Coast Range. Nick Neely

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ tags. Other tribes want all of their fish entire, but the Cow Creek Band needed only two. “You could gut and fillet them also, if you’d like,” said Teri. Dave laughed, said his crew probably wouldn’t go for that.

      The lift whined as Dave tilted the bin, and another technician swept and dragged the fish so that they spilled, slowly, into the tribe’s turquoise counterpart, leaving it speckled and streaked with drip marks. In black gloves and a white apron, he had the appearance of a butcher, and he took his time, to minimize splatters. He’d done this before. Blood as thick as syrup ran over the sides and, when I edged a little too close, my shirt paid a small price. My forearm, too. Jake shoveled ice into the fish as they fell like a lumbering waterfall, and before long it seemed they would all fit in just one of the turquoise containers. “One less tote to clean,” said Dave.

      When the fish were tied down, we took a quick stroll around the grounds. The ponds looked like lap pools, but were tented with netting to prevent gulls and eagles, and maybe anglers, from diving in. They rippled with the backs of trout and salmon, and juveniles at all stages: fry, parr, smolt. We walked toward the fish ladder and collection pond. Sun poured through the ladder’s entrance, a roofless hallway into the river, where big fish were holding in the shadow of the wall. You could see them if you trained your eyes, if you squinted, and if the school nosed momentarily into the slant of light. They were poised as if waiting for some signal. Some decision.

      I asked Jake when he had caught his first salmon. Nine or ten, he said. I asked after its size. “It was all right,” he said. “It tasted good, I can tell you that much.”

      He put his kid on his shoulders, and they stood on the bridge above the ladder’s last step, the one that ultimately lofted those scarred-backs from the Rogue to their origin. Through the grate that separated the pen from the ladder, water roiled in an incandescent foam. As we stared down, mesmerized, instantly and inexplicably a slick teardrop form broke the surface and glided through the air into the hatchery’s motionless pool. “Ooooh,” we all said, as the salmon hurdled.

      “Good job,” said Teri. “He wasn’t wasting any time.”

      “He looked like he knew what he was doing,” said Jake.

      Then another he, or she, leaped up and deflected off the concrete sidewall into the holding pond. It was a triumph and a bittersweet moment of finality. For this was the gate to heaven. And these fish were a day late for the ceremony.

      The totes pulled out of the hatchery lot, and I followed. Salmon flies fluttered before the windshield and lay dead on the pavement. We turned toward Medford, but before we’d gone far, the fish swung right and headed skyward. Caution, a road sign announced, Limited Maintenance After Dark. This was OR-227, Tiller Trail Highway, the short-but-steep cut to Canyonville over a mountain pass. We were lifting the fish from their native drainage to the neighboring one, the South Umpqua, which seemed to embody the peculiar migrations of the modern age: Even in death, these fish were being transplanted to another river, the way planes let trout free-fall into alpine lakes; the way seedling invasive mussels hitch rides on trailered hulls.

      The road was hemmed in with fir, oak, and lustrous madrone. Then it ran through clear-cuts with heaping slash piles hard on the shoulder. I felt as if I were in the wake of something remarkable, clandestine even. The turquoise of the container took on a kind of glow, freighted not just with the weight of the fish, but with their import to the tribe and the Northwest more broadly. The drive was a procession, a caravan into the clouds.

      We crested the ridge and slalomed to Elk Creek, which joined the South Umpqua River at the townlet of Tiller, where many of the Cow Creek’s forbears are buried. They had built the first roads and bridges in the drainage for the government, some over the mountains on old Indian trails. Teri and her boys stopped at the general store. Inside was a framed black-and-white photo of a man with a pistol in one hand and a skunk dangling by its tail in the other: He was an official Douglas County champion skunk hunter, a dubious accolade. Teri and her grandson bought morning ice cream bars. Then we flowed on, past sturdy and decrepit barns, stacked wagon wheels, and shrink-wrapped hay bales that looked like fresh mozzarella in the fields; past signs for Eggs $2 (then, closer to Canyonville, Eggs $3) and Creation Camp.

      Finally we reached the river’s confluence with I-5 and the Seven Feathers Casino, the Cow Creek’s cash cow. What had started, in 1992, as a bingo parlor had become a three-hundred-room resort with a thousand slot machines on its main floor. Not too big, as casinos go. Seven feathers, of course, is symbolic: The tribe, as reconstituted, began with just seven families, the survivors of the Rogue Indian Wars of 1855–1856. They had hidden from vigilante settlers in the mountains east of Tiller. Thus the tribe’s emblem is of seven feathers tied to a single staff, a common destiny. But there is other iconography. In front of the hotel’s porte cochere stands a heroic statue with its wings swept upward, its talons outstretched: It’s the largest bronze eagle in the world, at thirty-three feet tall and ten thousand pounds, and it’s striking a salmon.

      The turquoise totes snaked to the rear of the casino and backed into an open bay lined with shelves of humongous cans and twenty-five-pound bags of flour and sugar that were heavier, just barely, than the salmon. I parked and was escorted down a corridor to obtain a behind-the-scenes badge that read Visitor. When I returned, the dead had been unloaded in clear plastic tubs and carted into the commercial kitchen, where a dozen chefs awaited, all in white. They had donned a hierarchy of toques and berets, and on the stainless steel preparation tables before them, each had a V-shaped wooden carving board to cradle a fish. The casino had made these some years earlier for precisely this purpose, the annual pre-powwow cleaning. It was clear much bleach would be needed.

      Several other tribal members arrived to help prepare the salmon, including Kelly Rondeau. He wore a faded T-shirt printed with a wraparound American flag and sunglasses atop his ashen hair tied in a ponytail. His face was tall, his nose broad and prominent, his rugged smile lines framed by a moustache. “So which one do I get to take home?” he said jokingly. Half-jokingly. The Rondeau family is one of the seven original. His grandfather had been instrumental in starting the casino, and now Kelly was on the tribal board. He told me of the 180,000 steelhead smolt the tribe had helped release into the South Umpqua over the last decade. “We’re going to have to start claiming some of them,” he said, wryly.

      I spent time with Dennis, Buffet Captain, and Victoria, Sports Bar Cook. Dennis did the cutting. With a forceful cleave behind the gills, their heads, those sunken and rosy eyes, were the first to go. For those that had already lost their snouts, it seemed an act of mercy, aesthetic at least. In many of the salmon, this first cut revealed shining clusters of roe behind the shoulders: translucent orange orbs that, in another life, would have overwintered in the small crater of a redd to first become big-eyed alevin, which stay hidden under gravel with a yolk sack slung to their bellies. The chefs scooped these refulgent masses into gallon bags for those on hand and lucky elders. Kelly held up two bags as if raising the spoils of a contest. He would thread them like beads onto a hook and bait steelhead, but one could also flash-fry them with flour.

      The fish were butterflied, from the anal duct upward. The glossy innards were slung into trash cans. With the knife’s tip—or better, a fingernail—the chefs scraped out the coagulated red that ran against those spines newly exposed to the fluorescent light. I asked Vicky what this spinal gunk was called. “Spinal gunk,” she answered with her signature staccato laugh. “I have no idea.” I’ve since learned that it’s called the bloodline: the river within the fish, those arteries and veins that allow these dense muscles to thrust and quiver, and fight their way home.

      “I like fish,” said Vicky, “but not in the raw. Don’t think I’d want to do this for a living.” She did the washing in a stainless basin, her chubby hands swirling inside the open book of each salmon. “This is not how they get’m at Safeway,” she added. The steady sound of the СКАЧАТЬ