anadromous, a term that derives from the Greek for “running up.” According to one dictionary, it means those fish “which spawn in fresh or estuarine waters . .. and which migrate to ocean waters.” Other anadromous fish include steelhead, smelt, green sturgeon, and Atlantic salmon, but all of these return to the sea after spawning, while Pacific salmon die.
The life cycle of Pacific salmon spans two to seven years, depending on species and location. It starts with the egg and ends with the parents who deposit and fertilize the egg. The parents’ adult lives have been spent in the sea. Both the beginning and end occur in the fresh running water of a stream or river.
To start, with her tail and body the female digs a nest, or redd, in the gravel of the stream bed and deposits several hundred eggs at a time, then covers the hole with the talus of the next she digs. The male twitches and darts alongside, guarding against predators and other males. During the actual spawning process both move close together, and their mutual body vibrations release eggs and sperm simultaneously. Neither parent has been able to eat since leaving the sea to enter fresh water. They have beaten themselves to the popped-stuffing consistency of rag dolls. After their final mission they simply float with the current. Within hours or at most days, both are dead. Their bodies provide food for other creatures, including those their offspring will eat in turn.
The protected eggs winter in the gravel of the stream bed. They hatch in 120 to 180 days, depending on water temperature, into bigeyed larvae or alevins. These are nourished from the attached yolk of their birth egg. Weeks later, in early spring, they struggle up from the gravel as fry (or fingerlings), still big-eyed but shaped like fish. As the fry swim in free water they feed voraciously on plankton and small insects. In the process they become smolts, fully formed little salmon ready to enter the sea.
The time span of development differs greatly among the species of Pacific salmon. The pink or humpback becomes a smolt and goes to salt water within a day of hatching, while the red or sockeye first goes to a lake and takes as much as two years for the same process. Most of a salmon s life is spent in the ocean, where it travels, feeds, and grows. The pink operates on an exact cycle that returns it to its birth stream just two years after being deposited as an egg; the sockeye spends two to four years in the ocean. The king or chinook’s cycle takes up to seven years. The longer the span, the larger the salmon at maturity, with pinks about four pounds, sockeyes seven or eight, and kings twelve to forty or more pounds. Whatever their annual timetable, all salmon smolts enter the sea during late spring and return to spawn in summer or early fall.
During their life at sea the various species of salmon are generally silver, with bodies shaped smoothly like bullets. The return to fresh water changes them. The males develop hooked snouts (making it easier to defend their nests but impossible for them to take food) and humped backs, the hump in the case of pinks being pronounced enough to earn the subname humpbacks or “humpies.” The digestive system degenerates and stops functioning. The bright silver turns to motded browns, blacks, and greens except in the case of sockeyes. These transform most dramatically of all, to a glowing magenta with dark green around the mouth. From a human viewpoint the spawning fish become inedible: the meat turns watery and loses flavor, along with the appetizing pink and red colors, as the fish draws on his stored oils and minerals for nourishment in place of food. The bears who station themselves in the stream mouths to scoop the massed fish with their paws appear not to mind.
Fishing boats harvest salmon during that period in summer, just before spawning, when the fish leave open sea and travel the waterways that lead back to their destined rivers or streams. Year after year each race of salmon swims the same migration pattern (even though as individuals they travel the route only once), following the contours of bays and capes, moving with the tides. They even keep the same time schedule as their parents, with runs predictable almost to the day no matter how far they must travel to meet the appointment.
The ocean course of salmon is hidden to humans, who can only tag them as smolts and then chart their migrations through the random hauls of research nets. Their trips homeward along the shorelines are visible to a well-tuned skipper as finners, jumpers, and various ripples. When they reach the streams for their upward struggle, they may keep their mystery intact but their privacy is over. The sight is one of Nature’s great ones. Remember that freshwater streams composed of springs, rain, and snowmelt flow downhill from mountain to ocean. In salmon country you will see a falls of white-churned water tumbling several feet to break with hammer force over rocks. Suddenly black fish shapes emerge within the white. Their tails wriggle but they are otherwise stationary, heads up, as the water pours over them; they are actually swimming fast enough to hold their own against the flow. Occasionally they leap into free air and re-enter the falls a foot or more higher. If the water force crashes them to the rocks they start again. Over and over they move against the force until they make it to the top and can rest exhausted in one of the backwashes of the falls before continuing.
