Coast Range. Nick Neely

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СКАЧАТЬ given up their heads, but not their tails; not their elegance. Teri, Kelly, and the other members of the tribe helped package them: shrouded in plastic garbage bags, wrapped in white butcher paper, stacked once more on a stainless cart. Some were marked with a Sharpie for the mid-July powwow, others were reserved for a second event. Teri selected a small fish, one to fit her oven. “Everything you do, you do with a prayer and good thoughts,” she said. (“What is that,” asked Kelly, “a trout?”) The rest were wheeled into the freezer.

      Two weeks later, I found myself on the Rogue-Umpqua Divide, staring out from under a fleece cap at a vast series of drainages. The Cascades’ ridges seemed to live up to the range’s name: a long line of waves being pulled down, slowly, by gravity. The snow had just melted, the earth was soupy, and the mosquitoes whined. I immediately had to stoke a fire to ward off these evil spirits. But there were tiny yellow violets strewn across the wet jeep tracks, and I was otherwise alone. At dusk, I became apprehensive for a moment, thinking a truck was coming around the bend. But it was the moon.

      In summer, the Cow Creek Band also climbed to these heights, which were known, almost mythically, as the Huckleberry Patch, as if it were the first and only berry-picking spot on earth. They felt closer to the Great Spirit at these heights, slept in the open air, and dried venison and berries for winter. Sometimes they descended to the Rogue to hunt and trade, and went across Natural Bridge as far as the Klamath Marsh. They roamed west into the Coast Range or through the Rogue watershed to the Siskiyous. They told origin stories about the cradle of Crater Lake, Mount Mazama, whose shield feeds the Rogue and so, with a little help from the government, gave life to the salmon frozen in Canyonville. Here on the divide, the idea of carrying fish between drainages suddenly didn’t seem so unnatural: From this edge, water ran two ways, arbitrarily, and as a result entered the sea one hundred miles apart. But this view described the Cow Creek’s territory long before it was renamed a “wilderness” even as surrounding hillsides began to lose their trees.

      In 1853, the Cow Creeks became the second tribe in Oregon to forge a treaty with the United States, ceding more than eight hundred square miles of land in the South Umpqua watershed, though they had no idea something so essential could be signed away. They were compensated 2.3 cents per acre, and the United States turned around and sold those acres to settlers for a dollar and a quarter. Afterward, the Cow Creeks were literally and figuratively driven into the hills, toward the Rogue-Umpqua Divide. Though they were promised a reservation and more, the tribe was only truly recognized when, without notice, its sovereignty was dismissed by the Western Oregon Indian Termination Act of 1954. But in 1982, Congress reacknowledged the tribe and, two years later, the courts awarded it 1.5 million dollars for lands lost. The tribe’s leaders prudently rolled the sum into a trust that helped spawn the casino and, now, a growing empire in Douglas County.

      Come morning, I drove in low gear down the swelling Umpqua, to the falls where the Cow Creek Band had long congregated for salmon and still gathered for its summer powwow. The campground was a clearing nestled against a ridge on the north side of the river, an old Forest Service camp ideal for large groups. Tribal members had arrived the night before and parked among the trees at the meadow’s edge, in the sanity of the shade, in their annual spots. Families stretched tarps between RVs and firs to bridge their camps and shelter their stoves. The two teepees present were vastly outnumbered and looked out of place (historic Cow Creek houses were dugouts with pine-board ceilings). Space was already tight, so I pitched my tent in the meadow, in the morning shadow of a lone oak tree, poison oak ascending its trunk. I should have thought about how that might make me stand out a little, but no one cared. The tribe welcomed me. When my unstaked tent blew off that afternoon, someone corralled it and tied it to my roof rack like a balloon.

      Before noon, an assembly line began to gather around a long, pinegreen folding table, and there I reconnected with Teri and Kelly. Supplies were waiting: cylindrical cartons of Morton salt, fresh-cut lemon wheels in gallon Ziplocs, terrifying jars of minced garlic, and most important, an unopened case of mayonnaise. All to dress the fish. Also a box of sweet Walla Walla onions, which first had to be chopped. It was a merry affair with few tears. “Look at all these Indians, with all these knives,” said Kelly, “and everyone’s still got their hair.”

