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In Canada counting salmon in clear-water rivers can be unfussy: I have seen a wide placid river where the flow is channelled into a central funnel and a human counter perched on the platform end working a clicker to record every fish passing. These wilderness workers, operating in rotations, need good bug dope, a wide-awake buddy checking for bears tiptoeing down the platform, and extraordinary concentration. Happily the runs are often focused into just a few weeks, and, pressed for time, they move in the day.
More usual aids are military-type night-sights, which, focused against a light background, make salmon watchable as they swim upstream. Most of those fish leaping under the noses of anglers are not moving upriver but performing their acrobatics for other inscrutable reasons. Nineteenth-century writer William Scrope charmingly referred to them leaping because of ‘excitement’.
Again, anglers talk of fish running in spates. They actually wait until the debris and clouds of suspended particles have ebbed and abated and then they run, in the cleaner flow. It is dangerous for salmon to get muck in their gills, and as birds constantly preen their feathers for efficient propulsion so salmon look after the efficiency of their highly tuned bodies. One or two days after the flood-crest is a likely running time – and they are slower to chase a melting snow spate than a rain-driven spate.
Where anglers are spot-on is in the commonplace assumption that salmon get interested in fishing flies after they have moved position. A salmon that has dwelt in one place for a month may have watched innumerable flies swinging over it and pays them no greater attention than the man on the park bench does who subconsciously watches buses looping their circuit. The same fish having shifted station will be activated and lunge at the fly, maybe attempting to purify its new location of annoying irritants.
Tagging has shown that salmon often enter a river, stay a while, and then leave it. During a long summer salmon may climb rivers, fall back to brackish estuaries, wait for another oxygen-rich freshet to stimulate a move upstream again, and then repeat the yo-yo procedure. Although Atlantic salmon are renowned for their generally faithful return not only to the river of origin but to the section of river from where they broke out of the egg, they can mess with the rules too.
A salmon has been tracked tasting the water on Scotland’s west coast for a while, then moving to an east-coast river, and finally ascending the third river it had trialled in one year, where it spawned. This ranks as an extreme example of genetic straying. A salmon tagged on the Dee in Wales was re-captured in Denmark. I am unsure whether a salmon tagged in Europe has ever spawned in North America; reports vary, but betting against salmon’s versatility and survivor-adherence would be a mistake.
I was on Russia’s Kola Peninsular on a river called the Kharlovka in low-water/high-temperature conditions when it appeared to the anglers and the ghillies that the fish actually left the river, retreating to the refreshment and oxygen of the open sea. We could see them driving downriver. At this point the sea was only a mile or two distant. There would be a good enough reason: when wild salmon are closely confined fungal diseases spread fast. They can spread even faster amongst fish in low water and even disfigure a whole river population. Saltwater does the laundry.
Salmon fungus comes in more than one type, and can keep growing on fish that are already dead. The fungus is an external manifestation of a fast-spreading microbe. It is normal even in ordinary seasons to find pre-spawning salmon with white fungus starting on their heads and backs, and when spawning is done these mouldy discolorations accelerate to be abrupted only when the fish is cleansed by saltwater. Warm, low-water river conditions make matters worse.
Managers report that this occurred on the Tweed in Scotland late in 2011. It was not the potentially lethal condition called ulcerative dermal necrosis (UDN), in which lesions can penetrate into skeletal tissue, rather, as assessed by the river biologists, a more common fungal affliction broadly termed Saprolengia, caused by overcrowding.
The last time fungal diseases killed huge numbers of pre-spawners in Scotland was in the 1960s, when runs were prodigious. I remember walking down to look at the water in August with my grandmother, a dedicated angler who went to the river as others go to their office. White lethargic salmon with rot peeling from them cruised aimlessly in shallow water. I recall her sombre mood. Some see fungal outbreaks on a major scale as a response to over-population, and this distressing scene did indeed coincide with a heavy run of fish. Widespread fungal attack has not recurred on this river since.
Fishermen are the best monitors of a river-system. Their observations and speculations about this fish serve the species well. What salmon do in rivers will probably preoccupy anglers for as long as they persist in trying to catch the fish in what might be seen as an elaborate manner. Easiest perhaps then, sifting the options for evidence, to watch salmon in rivers.
I remember meeting a German salmon angler in Ireland long ago who had adopted a rigidly logical Teutonic approach to his fishing. Having showed me a rack of twenty-foot rigid poles, he asked what I thought he did when he went fishing. As if it was the most obvious thing in the world, he cried, ‘I climb a tree!’ When sun shone on the pool he was to be located hanging out of his tree wearing polaroids. From above, the river was like glass. For this Germanic genius it was self-evident that to cast into a river in the hope of catching a fish you did not know was there amounted to a bizarre and undignified expenditure of energy. So he looked down from aloft and spied, from his vantage points along the River Blackwater, whether any salmon were available for the catching.
He then drifted flies, of his own special construction, of course, over the noses of the targeted fish until they lost patience and snapped. Invariably, he assured me, they all eventually break, irritated to a frenzy, like a person with a spider crawling on his face. The idiosyncratic sportsman claimed to have caught numerous fish in this manner. He said snapping-time was always inside three-quarters of an hour.
Thinking on it, catching them on those rigid poles must have made it a mechanical exercise, lacking in the intimacy of galvanic contact. But there was the hunter satisfaction, I suppose, of having behaved in an impeccably rational manner.
