Coast Range. Nick Neely

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СКАЧАТЬ moving as she went. Once finished, she replaced the lit smudge in the warty trough of an opalescent abalone shell. The smoke would allow only good spirits.

      The fish was laid on the foil and slathered in sacred mayo. Then the matron of the tribe, the eldest elder, was brought forward by Grandma Gin to formally bless the fish, as was tradition. “Okay, Kelly,” said Grandma Gin, “you want to come stand near Aunt Rena? She’s going to say her prayer.” Rena was slightly hunched and held to a smooth walking stick. She peered out from thin-rimmed tortoise-shell spectacles and pursed her small mouth. Her white hair was short, hardly longer than the lobes of her ears. She wore a pink windbreaker and a hat that said Native Pride. This year was Rena’s first as eldest, and she was trembling with emotion. She was ninety-four years old.

      “Come on, my powwow princess,” said Gin, “you can do it. We love you.”

      Rena sobbed and her words were a quiet babble into Gin’s ear.

      “I know you do,” said Gin. “But he is here, in his spirit. All our ancestors are here in their spirit.”

      Aunt Rena had lost her husband decades ago, but he was in mind, very much so. They were married before she finished high school (she’d started school late, at the age of nine). He had worked for the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps before they moved to Union, on the dry side of the Cascades, for his job with the railroad.

      “All right, Grandfather,” said Rena, finding strength. “I ask that you bless the people that gave us the fish. And I ask you to bless each and everyone that wrapped it . . . Thank you, God, for giving us the fish that we will partake of our elders with. That’s all.”

      “Aho,” said the crowd. “Aho.”

      Gin rubbed Rena’s shoulder. “There you go,” she said. “He’s here. He’s here. Come on.”

      “God bless you, Aunt Rena,” said Kelly. “My dad’s here, too.”

      “The brightest star in the sky last night was Buster,” Rena replied, referring to Kelly’s father. The Cow Creeks also believe that a shooting star is a spirit arriving to inhabit a newborn.

      “Yeah, I know,” said Kelly. “That’s what I was thinking.”

      “They’re all here, honey,” said Gin. “An eagle flew over this morning, remember, Kelly? When we raised the flag, the eagle went over.”

      “He did?” said Rena.

      “Yes, he did,” said Gin. “Your eagle . . . he’s here. He’s teasing you . . .”

      “He didn’t come and bow to me, that rascal.”

      “He will,” said Kelly.

      “You’ll see him,” said Gin.

      Boys had been up all night tending the pit. It had been dug in the meadow, not far from the logs, those whole trees that framed the dancing grounds, where men in full regalia would circle and stomp during Grand Entry on Saturday. Cedar billets had been thrown down and kindled, and the kids had stoked the fire through the dawn to build up coals. One boy was discovered asleep on the dirt pile from the pit’s excavation. Wade had kicked his foot away from the flaming wood (his buddies had made no motion to help). In midafternoon, the boys still hadn’t retired to their sleeping bags; in the shade, with a subwoofer, they were having a deliriously good time as local heroes.

      Traditionally, salmon fillets were splayed across western redcedar staves and leaned over a fire. The cedar’s natural oils flavored the fish, while its tannins resisted flame. Now, however, a giant grate with legs had been pulled over the coals, a devilish cot, and Barry McKown laid the fish on it in two shining rows. Nineteen fish shoulder to shoulder, the way they might jostle upstream through a gauntlet, but here insulated on a pyre. I’d met Barry first in the casino kitchen. As powwow grill master, he had come for a glimpse of this year’s raw material, which met his approval. He’d worn a Hawaiian shirt then, and he wore another one now, white palm fronds on blue. Barry has a round face and mustache, and his brown locks stayed stuffed under a Cow Creek cap with an embroidered bald eagle hauling off a salmon. Of course.

      Barry had been in charge as chef for twenty-six years. It was Kelly’s grandfather who had asked him if he would take over the cooking duty. “Yeaaaaaah,” Barry had replied, in his rural-dude twang. “It would be a great honor.” Each year since, he has baked roughly three hundred pounds of Chinook, about twenty fish. He flips them every half hour, for three and a half hours. Afterward he would “stack them like wood” under a tarp. “As it’s cooling down,” said Barry, “it sucks that juice back in.” His priority was wholeheartedly “my juices” and “extra juicy.”

      If to chop your own wood is to warm yourself twice, then Barry was satisfying his hunger seven times over—and warming himself, too, because this sucker was hot. In preparation for a flip, he donned heavy leather gloves that covered his wrists and forearms, just like those the woman from Wildlife Images wore as she handled the captive bald eagle (or the barn owl, or the Swainson’s hawk) at the powwow for show-and-tell. But as Barry cradled the heavy fish and set them back down—rotating them from the grill’s interior to its periphery—it was more like placing sandbags during a flood. This year, he was shielding his bare shins with a sheet of corrugated tin. “I’ve been burning my feet and legs,” he said. “Only took me twenty-six years to figure that out.” With each flip, sweat appeared instantly on his brow and streamed down his cheeks.

      A wall clock was leaned against a fir beside Barry’s camping chair to help him monitor the fishes’ progress. He grew slightly concerned. The salmon were taking awful long to bake and time was beginning to run short, the shadows lengthening across the parched meadow. He didn’t have his briquettes, as he was supposed to—the organizing committee had forgotten them—and the cedar wasn’t white-hot. “I could get scalped and hung up from a tree if the fish don’t come out,” Barry said. As he handled the fish, gradually they reclaimed their native shape, the foil conforming to their curved bodies, while leaking juice browned their crinkled topography and sizzled away. Across one end of the grate, roasted lemon rings lay scattered like a spill of enormous roe.

      Another flip, and then Barry took me to the river. In a year of heavy snows, the South Umpqua Falls plunges classically along the north bank, the near side: headlong from ledges, in a torrent. But on the far side, it’s less a falls than a glide. A smooth, low dome of bedrock spreads the water so thin that it appears as a ten-thousand-thread sheet pulled across the stone. People were walking up and down this easy cascade barefoot or in flip-flops. A woman held the hands of her two kids, one a toddler, as they made the brilliant, flowing descent in yellow and red life jackets.

      In the old days, salmon also walked up the dome with their bellies on the slab and their dorsa in the air—and they still made the climb, apparently, on certain moonlit nights. Once the tribe built weirs atop the falls and set cone-shaped traps, woven of hazel shoots, in the fast channels below, so that the thwarted fish would be swept back into these basket funnels and pinned by the strong current. You’re no longer allowed to fish for salmon at the falls, but sometimes, Teri had told me earlier, you can glimpse them deep in the pool, if you swim with a mask. If you brave the cold. “But you seldom see them,” said Barry, “there are so many people here making noise.”

      Kids were hollering and sliding off the ledge into the bracing pool. Some on inner tubes, others on their bums. The seasoned or foolhardy launched into backflips. “Yeah, it’s really high,” said Barry. “Big falls this year. Beautiful. I love the way the water just rolls down the hump of rock.” It was six or seven inches above usual, he estimated. A concrete fish ladder ran СКАЧАТЬ