Juvenile salmon in captivity display Zugunruhe, in the same way as caged migratory birds. That is to say, they become restless and more active at the same time as the other salmon of their species are migrating in the wild. The cones in their eyes alter to better prepare for ocean vision. They become more aggressive. In their tanks, they will orientate themselves to the corresponding compass points that their wild cousins are swimming to – to the west, to the north-west, to the south.
The parr set out in the first floods of their second spring, spurred on by changes in daylight hours and warming water temperatures, following the ice out to the ocean. To begin with they travel in small shoals, tails-first, so that they flow downriver, the same direction I am headed, ten miles a day, or twenty. As they travel their parr marks fade, their little bodies turning silver, in a process known as smolting. Other shoals flow in from other tributaries, and one day they will pass the adult kings that are bound the other way, upriver, swimming hard against the current, or snagged and thrashing in the set nets. In two months, or maybe three, the smolts will reach the delta. They will have eaten little, just what drifted into their mouths, but now they pause and feed. They eat plankton, sand-hoppers, shrimps, crustaceans, and they grow rapidly, adding an inch a month. Six inches, seven inches, eight. As the tides wash in they taste the first of the salt in which they will spend their adult lives.
Salmon did not always migrate. Whether they were originally a marine or a riverine fish has been much debated in the manner of the chicken and the egg. But now they are wired to travel. In The Compleat Angler (1653) the English writer Izaak Walton described the salmon as being ‘like some persons of Honour and Riches, which have both their Winter and Summer houses’, but the salmon’s ability to survive in both fresh and salt water is rather more remarkable than that. Just half a per cent of thirty thousand fish species have the ability to straddle both these environments.
To be a porous animal in any aquatic environment is a challenge. In rivers, the water seeps into a fish’s body, and its kidneys must continually expel it as urine, whilst at the same time cells in the gills extract salts and electrolytes from the surrounding water and transfer them to the blood, to prevent it from becoming too diluted. But as the salmon hit seawater, this physiology must change. In the ocean, water is drawn out of the body, and the salmon drink seawater to replenish it, their kidneys filtering out excess salt as the gills now reverse their function, excreting sodium and chloride. The kings will not know freshwater again until some four or five years later, in the last months of their lives.
I leave Teslin after three days. It is early June. Out on Teslin Lake it is hot, too hot to paddle, too hot to think. I float and drift and loaf. A loon is out there somewhere, warbling through its crazy cries. I sing dumb songs. I scare the ducks for something to do, like a small boy. Trucks rumble far off, out along the highway. All along the shore are the remains of other fish camps, old bits of metal glinting in the sun. Through binoculars, I watch two kids on a quad-bike scrounging one for firewood. I watch my paddle, the line and vortex of each stroke drifting away behind me like footprints across the water. I stop and swim and carry on, I stop and swim and camp. One evening I catch a grayling, and fry it up beside potatoes in my skillet on the fire. I have already forgotten darkness.
There are always those first few days, I find, until I shed the city, before I feel at ease again. Before muscles feel good, before cracked burnt skin stops hurting and feels like it’s at home. Before my eyes open as wide as they ought. I dip a cup from the side of the boat and drink. Not even from a spring, straight from the lake. It feels astonishing that once all rivers would have run with drinking water, that once I could have dipped my cup into the Thames. And I remember the words of Bill Mason, the Canadian who did more to popularize modern canoeing than anyone else, who made it a rule not to paddle on water that he wouldn’t also drink.
It is two days to the western end of Teslin Lake where, beneath a second bridge, it becomes the Teslin River. There is a diner here, and I stop for Eggs Benedict and coffee. As I get back on the water the weather shifts, I can pinpoint the very moment. The wind swings round to blow from out the north, gusting blackly across the water. The pressure drops out of the air like a stone, the clouds pile up, and then, for some days, it rains. The Teslin River moves quickly once it strikes out from the lake. The river’s speed is shown in its reflections, a rushing lacework of mirrored clouds, ten miles an hour, twelve. The surface roils like cauldrons. Beavers rise beside the boat and, startled by my presence, slap their tails and duck beneath again. I slap my paddle back at them, the biggest beaver on the river.