I recall a scene one summer on the Saint-Jean River in Quebec where the water is pellucidly clear. I was walking down the river-bank when I came across an angler lying atop a small bush with his hat tilted over his eyes. Striking up a conversation it transpired he was waiting for ‘his’ fish and the right moment. I pressed him more and he showed me the fish, which I took a while to detect. Stretching far out in front was a rippled pavement of smooth, light-coloured rock. The water looked shallow, maybe three feet deep. Eventually I spotted, nestled into what was no more than a groove, a very large salmon, its back beautifully camouflaged in the ochre tones of the undulating river floor. The angler said he had tried his fish earlier in the day with the sun just rising. The fish had moved and moved again often but never opened its mouth. The next suitable moment would be as the sun disappeared over the canyon side. The angler had six hours to go. He seemed unruffled at the prospect, and sure the fish would succumb. He intended drifting his fly down from some distance above to give the big fish time to see it, and then letting it slide over his nose closer and closer, till … the chapter was written in his mind before it had even taken place.
The interesting time for salmon-watching is late summer when numbers are building for the orgy of spawning. Upstream of the river-bridge to my home is the entrance to a tributary. Salmon gather below the bridge for the shade, perhaps, but also to wait for the right moment to run the tributary and spawn there. The place where they accumulate looks the same as the rest of the river-bed, a trifle deeper maybe, stones studding the sandy bottom. They have stations, places they like to be. These are not, as is often loosely said, ‘behind’ rocks, rather to the side or below. There they rest, pointing upstream, close to the bottom, occasional bubbles emerging lazily from their mouths, like giveaway wisps of smoke from rainforest tribes.
In the protection of this shady place at a certain point in the autumn the salmon numbers stack up in a diamond formation. To start with, a few just take positions here and there, but as spawning approaches they tighten into a formation. As the days pass and no rain raises water levels, the space they are occupying shrinks and gets cramped with more fish still arriving. It is like a rail terminus with no trains leaving. The water lacks the refreshment of oxygen. I have seen the mass of salmon get edgy and impatient; they start to jostle and swirl at each other. There is a palpable build-up of nervous tension.
One time this was dramatised in a remarkable way. Above the bridge swam a pair of mergansers, paddling on the side of the river. Like a torpedo in an old war movie, a large fish suddenly charged the two sawbills. He launched himself from at least 60 feet and, missile-like, broke the surface enough to create a bow-wave. The mergansers, sensing something at the last moment, rose in a panic of clattering wings and flew fast away.
Well, salmon do not in theory attack birds, but the fact is that mergansers are major predators of salmon eggs, a difficult enemy for the progenitors because the sawbills get their necks and beaks under the water and then shovel through the redds removing the buried caviar. Salmon hide the eggs in their redds and assume they are safe until the little alevins wiggle out in warming springtime sunshine; they cannot remain on duty to stand guard. I have seen a merganser in Canada surfacing from redd-raiding with salmon eggs cascading down its chest. I believe that cock salmon recognised in the merganser pair, with their elongated predator shape and thin heads, a predator enemy. It was a bird-fish interaction I will never see twice.
Prior to rain, the petulant salmon under the bridge are all moving and all disturbed. They squirt forward and drift back, they nudge other salmon, their tails swish and they shift position. Rain falls. I wait for the right conditions to see under the bridge again, despite it being harder with higher water. One time I had counted around 150 salmon in diamond-formation then, following rain, the river-bed where they had been was denuded of every one. The breeding pack had moved on to the final stage: the upper tributaries and the redds.
I was taught by an old fishing ghillie how to read water at this point in the salmon chapter and to detect the presence of a river’s spawners from water movement. It is an art. You walk upstream from below, although from above is possible too. The spawners are in certain types of places, at least where I view them they are. They occupy the fast water beside and behind the bigger stones – they like active water with energy. To start with they are not in the fastest riffly current, which is shallow, but in the channels by big rocks. From below you see not the fish but the bulge in the water above where they lie. Their bodies are never long still, so the water has a thicker, darker look. Momentarily they move and a fin-edge shows. Then the fin of the partner fish, close by. If you walk up the bank opposite to the fish you can watch the pair of them. Only if you wade into the water do they swim off. It is not like in the fishing season; these creatures have a special matter on their minds, nothing less than their definitive act. As spawning time approaches they move into the faster riffles.
In Canadian fishing huts and fishing lodges and airports near fishing rivers, one man’s quotations often adorn the public spaces. They are the words of Roderick Haig-Brown, a judge in his day and resident on the banks of the Campbell River on Vancouver Island. In his book Return To The River he describes the drama on a spawning redd of a female Chinook salmon, a stupendously big fish for the little rivers it breeds in.
No one who has read Haig-Brown’s account will feel brave enough to attempt their own description. His spare, detailed and probing simple language turns the enactment of egg-release into a pageant of wildlife drama. He describes the hen’s convulsing flanks as she releases eggs, redd-digging with fierce sweeps of her mighty tail, the water current helping the process. Then the arrival of the cock squirting his cloudy milt over the egg pile, the competing immature Chinook rushing in to have his go at contributing to procreation, prior to the whole nest being rapidly covered with pebbles in protection from the throng of potential predators needing just such a feast of fresh protein before the onset of north Canadian winter rigour.
At last he describes her dying, being eaten alive by rot, the fungus which softens and breaks down the flesh. Our heroine mother is left disintegrating on the stones. But, critically in Nature’s cycle, her dismembering body flakes feed vital protein to young fish and her distant successors. It is noble writing, and gripping. In stately style he takes longer over some passages of this enactment than the real-life duration.
To watch salmon spawning is an elevating experience available to anyone living in salmon country anywhere. Yet we are glued to wildlife films for their perfecting, high-tech, laboratory touching-up, editing and enhancing. Nothing can give you the smell of the real-life river at spawning, the proximity, and the clarity.
