by Langdon Cook
“She could be homecoming queen if she wants to,” Victor agreed.
Bradley told them about our popped pontoon. “It’s like a teething ring to bears.”
“We had a wolf a couple years ago. I’m fishing and here comes this mangy German shepherd and, holy shit, it’s a wolf.” The conversation pivoted back, as it always does, to the fishing.
“How’d you do this afternoon?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? How long you up here for?”
“Six weeks.”
“Perfect. The river’s gonna go out, you know.”
Everyone nodded. It’s a fact of steelheading in the upper Skeena watershed that you’ll experience at some point what’s known as “river out.” The headwaters have been heavily logged, and all it takes is one night’s rain, especially on the Kispiox, to send a brown wave of sediment and debris hurtling downriver, shutting off the fishery for a day or a week or longer and keeping all the anglers cooped up in camp, reading and playing cribbage, partaking in early cocktail hours.
Just then, Armin appeared. He was a large man, a cinematographer by profession, originally from Switzerland, with broad shoulders and a European disposition. Sometimes he wore a black beret. He walked up the path with his spey rod in one hand and a bottle of red wine in the other. He had his waders and boots on and carried his little bottomless, self-bailing inflatable boat around his waist the way a kid wears an inner tube at the pool. Only a beanie cap with propeller could have improved the look. The crowd on the deck gave him a Bronx cheer.
“Touch anything today?” someone called out as Armin came into earshot.
“Aye. Pretty little hen took me across the river and threw the hook.” Armin lowered the boat, a one-man Water Master, stepped out of it, rested his rod against a porch post, and sat himself down in a plastic chair to have a drink. He’d been in camp for nearly a month now. This was his twentieth-odd year on the Kispiox. Every year, just about, there was a bear story. But the reports of rapacious logging and ornery bruins were so common and so expected that they had been reduced to story fodder, the stuff of cocktail hour. The real worry was a proposed liquefied-natural-gas pipeline, to be built right through the heart of the watershed, connecting export terminals on the coast to the fracking industry of the interior. And there was always the more immediate menace of the commercial salmon fishery. Most agreed that the gill nets were the biggest threat to the river’s steelhead—at least until the gas pipeline became a reality.
—
DESPITE ITS WILD AND REMOTE CHARACTER, even the Skeena suffers from the usual problems that afflict salmon rivers throughout the more settled regions of the Pacific Northwest: heavy, often irresponsible timber harvest, mineral extraction, oil and gas drilling, and the ills associated with urban development along its race to the sea. What the Skeena doesn’t have to contend with are dams and hatcheries, and for this reason its fish are revered for a wildness unchanged since white settlement. The river is arguably most affected by policy decisions made at Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) in faraway Ottawa, especially those decisions involving commercial fishing.
Some anglers study the reports issued by DFO like Talmudic scholars analyzing dusty old parchments; they look for clues to unlock the fishing universe’s secrets—or, more specifically, to foretell what their chances might be of hooking a goliath that season. The most revealing clue is the summer catch rate of sockeye salmon. Sockeye and steelhead return to the river at roughly the same time. Commercial-fishing boats set their nets in Hecate Strait just outside the Skeena’s mouth to intercept the salmon before they enter the river. Large sockeye catches correlate with increased steelhead mortality, bycatch being the seemingly innocuous word for nontargeted fish that end up in the nets by accident. The government has concocted all sorts of regulations to limit steelhead bycatch, but the steelhead get caught anyway. Fishing boats are required to have a reviving tank on board to help release them back to the wild. This system is viewed with skepticism by recreational anglers. In a year of poor sockeye returns, the government will shut down the commercial fishery, inadvertently helping steelhead; in a year of good salmon returns, the steelhead are swept up in the nets. A big run of sockeye is now considered a death knell for steelhead.