The offshoots from the main stem are like a primer of Northern words: Log Cabin Slough, Muskrat Creek, Little Salmon River, Fish Hook Bend, Mosquito Gulch. Many other places on my map are named for the first white men who settled here, and speak to the diverse provenance of the prospectors who came into the country: McGregor Creek, Von Wilczek Creek, O’Brien’s Slough, Johnson’s Crossing, Erickson’s Woodyard. I stop one night on the beach at Mason’s Landing. In the woods back from the river, out of the rain, there are a cluster of collapsing cabins, built a century ago, following the discovery of gold on Livingstone Creek. Mason’s Landing would have been the quickest way in: a float down the Yukon from Whitehorse to its confluence with the Teslin, poling the boat upriver to here, and then a tramp through the bush to Livingstone. Once there was a roadhouse and a stable here, a small trading post and a telegraph station. The police delivered the mail from Whitehorse twice a week. That is to say, in 1902, it was significantly easier to make contact with the outside world than it would be for me to do today. My quickest way to get a message out would be by paddling to Carmacks, about four days away. The buildings are fading back into the landscape now, overgrown with wild rose, sagging beams and fallen timbers. They look less man-made, more a peculiar constellation of natural elements. The roof of one is so thick with moss that it looks no different to the forest floor, and a thirty-foot-high spruce projects from it. On tin beaten into flues and back plates for the wood stoves, thick with rust, I can still make out the brand names of the products they once held.
All down the river are remnants from a time when the Yukon thronged with human life. Old gold-mining paraphernalia; the remains of roadhouses every twenty or so miles that were the stop-off points for travellers, rhubarb and raspberries still growing in their gardens; mooring rings drilled into rock. On Shipyard Island, the steamer Evelyn is rotting where she stands. Finding it amongst the trees is like coming upon some ancient Inca temple: 130 feet long, as tall as the spruce, with accommodation for eighty-five first-class passengers. Her hull splintered, the floorboards fallen through, the names of lovers scratched into her boiler. I walk along the upper decks, peering into cabins.
It is at Shipyard Island, two weeks into the journey, that I finally join what is, by common consensus, the main stem of the Yukon. Flowing from Whitehorse, it is swimming-pool blue, so clear one can see fish, but here the Teslin muddies it, and until it meets the ocean it will not run clear again. ‘Yukon’ is a contraction of the Gwich’in phrase chųų gąįį han, which translates as ‘river of white water’. It is a milky, soupy brown. The silt, rubbed from distant mountains, whispers at the hull, and if you dip your paddle and hold your ear to the shaft you can hear it clearer still, as though the river is deflating. Each new tributary, many of which are big rivers in their own right, adds to the load of silt, so much so that by the time I have passed the eponymous White River it runs so murky that you cannot see deeper than a single knuckle beneath the surface.
The high-cut banks give way to basalt cliffs, their lower slopes thick with juniper and the vivid pinks of fireweed, now pushing out their first flowers. Fireweed is known as Summer’s Hourglass here, for the creep of blossom up its stem can be read as a gauge to the proximity of winter, so that even now, in the endless light of early summer, there is the foreshadowing of its end. And the river widens, too; at points it is maybe half a mile from one bank to the other. Hoodoos, Gaudíesque, wind and weather carved, loom high above the river, hazed by ravens calling madly. One afternoon I see a wolverine, swimming crosswise to the current, like a piece of drift with a mind of its own. It climbs out of the river and shakes itself before it sees me, and darts into the scrub. A wolverine! When my grandparents moved into the house they live in now, they found a walk-in store cupboard covered with scratch marks on the inside, as though some beast had been kept in there. From then on it was known as the Wolverine Cupboard, although as a boy I heard it as ‘wolvering’, a verb. What sort of terrible creature could have wolvered this cupboard, I wondered. It has forever been an animal mythic in my imagination. And no less mythic for now having seen one.
Finally the weather clears and falls into a pattern of hot mornings, and a slow build-up of cumuli that become distant storms by the late afternoon. Off over mountains I watch the lightning, and one evening, perhaps an hour or so after a storm, a pall comes down over the river. The air smells of wood, like new planks on a hot day, and the river assumes an air of total stillness. Everything beyond the closest bluff is misted blue, receding lighter to the mountains, pale against an even paler sky. The smell of smoke comes stronger and catches in my throat. Then the day takes on a shade of sepia, shot through by the low sun, the exact same colour as the water, and I float through it as though through a dream. Later, in this murk, I hear music. I can see neither bank and cannot place where it is coming from. It is ethereal, far off, as though Sirens are calling to me. Eventually I convince myself that it is the engines of the planes that are bringing water for the fire. But still, as I drift through this dimensionless space, they seem to harmonize within me, and come from every place at once.