Usually between sundown and midnight, working upstream, the hen turns on her side and scoops a depression in a sandy and gravelly substratum, laying eggs all the while in a steady outpouring. The eggs remain fertile for only one minute, so contenders vie to fertilise them, squirting their cloudy milt. Action is furious. The redds are then covered over with the same stone-shovelling to a depth of up to a foot.
I saw this process one time on a gravel-bar below my house late in November after most fish had spawned. The salmon were same-sized, around 35 pounds. I had recently handled some big salmon and although fish of this size are seldom seen in the River Helmsdale, that was the class of fish I was watching. She lay just in front of him, but instead of a vigorous and exhausting performance these two were in languorous mode. They were so large that no grilse, parr or other contenders were visibly around. Their backs were clear of the water, and the two giants seemed just to nudge each other on the redd. I had two of my children with me and, riding piggy-back, they could see it all from a better height only a few yards across the stream. I almost felt like going away out of politeness.
Enquiring later about the presence of such leviathans, a retired fishery bailiff told me he had long known about these very big salmon. They entered this river after angling had finished, often not till November, and stayed only long enough to spawn. He reckoned they were usually no more than a fortnight in fresh water.
The salmon eggs are clustered in the redds until they hatch, safe from most eventualities except major flooding when rolling rock could smash their soft mounds and disperse the egg collection for consumption by all and sundry. For there are few denizens of salmon headwaters for whom fresh eggs are not a welcome dietary enhancement. Unlucky clutches too near the surface can be frozen solid on gravel-bars exposed to hard frost which has driven down water levels. Redds are safe if there is stability in the river system until they hatch in the spring.
The actors in the conception drama have changed their costumes to participate. Both sexes’ noses become extended. If he were a medieval knight trying to unnerve his jousting opponent, the features the cock salmon arraigns himself in might fit the bill. He grows a lower-jaw projection in the form of a solid gristle hook which curves up, sometimes actually piercing the cartilage of his upper mouth, which itself arches, pre-spawning, to accommodate it. The knob has a name, the ‘kype’, but its purpose is uncertain. Salmon fishery managers have seen cock salmon thrash their heads at male parr trying to get near the females on the redds, but a knob this solid is hardly needed for that. As big cocks charge and chase each other the kype may be a proboscis for belabouring rivals. When the cock reassembles his hormones after spawning and drifts downriver as a kelt, the kype in sympathy shrinks too, till only the familiar small hook is left. Unless this happened he could never resume feeding.
The cock’s head attains super-gothic ferocity, being elongated for the spawning by three or four inches, and his skin blackens. At the finale he hardly looks like a fish at all.
When at our local hatchery we had schoolchildren on an afternoon out acquainting themselves with the species for the first time, I remember a fishery bailiff hauling a cock salmon from a deep holding tank and the wide-eyed, disgusting-looking monster squirming from side to side, eliciting a gasp of horror from the young onlookers who jumped backwards. They may have seen some X-rated movies, but this was something else.
Normally, after 50–110 days, the incubation extending to eight months in the colder Arctic, the salmon eggs break forth as tadpole-like creatures, carting as an underbelly appendage the vital egg sac. This bulging picnic is for consumption on the next stage of the pilgrimage, before they can start feeding from the outer world for themselves. As the little jelly-like creature, with its sharp, black, instantly functioning eyes expands, the picnic shrinks, and after six to eight weeks has been completely absorbed. From that time, life support is externally supplied – or existence ends.
Fry, as they are called, eat tiny crustaceans, insect larvae, nymphs and phytoplankton – a variety of miniature organisms that flourish in stream sunlight. They subsist on their hunting skills, which are rapidly developed. In summer heat food multiplies and in winter it shrinks till it disappears, their growth mirroring food availability. The further they range from the safety of shade and cover, the higher the risk of ending up in the stomach of a trout, heron, kingfisher, cormorant, or other assailant. In the fecund backwaters of Scotland’s Aberdeenshire River Deveron, where the water is clear and glassy, I have seen thousands of fry massed in corners. The fugitive instincts they need in later life are in evidence early and they move like lightning, even from passing shadows.
The parr stage is marked when they reach a couple of inches. Parr have snub noses, brownish backs, some black spotting, and a few red spots near the lateral line. This line is their nerve system, the strung-out headquarters where their sensory faculties are assembled. Parr have an easy signature in several dark bands running vertically up and down the body, no sign of which survives beyond this stage of their existence. The barring accounts for the term sometimes used to describe them: ‘fingerlings’.
Anglers know them as the energetic little fellows that can seize a fly, sometimes almost of their own size, equally in fast riffles or at the tail of the pool in torpid backwaters. We dislike holding them for fear our hands are too hot, so we customarily let them wiggle free from the hook, holding them near the surface to skip off as they hit water.
Just as seagulls are a sign of worms being turned by the plough, so mergansers are a sign of parr shoals. On the famed Restigouche River in New Brunswick, where some of the largest Atlantic salmon abide, flocks of mergansers number hundreds. They fly in menacing sinister squadrons up and down the fish-rich river, making a commotion when they all settle. In the Fifties it was found on the nearby Miramichi River that 86 per cent of the local mergansers ate parr to the tune of over a million each annually! It almost defies belief, but tests elsewhere replicate a gargantuan consumption rate. Mergansers can decimate a salmon population, faster when the water is low. Restigouche kingfishers target parr too and in times past the fishery owners painstakingly shot both mergansers and kingfishers as part of routine salmon protection.