The term salmon is used ambiguously to cover all three members of the biological family Salmonidae: trout, genus Salmo; char, genus Salvelinus; and Pacific salmon, genus Oncorhynchus (Greek for “hooked nose”). The three have in common an exclusive natural habitat in the northern part of the Northern Hemisphere. All bear a family resemblance—sturdy, rounded, muscular, spirited fish—while differing in fin and scale structure as well as some habits. For example, the legitimately celebrated “salmon” of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland are actually trout, as are other Atlantic salmon. They follow the same anadromous cycle as their Pacific relatives but do not habitually die after laying eggs, often surviving for three or four separate spawnings. The Pacific salmon, genus Oncorhynchus, occurs only in the North Pacific Ocean. The five species in American waters are Oncorhynchus nerka, the sockeye or red; O. gorbuscha, the pink or humpback; O. tschawytscha, the chinook or king; O. keta, the chum or dog; and O. kisutch, the coho or silver. These five also occur on the Asian side of the Pacific along with one other, O. masu.
North American runs of Pacific salmon are shared by northern California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska, while Japan and Russia are the main Asian beneficiaries. The salmon spawn in thousands and thousands of streams and larger waterways that flow from the mountains to the sea along the entire rugged Pacific coast. The greatest American abundance is in Alaska, where the coastline is as uneven as an ink blot on porous paper and every spur and cove represent the mouth of at least one stream. Hardly any part of coastal Alaska lacks salmon. They even run in the streams of the f
ar Aleutian Islands and in the rivers of the lower Chukchi Sea above the Arctic Circle. On Kodiak Island alone there are some forty salmon-breeding rivers and three hundred streams. The largest individual salmon waterways of North America are the Columbia River that separates Oregon and Washington, Puget Sound in Washington, the Skagit and Fraser rivers of British Columbia, Bristol Bay off the Bering Sea in Alaska, and the Kuskokwim and Yukon rivers of far-northern Alaska.
The only predictable factors in salmon fishing are the general part of the year during which each species runs and the two-year cycle of pinks. Not all species swim all waters, nor do all groups of a species school simultaneously. Some streams have two and three individual runs of, say, sockeyes or pinks; some rivers have separate runs of each species in its time. In the Kodiak area, sockeyes run in June, pinks in July and August, chums (locally called dogs) in mid-August, and cohos (silvers) in September. The Bristol Bay sockeyes appear in early July. Off Ketchikan, the kings begin running in May, the cohos in August.
Nets in the overlap periods can be counted on to yield a mixture. A Kodiak purse seine in early August may pull about 75 percent pinks, 20 percent chums, and 5 percent sockeyes and cohos.
The different salmon have distinguishing characteristics by which fishermen and cannerymen tell them apart. Hank, sorting fish in the hold, won’t need his college education to identify the thick, mottled chums, which are twice as big as the clear pinks. But to cull from the pinks the incidental sockeyes and cohos, especially if they are small, will be quite beyond him at first in the bare-bulb shadows. Among a fishermans guidelines: Male chums have big teeth and plierlike snouts, male pinks have more pronounced humps (although all mature male salmon share these characteristics to some extent). The tail fins of pinks are spotted; the others’ are striped. Chum tail fins have milky stripes. Sockeyes have similar stripes on a darker tail with thin lines of silver that sparkle at some angles. A chum’s tail is more tapered and a pink’s scales are smaller than those of the others. Only a king’s lower inside mouth is black. Chums and cohos have larger eyes than sockeyes and kings. The inside gills of a sockeye are reddish, those of the others white. A coho’s fins are frequently (but not always) tinted with orange. There are large, dark regular spots on the back of a pink, small ones on a coho, irregular ones on a king (including his dorsal fin), none on a sockeye or chum. But don’t stake your life on any of the above. The characteristics are not always that pronounced with the fish in hand. As soon as a novice memorizes a rule and begins to apply it, his seniors will generously shower him with exceptions. Then, one day, if he commits himself to the profession, he will suddenly find that instinct has taken over, and he will wonder how he could ever have failed to tell the salmon apart.
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