In a week I come to Dawson City, where the Klondike River joins the Yukon. The Klondike is a pretty river, and with the Yukon as my yardstick it seems narrow now and humble. It chatters over shallow rapids, and it borders many hundred square miles of tailings, the rubble left behind by the gold dredges, and the maze of pools they’ve pulled them from. Some of the tributaries that feed the Klondike run from the summit of King Solomon’s Dome, and the names of those tributaries tell the story of this town. Eldorado Creek, Bonanza Creek, Gold Bottom Creek, Last Chance Creek, Independence Creek, Little Gem Gulch, Nugget Gulch, American Gulch, Oro Grande Gulch, Too Much Gold Creek, All Gold Creek, Not Much Gold Gulch. ‘Klondike’ is an English fudge of the Hän word Tr’ondëk, meaning hammerstone, a hard cobble used for the hammering of stakes into the riverbed for the setting of the salmon weirs that would guide fish into the traps. Klondike, an onomatopoeic word, the sound of rock on wood, and the rush of water over rock, and a word that screamed from headlines and spread rumours in the drinking holes, a word that seduced a world in the depths of depression. I float into Dawson City in the same way that a hundred thousand other people would have turned up, a little more than a century ago.
These days Front Street has been abandoned to the tourists. It has kept its wonky boardwalks, and left its streets unpaved. Diamond Tooth Gertie’s Gambling Hall has three cancan shows a night. The poet Robert Service’s cabin is here, and one half of Jack London’s (the other half a museum in Oakland, California), two men responsible, perhaps more than any others, for writing the fictions of this place. By law any new buildings must give the impression that they were constructed at the end of the nineteenth century. In Maximilian’s Gold Rush Emporium you can buy nuggets and antique panning equipment and mammoth ivory and Jack London first editions. Men and women dressed in petticoats and buckskin will show you around the historic post office, the historic bank, the historic paddle steamer; they will tell you stories of courageous men and lascivious dancing girls, and strange things done under the midnight sun. Every night in the Downtown Hotel, its original front wood-panelled, its wooden bar running the length of the room, there is Dwayne, all gums, trousers hitched up high with braces, wasted, hammering through his repertoire on the upright piano, ragtime versions of ‘William Tell’, ‘Drunken Sailor’, ‘Heads and Shoulders, Knees and Toes’. He sips from a water bottle. Later, outside, I take a sip; it is vile even for moonshine. ‘Made from instant coffee,’ he grins at me, toothlessly. At the table opposite, a man in a beard and captain’s hat serves up Sourtoe Cocktails to the passing tourist trade, a shot of liquor with a human toe afloat in it, like a blackened monkey nut with a nail. You can drink it fast, you can drink it slow, state the rules on the wall, but your lips must touch the toe. The implication is that in a frontier town, far from centres of rule and regulation, this is the sort of thing that the residents would get up to, that we are only a few laws away from drinking body parts. Swallowing the toe is expressly forbidden, but it has happened on occasion. The fine for swallowing was five hundred dollars until one evening a man deliberately necked it, slapped down the money and walked out. The fine has since been raised. This is toe number ten. People donate toes in their wills. Once, hitching south out of Dawson, I was picked up by the town’s only resident cop, whose work that week was taken up in tracking down the toe, which had been stolen the weekend before. During the ride he received a call on the radio from a man purporting to be the thief, and he made me step out of the vehicle while he interrogated him. A charge for trafficking human remains is as serious as you might think. The toe was later returned, by post.
Dawson is a mix both of couples touring and of those who have blown in hitchhiking, in search of work tree planting or morel picking or something else cash-in-hand and back-breaking. The tree-planters live out in the woods, dodging the twelve-dollar fee at the government campground, a few people and a few dogs to a camper, hustling for work and eating out of dumpsters. The couples inhabit the RV campgrounds in immense and gleaming vehicles with names like Prowler, Hitchhiker, Bounty Hunter, Wild Cat, Ultimate Advantage. Many will have sold their homes upon retirement and moved into an RV of equivalent value, migrating south to Texas for the winters. Snowbirds, they are called. The two tribes prop up the bars in different shifts, swapping stories of the road. The bars do not shut. People mill in the dusky streets at 2 a.m.