It is perhaps one of the oddest adaptations of Atlantic salmon that some of these miniature parr can be sexually mature. As we have seen, they are capable of fertilising big hen salmon on the redds, nipping in as the cocks pause and ejecting their little sprays of milt over them. Looked at from an evolutionary point of view it completes a portrait of salmon’s variable ways of circumventing catastrophe. If all the cock fish in the sea were boiled in the lava outflow of an erupting volcano (to take a fantastic scenario), then the female fish reaching home would not be reproductively marooned. That little barred parr would be waiting, successful fugitive from kingfishers, to secure the future of one more generation of fine salmon.
Parr feed on the full range of titbits that the meagre headwaters of salmon rivers have to offer. Mayflies, stoneflies, other insects and insect larvae, worms and mussels – most things moving and many unmoving contribute to diet. Vulnerable to acidification and very low levels of pH, to chemical discharges from agricultural crops like silage, concentrated effluents, mining tailings, high aluminium and heavy metals, wood dust, oils and the like, parr need clear water and flowing streams. A simple-sounding requirement, but in a land-hungry world clean water is not such a common commodity. As they prepare to ‘smoltify’, their tails lengthen and the forks in them deepen, their fins grow, the scales soften, and they turn silvery. The great odyssey in the ocean is about to commence.
It is a matter of wonder that such small creatures can be destined to go so far. When birds migrate, they are of a similar size to their progenitors. When flounders and shad and lampreys shift in and out of the salt water on the tides they cover measurable distance on a manageable scale. Other mammal migrants travel in families and herds, adults protecting young. Caribou and elephants and migrating African antelope shepherd their young, fending off predators on their behalf. But these small salmon are unaccompanied minors, with a threat-filled odyssey ahead. On the trip they rub shoulders with whales, they are tossed and turned in the ocean’s systems, upwellings and currents and still they adhere to their programmed track. SALSEA identifies the routes and genetic families of some of the journeymen.
When common eels leave the Sargasso as elvers they allow the prevailing winds and currents to push them across the Atlantic towards freshwater lakes. The journey can take years, but the fish are essentially passive. It is the determinism of the young salmon that amazes. Predestined to reach a feeding ground, whether in the North Sea as grilse, or on the Greenland Shelf and north-east Atlantic as multi-sea-winter salmon, they are on a mission, bent on their assignation with copious krill and capelin and other nutritious sweetmeats. The whole challenge is formidable in the extreme.
The Culture (#u07d98b94-28b9-5a1f-9881-266326795b2f)
I was in a party of river rafters on the Alaskan panhandle late one summer and we had finished taking apart our gear and were waiting to be picked up. We dawdled around a river-mouth where a multitude of salmon were swarming. Biologists had blocked the small river-mouth with a grid because enough spawners were already jammed in the river and more would overload the small rivers where they bred. Families with open pick-ups were backing onto the edge of the pool and the men were snow-shovelling palpitating salmon directly into the backs of the pick-ups. They filled the rear of their vehicles, pulled tarpaulins over the still-thrashing salmon and drove off. Winter food supply all sorted.
These biblical-scale salmon runs are not all gone. In fact, they continue. It was a year predicted by fishery scientists as likely to be low on spawners, and a multitude arrived.
The world of antediluvian excess, of passenger pigeons in numbers to darken the sky, of fish which break nets and pull trawlers under the waves, of buffalo whose thundering hooves made the American plains shake from far away, these examples of Nature’s gargantuan excess still exist in parts of the Pacific salmon domain. It is reckoned that in the southern edge of range, America’s Washington State and Oregon, only a tenth of the original runs survive, but north of that runs persist.
What is unknown is the degree to which hatchery efforts by Alaskan fish and game managers are reinforcing migrations. Only genetic testing from the annual runs, against a database of the genetics of salmon used in the hatcheries, would show this, and the record was not taken. There is an element of hybridisation in the run.
I was shown a tributary of the Campbell River on Vancouver Island where pink salmon waiting to spawn were stacked like sardines in a tin. The place was dense with vegetation and only as the fishing guide pushed aside the tree branches did I make out what was in the water. It was like looking into a wine rack where the bottle heads were fish faces. Having spent over a week seeking one lonely steelhead willing to engage with my fly patterns it was a trifle galling to see a stack of fish so dense it pushed water from the river onto the bank.
In July 2010 I was in Vancouver when the sockeye were thronging the bays around the city. Rod fishers were all over, filling larders for winter. There was some edgy banter, too, about whether these super-abundant fish should be returned or not. Conservation talk about perilously damaged fish-runs, even of a different salmon species, had altered public perceptions. The language of conservation and the more acute sense that wildlife values must from now on be looked after has hyped issues, and common sense can get lost. One species gets muddled with another in the public eye and the projection of fishermen as ruthless, greedy hunter-gatherers becomes lodged in the public mind.
Long ago in the history of fish management in western American and Canadian culture it was hard to make the case for the protection of migratory fisheries against the socio-economic advantages of industrial advance, timber-logging, and the power of hydro-energy. Nowadays, in instances of survival adequacy it is sometimes hard to make the case for a controlled take.
The point about the prodigious runs of salmon into western Pacific rivers is more significant, though. The salmon runs dictated human settlement; this can be shown compellingly. No one has applied this information to settlement history in Western Europe. Here the Atlantic salmon, not the Pacific species, was the bonanza of protein delivered by migratory evolution. It is known that the Phoenicians netted tuna in the open sea two thousand years ago. Anyone capable of doing that, and capturing very large fish which were also the fastest swimmers in the sea, could with comparatively little effort have trapped salmon. And they did.