      Then at the head of the table stood a man named Wade Wells, bare-and barrel-chested, in sunglasses, his slate hair crew cut. He lived in Sutherlin, just north of Roseburg, and coached sports at the high school from which he graduated; his upper arms were about as swole as the fish. He kicked off the proceedings by pulling a loud, blinding sheet of tinfoil over his head so that it illuminated, then shaded, his torso, and he brought it forward through the breeze, a metallic cape trailing behind him. “Dancing with foil,” shouted one onlooker. It stretched clear across the table.

      Two young men with a Marine disposition were assigned to unwrapping the thawed fish from their garbage bags and carrying them by their tails (gingerly, firmly) to the foil. The fish were headless and, with scissors, the guys now docked the stiff points of their tails so they wouldn’t tear the foil. As each fish was laid down on a new sheet of foil, Kelly massaged its flesh with mayo, inside and out, his disposable gloves nearly hidden in a swirl of egg yolk and vinegar. “Caress that fish,” said a woman named Jessica Jackson, an Air Force member in a maroon tank top and short brown braids. “Let the fish know it’s loved.” At some point during the assembly, Kelly held up his hands, grinned, and said, “All I have to do is clap my hands and everyone gets mayonnaised.”

      Others hovered over each fish momentarily to shake on more salt than you would believe and stuff it with handfuls of yellow garlic and chopped onions, a surrogate for the innards removed in the casino weeks ago. Then the “lemon girl” took her turn and placed four or five slices inside each belly, all in a neat, overlapping row. Trying to clamp the cavity shut was like wrestling a suitcase. Finally, Jessica and the day’s chef, Barry McKown, each lifted one side of the foil, creating a tall aluminum A-frame. They rolled the sheet’s ends together until the fish was snug. They folded and crimped the long edges to finish the pocket. Then Wade tore more foil, and each fish was double-wrapped. “Got’a keep my juice,” Barry reminded us. “Double-wrapping helps me out a lot.”

      “We are a well-oiled machine!” Jessica declared, which was not untrue. Especially considering the mayo. She had the flare and spunk of a leader. Wade began to sing—Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone—Got’a whole lotta of love—as he drew out long crackling sheets, one after the next, and danced them forward. The foil caught the sun through the cumulus and reflected it onto the faces of the volunteers. It was like a photo shoot. “Mayo, Led Zeppelin, shiny lights—I was starting to have a little seizure,” said Wade. Again the salmon piled up, this time like silver ingots, until there were eighteen. Each lay wrapped as if in homage to its gleaming self, only, in this life, with straight edges.

      Finally, the ceremonial fish: cleaned, but otherwise untouched. Still with its head and tail. This one was sacred, the core of the afternoon. This particular Chinook, of the thousands that would return to the Cole Rivers Hatchery. “We only got two of them,” said Jessica, urging caution. “Can’t be running to the store to get another one.” In case of disaster, a second entire fish was on hand, still with its head, but it was slated for a fall powwow. The tribe had grown so large—to more than sixteen hundred members—that now it hosted two intertribal gatherings each year.

      The guys brought the fish before us. Its face, its robust lower jaw, was bruised and rubicund, as if the blood were welling back after the long cold spell of the casino. Its bronze eye was sunken slightly, but still bright: That you could meet the gaze of this fish did seem important; you knew whom you were bound to. We all looked into its pupil, which had seen something of the Pacific’s depth and returned to stare blankly at us.

      The men held the heavy animal so that it could be blessed by Grandma Gin. She was indeed warm and grandmotherly, with deep laugh lines and eye shadow. Her bangs were coiffed, but her dyed auburn hair was otherwise long and straight down her shoulders and back. She intently wound a smudge stick—a smoldering bundle of white СКАЧАТЬ