Prince Rupert is the sort of fishing community that’s hard to find these days. As the western terminus of, first, the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway and, later, the Trans-Canada Highway, Prince Rupert has never been exactly on the way to anywhere. Its founder and main booster, Charles Melville Hays, went down with the Titanic. Commercial fishing has been its main draw for nearly 150 years. The first cannery opened at the mouth of the Skeena in 1876, and fishing began in earnest the following year. By the turn of the century there were eleven canneries, and as many as fifteen by the peak, between 1913 and 1927. In the early years, the catch of chinook exceeded one hundred thousand fish, with coho in excess of two hundred thousand and sometimes twice that in peak years. In stark contrast to the local tribes, who over millennia had developed fishing rituals and techniques that allowed plenty of salmon to reach their spawning grounds, the white fishermen strung so many nets across the river at all hours of day and night that it’s a wonder any fish made it upstream at all. Not surprisingly, the commercial catch for both species started trending down by the 1950s, with crisis levels reached in subsequent decades. By 1985 the chinook catch had fallen to twenty-five thousand, and the decline in coho was even worse, with escapement estimated at 6,333 fish in 1997, the lowest ever documented and a sharp drop from the escapement of one hundred thousand as recently as the 1960s. In 1998, DFO announced that conservation would be the new priority, and though both chinook and coho have bounced back somewhat with stricter regulations, some tributaries have yet to recover. This loss of biodiversity affects the genetic health and productivity of the entire watershed.
One of the wrinkles of salmon biology is that overfishing or otherwise depleting even a small, inconsequential stock (in economic terms) within a river system has negative genetic effects across the entire population. But gill nets, the commercial gear of choice, don’t differentiate between stocks, and when one stock is extirpated from a corner of the river, the entire population throughout the system suffers a loss of genetic diversity. As the white gill-net fishery intensified in the first decades of the twentieth century, ignoring even perfunctory regulations to rein it in, one stock of salmon after another crashed. Here was a river that hadn’t been subjected to the hydroelectric dams and hatcheries of the Columbia, that hadn’t been sacrificed to agriculture like the Sacramento and San Joaquin, that remained relatively intact compared with other large rivers. The Skeena was brought to its knees primarily by overfishing.
The sockeye is currently the most valuable commercial species. Formerly it returned to the Skeena in numbers several million strong. By the 1950s, commercial fishing was exploiting half the sockeye population and as much as 70 percent in subsequent decades. Recent studies have shown that each stock of sockeye is genetically suited to its particular rearing lake, and genetic differences can be seen in populations even a few miles apart. Again, the nets don’t distinguish between healthy populations and those on the ropes. This basic problem—that a commercial net fishery based at the river mouth can’t be selective enough—is exactly what most infuriates steelhead anglers. They wonder what their beloved Skeena system would look like if this net fishery suddenly vanished. Poof! The idea of a couple hundred thousand or more wild steelhead pushing up the river each summer is the sort of thing that can make a steelheader lose sleep at night. The next question: What if the math penciled out? Is it possible that the economics of recreational fishing could possibly trump commercial fishing? For their part, steelhead anglers point to numbers supplied by DFO itself to suggest that, yes, in terms of overall monetary value from license sales and tourism, the Skeena’s sport fishery is worth more than its commercial fishery and, since all steelhead must be released by nontribal anglers, is de fa
cto more sustainable. This does not sit well with the locals in Prince Rupert. The idea of shutting down an entire industry, and a blue-collar one at that, to benefit mostly well-heeled sport fishermen is unacceptable to many.
This unfortunate set of circumstances—pitting one resource (sockeye salmon for food) against another (steelhead for sport)—was shaken up in 2011, when the government, after more than a century, recognized the Lake Babine First Nation’s right to catch sockeye on its ancestral fishing grounds in the Babine River, high up in the Skeena system. This fishery, historically estimated at an annual 750,000 fish, had been banned since 1906. At the time it was convenient for the white settlers to accuse the tribes of overfishing in order to remove unwanted competition, but now most people admit that the Babine people were fishing in the most sustainable way possible: targeting one species near a river’s headwaters rather than laying indiscriminate nets across a saltwater channel at the mouth. With this decision, recreational anglers hoped that more sockeye would be allowed to pass upriver—and, with them, steelhead. So far that hope has not panned out.