Take the Pacific coast first. In his 2011 book comparing the New World and the Old World, entitled The Great Divide, Peter Watson examines the effects of a great climate shift. From around 6000 BC sea levels began to stabilise. Glaciers had been pouring fresh water into the seas, and land had been rising as the weight of ice lifted. This process eventually levelled out. Vast shoals of salmon began to swim up the pristine rivers. A harvest of fish arrived on the doorstep of tribes on river-mouths and it came every year, regular as the turning season.
Peter Watson’s evidence comes from the fish bones in riverside human settlement remains. There, human skeletons show signs of arthritis consistent with a diet consisting predominantly of fish. From about 3,000 BC shellfish were added to the menu. Middens grew in size and it appears clans and tribes began to become more permanent and less peripatetic. Cemeteries mark places where tribes wished not only to lay their ancestors’ bones, but also places to which they lay claim.
Peter Watson’s theory is that the New World, blessed with abundant game and a wagon-train of protein in the form of Pacific salmon arriving before the onset of winter to stock the larders, had no need to evolve and develop agriculture, as had happened in the Old World. Where societies in Asia and Europe lived on cereals and domesticated animals, in the Americas people were graced with abundant wild animals for food. Chief was salmon; north-western cultures used flounders, herring, cod, sturgeon and small oil-rich fish called eulachon too, but most important of all was salmon.
The key to the harvest is the nature of tidal rivers and migrating behaviour of salmon. When the tide fills a river-mouth the fish ride in on it, holding on to the top layer so as not to scrape their stomachs on stones. This way they ascend the river to ascertain whether to continue in the freshwater environment or return to the saltwater and wait for a better moment. But as they return the tidewater level is falling. There is less water to swim in. That is when a river-bed weir structure which had been below water level a few hours earlier suddenly becomes a barrier. There is no escape over the top of it and the unimpeded water flows back through small spaces in the weir. All that is left behind is the fish. They can then be speared or caught in dip-nets, or in a manner of other ways removed from the water. Easy as pie.
There is nothing smart about this: I have seen the same thing happening in Scotland about thirty years ago on the River Ericht, a tributary of the Tay. Stone Age isn’t dead! Village boys ran about amongst the rocks as the water levels fell during a dry spell, spearing and catching salmon marooned in pools. Some of them had lamps and flares the better to see the fish as dusk drew in. That scene, long ago called ‘burning the water’, could have been taking place at any point in the last thousand years. Technically illegal at the time, the occasion pre-dated the era when salmon were accepted as being rare and in need of protection from this primitive-style capture.
Yet the riotous melee had an atmosphere of folk revelry and abandonment to primal energy which somehow stirred ancient memories. Anyone prone to get too sniffy about inappropriate salmon-catching should be reminded that some late-eighteenth-century landowners in New England, unversed in the then-unknown delights of rod-and-line fishing, travelled distances to the Connecticut River to get their fun from salmon-spearing and gaffing salmon leaping at waterfalls.
In the Pacific Northwest the background to salmon capture was quite different. There the salmon was holy and the run was a phenomenon upon which survival hung. Unsurprisingly, the ingenuity, artistry and practical neatness of some of the artefacts developed to capture and process the fish harvest from the sea were astonishing. Salmon were the lifeblood of existence for these people and their fishing culture reflected it. The most famous artwork from the Pacific Northwest is from the Haida Indians, and some of their resplendent work consists of images of fish. Salmon equalled tribe survival and the cultural acknowledgement of this is a feature of the history of the north-west.
Catching salmon was taken to a level of high art in a practical sense. Cedar bark was twined into nets and split cedar boughs were used to make nets and traps. Cedar was deployed too to make lashings for constructing lattices for stopping advancing fish, and wild cherry was tough enough for attaching shafts to nets and fish-spears. Flexible boughs of hemlock and spruce were twisted into fish-traps formed like tunnels in varied designs.
The native people were assiduous in the harvest of their prime resource. The techniques and structures were impressively elaborate. In some of the fish enclosures constructed to hold fish as the tide receded, white clam shells paved the floor, better to show to those peering down what fish were held there. There were lattice mazes with intermittent posts driven into the tidal estuary to snare salmon drifting on the tides; looking for a way out, the salmon swam further in. Different designs were used for varying stream flows and different woods were separated into functions suited to their characteristics; for instance, willow was used for major weirs, being strong and flexible and abundantly available. Stakes held their position, being pointed at the bottom and driven into the stream-bed. On the longer weirs the fishermen built spearing platforms in tripod shapes which enabled them to spot the quarry. Spears were subtly designed with stop-butts to prevent the pointed spear sections being damaged on the bottom.
Plant knowledge had progressed far on this well-endowed coastline. The Indians discovered that the stinging nettle, which grew over head height in those parts, had a property which could be used for salmon harvest. The stalks were cut, dried, peeled, beaten, shredded and then spun into a two-strand twine of exceptional strength. The wood and bone spindles used to do this were in use up to the present time.
In preparation for her brilliant illustrated study, Indian Fishing, British Columbian writer Hilary Stewart tried out these techniques herself. Using plants and different woods she constructed weirs and traps and spears and every tool connected to the salmon harvest. She found it took time and skill to replicate the old toolkits – but they worked. In Europe the same knowledge existed and nettles were considered to make stronger twine than flax – in fact the word ‘net’ derives from nettle. Cedar and willow bark were materials for net construction too. The hoops of nets might be made of bent vine maple.
