Totem Salmon

Totem Salmon by Freeman House is, on one level, a book about efforts to restore a salmon run to a small river in northern California. On another, it is a story about a community of ranchers, loggers, fisherman, old hippies, and pot growers who try to find a way to work together based on the common, if often uncomfortable, belief that salmon are important to the place they call home. The book explores the notion that the commitment we make to something outside ourselves costs us and changes us, but is ultimately where the real richness of life is found.

Totem Salmon by Freeman House

Precocious male chubs arrive first and wait, a wave of reproductive insurance. They are fertile and as ready as any human adolescent, but later the larger males will attempt to exclude them from the final intimacy. The three- and four- and sometimes five-year-old males arrive next, darker and more damaged than their smaller, brighter brothers. They have grown downturned snouts with snaggled teeth. Noses and tails have been abraded white as the heavy fish leaped upstream against rock and waterfall; in some places white fungus grows on the sores. The two age classes avoid each other. None of the fish have eaten since entering fresh water and each individual seems all nerves and attitude. Alternatively edgy and languid, they patrol the pools and the dark spaces beneath the bushes that grow on the banks. Should a larger fish encounter a smaller one, there is a sudden stir: the larger fish will lunge and butt and snap to discipline and chase away the smaller.

The females arrive individually, all purpose and system and sleek intent. Each one of them is searching for a certain configuration of gravel and current that will serve her needs. The gravel must be of a certain size – the size of a small man’s fist, say – the water of a depth adequate to float the fish during the work to come. By the time she has traveled this far upstream, there is an imperative apparent in her movements: she is feeling the pressure of the season; timing is all. She ignores predators and works in broad daylight, in bright water.

She powers up against the current over a reach of attractive spawning gravel and drifts back. She powers up again, more slowly now, and seems to inspect the gravel with her nose. She is looking for a place where she will build the nest – the redd – the home of the future of the race. The water is a foot or more deep, with enough velocity and gradient to have carried the smaller cobbles on past. Her muscular tail, strengthened by the long sea journey, abraded and scarred by the struggle upstream, still contains strength enough to move half a yard of gravel, a few cobbles at a time. With the leverage of her whole body behind a turn, a swipe of the tail turns up a rock or two. A cloud of silt drifts downstream and disappears. She turns on her side and slaps the loosed cobbles with her tail – a double-time cadence faster than the palpitating heart of the human witness and loud enough to be heard over the sound of the water, loud enough to be heard by the bears and raccoons that lurk at the river’s edge each year at this time. She will dig until there is a depression up to fifteen inches deep in the river’s bottom. . . .

As she digs she concentrates on deepening it at the center, building an ovipository, a pocket nest for the protection of her eggs. She may have been at this for hours now, or even days. The male up to this point has shown limited interest. He may drift through the area of activity – especially if another male is showing interest – but he has been of no help in moving rocks. But now the female begins to act like a worker testing the result of her labors to see how close to completion it is. Arching her body, she probes the bottom of the depression with her tail, drifts to the surface of the running water, and probes again. Once she is satisfied, she hovers over the redd with her vent over the nest pocket. Her lower jaw drops open; the resistance of the gaping mouth helps her to hold herself in place in the current. While the female has been probing, the male has begun to hover steadily nearby, and he has begun to tremble. Now it seems as if an invisible soupy fog of piscine eroticism rises off the water and envelops the observer. The fog is a dense, cold, quiet mixture of sex, death and inevitability.

A single male will join the female in the nest, quivering now more noticeably. As the two of them turn and turn again to race the length of the redd, the male will frequently cross over the back of the female to swim at her other side; thus the temptation to call the act a “courtship” or “dance.” Other males will hover at the periphery of the action. When they come too close, the dominant male makes threatening moves out of the circle toward the intruders. The young jacks turn and flee, but the older, heavier males retreat only slightly, hardly turning out of the way. The tension is thick, palpable.

After a time, some signal passes between the two principals that the female is ready. Side by side, both are now holding their jaws agape to steady themselves against the current. The female’s tail is arched down toward the pocket at the bottom of the nest. Both are now trembling with the effort and with the gravity of the moment. The male releases a cloud of milt, milky and sperm-filled. At the same instant, the female releases a portion of her eggs. Often, and nearly faster than the eye can see, one or two other males dash over the scene and add their milt to the mix. For a moment, a milky cloud fills the pool. Another moment and it has washed away downstream. If we are lucky, we will have caught a glimpse of the eggs drifting down, slow comets dimly seen through a dense and fertile fog. Immediately, the female will move upstream of the redd and begin to cover the eggs.

The first few motions of her tail will dislodge no gravel, but will serve to create a current that distributes the eggs more widely between the sheltering interstices of the rocks. Then, with increasing vigor, she will move enough gravel to cover the eggs. The finished nest will be difficult to distinguish from the surrounding bottom of the stream, except that the gravel is cleaner and it may mound up slightly where the eggs are incubating. The nearby depression created in covering the eggs will likely serve as the beginning of the next nest.

Now the process begins again. One of the benefits of carrying thousands of potential embryos is that not all must be risked in a single location. Most female king salmon build three or four redds before they have completed their cycle.

Then silence. The progenitor fish, male and female, will drift to shelter, get caught up against logs or rocks they no longer have the energy to avoid, and begin to die, a process that may take hours or days. Their efforts have left them wounded and raw, and expanses of flesh have been worn away by the female’s gravel moving work. The secondary males will move on, perhaps to find other opportunities before their time is up. Females stay to protect their nests against predators until they have no energy left.

Eagles, bears, raccoons, and otters have been patrolling the edges of the streams throughout the entire cycle; they feast and feast and feast. In this way a multitude of salmon bodies, carrying nutrients gained thousands of miles away in the depths of the sea, are carried away from the edge of the stream where they will also contribute (and contribute importantly) to the health and fecundity of the forest floor. Those carcasses that decompose in the water will feed microorganisms that will later feed salmonid offspring.