Riley Starks has an answer to the steelhead controversy on the Skeena: Turn the gill-net fishery into a reef-net fishery. Then the steelhead could be released immediately without incident. But that is unlikely to happen, and Bradley has no plans to boycott Canada and spend his golden years at home. When he was a younger man, he and his pals designed T-shirts to commemorate their trips. I remember seeing him outfitted in one, a black shirt with the head of a steelie covering most of the front torso and rising at an angle like a jumbo jet just after takeoff. The object of its attention: a colorful egg-sucking leech near the shirt’s shoulder, a fly that’s snookered more than its fair share of Kispiox steelhead over the years. These days Bradley and Rocky mostly use dry flies, waking them across the current to entice a big steelhead to strike at the surface, a low-percentage game that hardcore steelheaders consider the pinnacle of the sport.
ON A GRAY OVERCAST DAY that carried a chill of impending winter, Bradley, Rocky, and I floated our pontoon boats from camp down to the bridge in town, where the Kispiox meets the Skeena. We passed venerated holes without touching a fish: the Bear Hole and the Potato Patch, Date Creek and the Gold Room. By late afternoon, we arrived fishless at the confluence, at the site of a Gitxsan community on the Kispiox Reservation. Like so many modern-day Indian villages across North America, this one was a slapdash collection of prefab houses arranged arbitrarily on a loose grid, with a few totem poles trying to dignify a city park given over to weeds. Two Kispiox men in jeans sat on concrete slabs below the bridge, dragging large treble hooks through a deep seam of the Culvert Run. They were allowed to keep the steelhead they snagged. I thought about a conversation we’d had earlier that week with the owner of a liquor store in Terrace, a man who was not a fan of the fishing regulations. “You’ve got the beer and the booze,” he said to us cheerfully as he packed up our purchases. “Now you just need the steelhead. Make like a Native. Yank that sucker onto the bank and get it into the trunk quick, before anyone sees you. That’s a proper B.C. barbecue!”
At the takeout, just a muddy ramp leading into the river, we landed our pontoons and started breaking down the rods. Normally Rocky would have found his little Honda stashed in the woods and made the ride back to camp to pick up the truck and return for the boats, but another angler, with an oversize pickup designed for hauling livestock, offered to give us a ride. We piled the pontoons and minibike into the bed and jumped in. Driving back through town, we saw the blackened remains of a recent house fire. The driver laughed as we passed by. “Give the Indians free government housing and look what they do. Build a bonfire in the middle of the living room.” An uncomfortable silence engulfed the cab. That’s when the first tentative raindrops landed on the windshield, a fact we all took note of.
—
AFTER A FULL NIGHT OF RAIN, cocktail hour was commencing early at the campground, with an eye-opener for breakfast. Though the skies had cleared, a thick brown current now sluiced downstream. River out. There was nothing we could do except hope the Kispiox came back into shape in the next twenty-four hours for our final day of fishing. After that: a long drive home that would mark the end of the angling year for Bradley. Me, I had a midwinter dinner date planned for the southern reaches of salmon country, where I would meet up with Rene Henery once again for a wild salmon repast at an unlikely place.
Rocky and some of our other camp mates, clutching their rise-and-shine mugs of coffee and Bailey’s, decided to spend the day tying flies. I was reminded of another steelhead campout, a few years earlier, when a bunch of us had gathered for an impromptu fly-tying class led by Harry Lemire while a muddy river surged past our camp. Nearing eighty at the time, Harry was perhaps the final living link to the historical origins of steelhead fly-fishing, and everyone knew this might be his last year in camp. The day before, some of his younger friends from the Skagit had helped him wade out into the Skeena’s swift current above the Market Garden Hole, where he put on a clinic, nailing three bright steelhead in a row on flies that would forever be tied to his name. Later, wearing a smart-looking watch cap and bifocals, Harry guided the assembled through each step of tying his Thompson River Caddis and Grease Liner fly patterns. When Harry generously handed me his demonstration flies at the end, Bradley whispered in my ear, “You best seal those in an airtight box and put them away in your bank vault.”
With river out, Bradley and I decided to forgo a noon drink with the other campers and instead drove upriver, seeking the headwaters of the Skeena. The Babine, the largest of the upstream tributaries, is renowned as a wilderness fishery and is accessible mostly to affluent anglers who reserve spots months, sometimes years, in advance at one of a handful of lodges that operate deep within the bush. Our plan was to simply see with our own eyes where this fabled river empties into the Skeena. A logging road would get us that far.