The north-west Pacific peoples used only materials they had at hand. There were no imported or traded tools or materials. Anthropologists today might term their salmon capture ‘organic’. Looking back from where we are now there is something delightfully clean and satisfying about a food provision entirely serviced from the clever utilisation of local plants. Thinking further afield, there are few societies of which this remained true until recent time. The Inuits in the Arctic are an example, and there may be others in Arctic Russia, but on the bigger landmasses, where travel in any direction was physically feasible, there are few. There were the northern Saami and variously named reindeer-herders of the Asian tundra and taiga who relied almost exclusively on reindeer. Generally, though, only societies on the rim of the habitable zone were reliant on a single migratory animal.
Salmon capture was taken to a high art. If the water was moving fast the salmon were swept into a fenced enclosure. The single exit was a grid shelf sloping upwards; escaping fish marooned themselves on the grid, struggling upstream as they attempted to reach flowing water again. Neat.
Snaring fish was a various art. Rocks on the river-bed were designed in hoops or ‘wing-dams’ with the open end upstream. There could be a series of these ring structures widening out with the river. On the ebb tide salmon fell back in the river-mouth and were stranded. The rock-traps can be seen in outline today, still in place even though modern techniques have rendered them obsolete. The top rocks have been swept away in centuries of spates, but the river-bed structures remain, jawbones from which the teeth have fallen.
They are as evident in western Europe as they are in the Pacific Northwest, but in the former place no one has been looking for them or trying to build a picture of Stone Age salmon capture. If you go to the Grimersta River on Lewis, in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, a prolific salmon system, you can find the same primeval remains of what at one time supplied local Outer Hebrideans with their winter food supply. The most elementary aspects of food harvest have a tendency not to alter much.
Weirs were angled to guide fish towards a centre-pass where the trap would be positioned. I have seen salmon channelled this way in Canada for counting and stock assessment. It works unerringly and the flow of the water keeps the latticework or stake-fence in place. Sometimes densely foliated tree branches are used to fill the bigger gaps. All the system needs is salmon with the urge to go upstream and water pushing the other way. Usually the more delicate lattice structures were taken away after the salmon run and the basic structures, especially when of rock, were left in place. If necessary they were repaired and rebuilt in springtime.
Tricking salmon into net-ends or ‘bunts’ was a brain-teaser which produced ingenious contraptions. The Indians worked out that salmon could be deflected by the appearance of pendant vertical lines which, had they attempted, the fish could have swum through. But the salmon opted to go in the direction of the tidal current and could be fooled into the upper layer of the water even though the water below was a lot deeper. A loose cats-cradle of connected lines, kept in place by sinker-weights and buoys, was enough to direct the salmon to where spear-wielding fishermen awaited them.
Bunches of rye grass were tied to the floor of the loose cradle of line to create the illusion of a floor or river-bed. This kept the fish in the river’s upper level heading for the denser-woven net near the shore through which they could not escape. Guile and knowledge of the quarry were essential in the capture of this turbo-charged fish. A salmon can outswim any creature in the river, and indeed most in the ocean.
In some ways it is peculiar that the Indians never developed the art of rod-angling. In the Azores today medium-sized fishing boats go to sea to take tuna, armed with bunches of fishing poles which are fished manually by fishermen just as day-boat anglers jig for pollack and mackerel. Rod and line is simply the best way of catching tuna. Additionally, rod-caught fish remain clean and attract the highest prices in the market.
The Indians approximated to this with line-fishing by trolling. Trolling from canoes took place in the bays and inlets before the fish range was narrowed by the confinement of rivers. A witness at the time describes what the Nootka Indians did:
‘For slimness and invisibility the braided leaders were made from women’s hair, or in rougher water from the quills of birds or porcupines. A hook was baited with fresh sprat or herring, and the line was attached to the solo canoeist’s paddle. The whole rig was sunk with small sinker stones. As the oarsman moved his paddle back and forth a slow jerking movement of the hook attracted the salmon. The paddle was then handled in such a way that the salmon was boated.’
You may ask, what were the hooks made from in a culture without metal? It is ingenious. ‘Bentwood’, or wood of hemlock, balsam, fir or spruce branches were used, but taken only from the places there were knots. For knots were denser than ordinary wood and instead of floating, sank. This wood was shaved to the right slimness, then steamed and pressed into a hook-shaped mould. Deer tallow rubbed onto the hook before cooling prevented the hooped construction re-opening. The barbs, lashed on, were fashioned from bone.
The ways in which Pacific-coast salmon were utilised once extracted from their natural element were diverse. Presumably some were used to fuel the energies of hungry fishermen and trappers and eaten fresh. Summer diets consisted of berries and shellfish; salmon was a burst of marine protein. But the bulk of the harvest was preserved for winter by drying and smoking. Nineteenth-century photographs show Indians dip-netting, scoop- and bag-netting and catching salmon in a multifarious manner, with the racks of fish drying in the background. Just as the weirs were often enormous structures involving the use of entire trees, and very long and strongly built, the drying-racks could be structures bigger than houses. Fir boughs protected the fish from direct sun and racks were positioned to catch warm winds for drying. Anything near ground level would attract grizzlies, hence the structures were built aloft.
Weather was all-important. There were good seasons for curing and drying fish, which was ideally done outside. If it had to be done inside, as much of the salmon harvest as could be accommodated was brought in. But for the really large-scale curing, space was needed, and that relied on clement conditions. Complete failure to cure the winter food supply successfully could lead to local starvations. There are a number of peoples, like the Han of the Yukon River, who critically depended on salmon runs for their survival over winter.
The V-shaped drying-racks could handle hundreds of salmon sides. Caches for salmon were built on stilts both to catch the wind and to keep bears off, and they were considerable structures. Some were the size of residential log cabins. There is a photograph of a cache built on several different floors climbing a single tree and connected by ladders. The Indians had wooden tongs for lifting fish. Strainers for removing them from cooking-pots were constructed of seal-ribs. Knives were made of mussel shells, and fish skins were dried on triangular blocks designed to stretch them. The number of varying utensils created to manage the salmon harvest equals the refinement of a modern kitchen equipment range. But all came from at-hand natural products. Tube-like bottles were made from the hollow necks of sea-kelp fronds.
The salmon were not only used for preserved food and skins. On the Fraser River the oil was taken from decomposing salmon bodies which had been left in troughs in the sun to rot, allowing the oil to seep to the bottom. Oil was procured too from the livers of dogfish and cod, and also from the bodies of eulachon (small oily river fish captured in shoals). Salmon roe was hung separately on racks and eaten when decomposed. Alternatively, salmon roe was sunk in boxes below the tide and rotted there before being consumed. Perhaps this is no more strange than raw salmon or gravlax being eaten in Scandinavia today. To many people, gravlax is the best salmon preparation of all.
The importance of the salmon in north-west Pacific culture is reflected in the artistry which was devoted to decoration of the tools deployed in their capture. Salmon was regarded as a sacred food resource with sacramental and life-saving qualities and was accordingly a repeat symbol in the region’s famous art. A nineteenth-century French missionary staying in a Huron fishing village described the eloquence of local preachers whose job it was to persuade salmon to come into the nets and be caught. His sermons were theatrical performances attended by the village in a hushed silence. Salmon, remember, possess souls.
Ceremonies preceded the opening of the fishing season. It was believed that salmon would reappear again only if their spirits had been properly appeased. The Indians regarded salmon spirits as closely linked to the human ones which subsisted upon their bodies. Salmon were seen as possessing a conscious spirit and their returning presence to their natal streams viewed as a voluntary act rather than the gene-driven survival ritual identified by biologists today.
If salmon failed to come back, the Indians believed they had broken sacred taboos, or in some way offended the spirit of the fish. Indeed, instead of perceiving the capture of the salmon as the wily manifestation of the skilled hunter’s art, the captured salmon was seen as complicit in its own capture. A willing participant in the scheme of things, the fish was taken only with its own consent, and its capture was dependent on certain conditions being fulfilled. In this sense the link between the salmon migration and the peoples who relied on them was similar to the relationship between the Saami of northern Scandinavia and Arctic Russia and reindeer.
The first salmon caught triggered more ceremonies. On the Lower Fraser the Tlingit peoples take the first sockeye to the chief who in turn carries it to his wife. She thanks the salmon chief for sending this emissary. The whole tribe attends the ritual consumption of this first salmon following a rigid set of rules, cleansing themselves with a special concoction of plants beforehand.
The life-giving fish had returned and the rhythmic cycles of Nature are again underlined and confirmed. Instead of chewing the dried salmon cured in a previous year, people could again eat fresh salmon with the tang of the sea.
In addition, the returning silver salmon were seen as capable of dispelling diseases and sickness. Prayers reflected the belief that while the salmon were being eaten in the opening ceremonies their souls surveyed the proceedings from above. Is this why, without knowing it, the rod-angling fraternity hang salmon replicas on the fishing hut or the sporting-lodge wall?
Most tribes had a ritual involving the salmon bones being returned to the river or the sea. One tribe burnt the bones instead, although usually incineration was avoided. The purpose of the rituals was a new commitment to the cycle which would propitiate the salmon spirits and ensure their return in following seasons. There were ceremonies as the salmon was cut and prayers were intoned by senior citizens in the tribe. The fish was honoured. Not before this was done were other fishermen allowed to start fishing from the rest of the salmon run. Which of us Western rod anglers hasn’t toasted a first fish? Perhaps more often we have toasted lost fish, the expression on the face of the worsted angler being the most interesting. We observe remnants of old tribal manners without knowing why.
In one ceremony where the salmon is served on cedar planks the fish has to be handled so that the head is always pointing in the direction of the fish-run, or upstream in the river. The Lkungen tribe in Vancouver Island send their children to await the first salmon to arrive in the fishing boat. The children carry the fish up the beach and conduct a ceremony involving burnt offerings. Only children eat the first salmon, adults having to wait a few days for their share. Salmon bones may not touch the ground and in due course are returned to the sea.
Californian Indians of the Karuk tribe believed that the poles used to make the booth for keeping spears must be taken from the highest mountain or the salmon will see them, and also that they must be renewed every year. The reason is that otherwise old salmon will have told young salmon about them. This tale not only humanises salmon, giving them the faculty of human sight, but removes the distinction between dead or alive salmon. Breaches of tradition entail the failure of fishing effort; these were societies saturated with faith in the spiritual.
James George Frazer, recounting some of these beliefs in his early twentieth-century magnum opus, The Golden Bough, points out that in regarding salmon as having spirits equivalent to human ones the salmon-dependent tribes’ philosophy chimes with the modern view of the indestructibility of energy. Energy assumes new forms but does not vanish when one energy-vehicle is transmuted into another – as when fish becomes food. This makes sense of tribal beliefs in the immortality of animal souls as well as human ones.
Amongst tribes less reliant on salmon but more able to catch, say, halibut, the reverence and ritual are invested in that fish instead. But for the majority of the coastal cultures on this seaboard, one or more of the five salmon species were the principal food resource. Beliefs about salmon outnumber those of any other fish.