We passed mile after mile of cutover forest. Even here, among the most celebrated wilderness fishing grounds on the continent, the lumbermen had plundered the land. On a rise, we pulled over and surveyed the country. Clear-cuts receded in all directions, many of them filled in with the regrowth of hardwoods, which blazed angry yellows and oranges in the cool autumn glare. But beyond the trimmed lines of managed, even-aged timberlands, we could see the ragged silhouette of primeval forest in the distance. Unlikely though it was, I tried to imagine that I was looking at the beginning of a swath of wilderness stretching clear up to the Arctic Circle, a place where steelhead and bears and wolves could exist beyond the greedy, fearful gaze of civilization.
In the half-light of afternoon, we arrived at a narrow bridge that spanned the Babine high above its flow. Bradley pulled over. Our map didn’t show any such crossing. This was something of a disappointment. Yet another bridge, another road. I hadn’t expected to traverse the Babine so easily, much less advance deeper into its watershed. We got out and walked the span to its midway point. The river moved fast and dark below, its depths impenetrable even with the aid of polarized glasses. Leaning over the railing, we studied its shifting patterns. White riffles played tricks on the eyes. The supple forms of steelhead moved steadily upriver in our imaginations. “Look at that seam,” Bradley said. “A steelhead could be laying up behind any one of those big boulders down there.” It was true. Wherever I looked, I saw the possibility of fish in the river.
After watching the shape-shifting current for a while, we backtracked and found a spur that looked as though it might take us farther upstream. The river’s pull was strong. We drove over a knoll, through an unlocked gate, and into heavy forest. The low October sun dropped behind a veil of evergreen, and cold shade enveloped the road as if we had entered a tunnel. Driving slowly with the windows down, we could smell the clean, tangy scent of conifer forest. The road angled right, and we caught a few glimpses through the trees of what looked like a gray river to our left. That’s when we also saw ribbons of smoke up ahead weaving a blue haze from a dozen or
more chimneys. We had arrived at a little hamlet in the woods. Small cedar-shake cabins slouched in the mud, their moss-covered roofs sagging nearly to the ground. The community looked very old, as if it had sprung from the ground itself. Maybe these were some of the people who fished for the Babine sockeye.
Bradley slowed his truck to a crawl. We didn’t see a soul. It was hard to tell whether the road continued through the village or dead-ended just ahead. It didn’t matter. Without a word between us, we decided to turn around. Even though there wasn’t a NO TRESPASSING sign in sight, we both felt we had arrived somewhere out of bounds. As Bradley made a U-turn, an old Ford pickup truck appeared alongside us coming from the other direction and stopped. It was full of people, all men, some young and others quite elderly: four wedged into the cab and several more in back, hanging on wooden slats. The driver leaned his head out the open window, his arm casually dangling over the side, his other hand on the wheel. He was ancient, his face so wizened I could barely make out his features, and yet his calm demeanor suggested he had all the time in the world. He took measure of us through two wrinkled slits for eyes.
“Afternoon!” said Bradley in his usual way. The driver didn’t flinch, didn’t move at all. His passengers remained stone-faced. Bradley glanced at me—as if to say, “What now?”—then turned back to the driver. A long beat. He started to fumble for words that wouldn’t come, and the other driver lifted his chin. The man’s gaze shifted from the front of Bradley’s new truck to the back and then seemed to settle on a corner of the rear bumper—or perhaps on some point of interest in the background; it was hard to tell. He might have been looking at the forest beyond us or even past the forest to the tiny specks of silver that represented infinitesimal views of the river through the trees. Or past the river to sights unknown. The afternoon sighed, and then the old man did something unexpected. He whistled quietly, deliberately, through his teeth. There was another pause. I suppose everyone was pondering that whistle. Was it admiration for our truck? Recognition of the miracle of life? Or nothing at all, just a way to acknowledge our existence? The sound, barely audible yet distinct, sliced through the delicate fabric of the day. I had no idea what it meant.