In her study of these subjects, Hilary Stewart records several salmon stories she encountered amongst the coastal tribes. One maintained that the first salmon to arrive were scouts. Correct treatment of the scouts ensured the bulk of the run following. Several tribes believed salmon were really people who lived in undersea communities. Some of the artwork reinforces this with, for example, a fish carving in an oblong piece of wood with a human in its stomach.
The readiness with which catch and release has been adopted in western European fishing circles surprises some people. Fishermen go misty-eyed. Seen as a spiritual enactment, it all makes more sense. Early people tried to ensure a salmon future spiritually, modern people try and ensure it biologically, but the two are in reality blurred.
Twin children in the north-west Pacific were believed to have a special rapport with salmon, and this was a widespread notion. If twins were born in the village, an unusually large salmon would arrive in the river afterwards. A wayward citizen could halt the salmon run by burying a salmon heart in a clam shell or in a burial ground. If salmon eyes were kept overnight in the house without being eaten, all the salmon would disappear. A shell knife had to be used in the ceremonial cutting of salmon or there would be thunder. Only old women past childbirth could work on, or repair, salmon nets. And because people enjoyed eating the sweet inner bark of springtime hemlock, salmon must too, and accordingly balls of it were adorned with feathers and sent downriver to satisfy the fish.
There were other taboos which required adherence if the salmon run was to carry on unimpeded. Freshly split planks could not be floated down the river and new canoes had to season before being floated. Hilary Stewart links this to the actual fact that extracts of fresh cedar are toxic to fish.
Rules abounded regarding the correct procedures for catching salmon. Children were not allowed to play with the sacred fish before they were cleaned. An offending child might even die. Salmon could not be taken up the beach from the canoes in a basket, but rather by hand. Anyone recently connected to birth or death rites should not handle or eat fresh salmon, risking the cessation of the run. The first salmon were not sold commercially in case the salmon hearts were destroyed or fed to the dogs, another potential risk to the run. A spear fisherman catching two fish with one thrust should not exhibit triumph, or the salmon already splayed on the drying racks would climb down and go back to sea.
The catalogue of means which the north-west Pacific cultures used for taking salmon could be continued. The tools and techniques they had for harpooning, spearing, jigging, snaring and ripping salmon are various and ingenious. They used whale baleen for snoods, bones for barbs, split roots for fish hooks. The subject is delightfully fruity.
Perhaps this is an anthropologist’s turf rather than mine. Where I think the key significance lies is in Peter Watson’s assertion that it was the abundance of the runs of Pacific salmon which has enabled the Pacific coastal peoples to continue lifestyles unadjusted to modern time in a way inconceivable without the extraordinary bounty of the salmon harvest. The various peoples who inhabited the lands around the Columbia River called the river ‘the great table’, where people could come at different times of year and get their slug of life-reviving sustenance.
Without that returning bonanza of fish which could so variously be prepared and cured and salted down, and preserved for use for over half a year later, the Pacific peoples would have had to trade, to open up avenues for the exchange of goods and generally interact with the rest of the continent in a different way. Their cultures would have changed long ago. The salmon harvest kept an undeveloped but environmentally benign culture in happy coexistence with the salmon runs for thousands of years. Up to a point, and we will revert to this later, it still does so now.
What has never been looked at is the degree to which human settlement was dictated by salmon runs. One might argue and even be able to prove that Vancouver, at the mouth of the Fraser River, was once used by native people as a salmon capture station. It is easy to imagine it; salmon are caught in Vancouver’s waterways now. Backed by the Rockies and without coastal roads and caravan routes trekking over open plains to the rear, maybe here, as was the case further north, a society existed for a long time in isolation from other trade centres, hemmed in by the mountains and living primarily on fish, most of which were salmon. Salmon were the cultural lynchpins. But maybe this is not only true in the Americas …
North European and Scandinavian cities are mostly sited on river-mouths. Mostly they were salmon rivers. Now that it is known that sea voyagers traversed the Atlantic long before Christopher Columbus, sea travel has an ancient pedigree. No one knows how, but 50,000 years ago humans crossed the water from Indonesia to Australia. Boats that could cross the ocean could cruise the coastline up and down. That may be so, but there is another reason why cities were built on river-mouths, and that is because the larder that needing filling was thus ideally located beside the conveyor belt containing the food. The food was migratory fish.
In the twenty-first century salmon cling to survival in a few rivers in northern Spain and in select French rivers down to the Spanish border. But even today the French have a delightful and powerful folk memory of ‘le saumon’.
One time I was sent by a magazine on a grayling fishing trip to a river in the south-west of France. It had rained stupendously, so my fishing guide and I forgot the fishing and enjoyed a repast in a dripping camping ground which was memorable for the wonderful goat’s cheese which his own flock had contributed. With little to do I looked at the rule book for local fishermen. At the back was a section on salmon fishing. To my surprise there was a long and detailed chapter delimning precisely how and when salmon could be caught and all the attendant rules. I expressed surprise to my guide that there were indeed any salmon in the river. He said casually that in fact there were not; the chapter on salmon was there to satisfy just such fishermen as myself, whiling away the time and dreaming of fish that might be – dreaming of fish that only existed in different places, where there were not hydro dams up and down the river, and where pollution had been addressed, and where water-flow permitted their existence. Perhaps only in France would you find that chapter about a fish from another place, but it rather enhanced the occasion for me.
Next day we got back to the action on the grayling and I thought several times of the possibility that somewhere on this river, sometime, there could be salmon again too. The concept had become embedded. The salmon as a cultural entity had a significance despite being absent as a living fish.