‘What’s up?’ a man calls across the way.
‘The price of gas,’ shouts back his friend. ‘My spirit. Maybe my dick if you had some tits.’
Dawson City is a six-hour drive from Whitehorse, four hours across the border to the first town in Alaska (Chicken, population twenty-three, winter population seven): it is about as frontier as it still gets. In one of the tourist bazaars the motto of the Yukon Order of Pioneers is hammered to a crossbeam: ‘Do unto others as you would have others do unto you’, and it is this anarchic ethic, imported to the North in the 1890s, that still pulls in the crowds today. The code of frontiersmen running from themselves or something else, who rejected hierarchy and class, and who relied on each other implicitly because there was nothing else upon which to rely. The get rich quick spirit, too, remains; the tough guys can still strike it big here. You see them in town, the Yukoner style. The grey hair, not long, but down to the shirt collar; not anti-authoritarian long, but the look of a military man who’s thrown in the towel, squirting out above the ears from beneath a baseball cap, the cap emblazoned ‘Canada’ with a stitching of the flag. A clump of moustache above their lip, like a draught excluder. The check plaid shirt, probably tucked into jeans with a belt with a brass buckle, stretched over a slight, tight belly, and a pair of leather work boots that you hear coming on the boardwalks. They sit in loose groups in the cafés on Main Street, drinking thin coffee and eating pie, discussing pistons and bears and the weather, keeping an eye on the river and the pretty girls that pass. Elderly men emerge from their RVs, white-kneed, and try their hand at gold panning on the tours: this could have been me, they think, a century ago, if only the wife would have let me. I would have made a killing.
The Klondike’s first big strike came in 1896. In 1897 the population of Dawson hit 5,000. By 1898 it was 40,000. By 1902, the city had government buildings, a power plant, four newspapers, several churches, a library, a court of law, a water-works department, several schools, a swimming pool, a bowling alley and a curling club. But gold extraction had already peaked. In 1900 a million ounces were taken from the ground; in 1904 it was down to 400,000 ounces, and the population was down to 5,000. Today the population of Dawson City is 1,375. The whole town is riddled with nostalgia for some confused and distant time when brave men wrung fortunes from the lands like water from a dishcloth, lands that Jack London, who spent fewer than nine months here, and most of those in bed with scurvy, described as ‘new and naked’.
I walk into the Visitor Centre. Its centrepiece is two interlocked racks of antlers, moose that had locked in battle and later died when unable to separate. Fight to the Death, the piece is called. It is hung with flags and red and white streamers to celebrate upcoming Canada Day. There is a man looking at it in puzzlement.
‘I don’t think this has really been thought through,’ he says.
Dawson is a palimpsest, another story sits behind it. The missionary Hudson Stuck, writing in 1917, was a hundred years, if not more, ahead of his time, when he said that ‘the great stampede to the Klondike of 1897 and 1898 brought nothing but harm to the native people’. Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.
A few blocks back from Front Street, I visit with Percy Henry, a Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in elder. There are few First Nations people on the tourist streets, but on the blocks behind the strip it is a different, quieter town. Percy gestures to where coffee is brewing on the counter, and I pour myself a mug marked with a verse out of Galatians. There is a vibrant, psychedelic painting of Jesus in a frame, and tacked to the door a printout reads: TOGETHER We can all be the stewards of God’s creation SO COME ON … let’s save the planet. Percy sits at the table forking at a microwave dinner of meat and swede and peas; the skin on the backs of his hands is as thin as tissue paper. He is eighty-nine years old, and he has the wild and playful eyes that people get when they realize they have hit an age where they can get away with anything. If ever there was an advertisement for the health benefits of wild fish, of clean water and clean air, it is the elders that I meet here. In 2000, Percy’s parents were entered into the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s longest married couple, eighty-two years long. Joe Henry quit fishing at 92, and died at 104. Annie died at 101.
‘So,’ says Percy, putting in his hearing aids. ‘What’s your problem?’
Two years ago, the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in took the decision, following Teslin’s example, to stop fishing king salmon for a seven-year cycle. It was a voluntary ban, and it has mostly been respected. The river has been quiet. The youth are taught to cut fish with chum salmon from the freezer. It can be hard to generate the same excitement. I ask Percy what he makes of it all.
‘King salmon can send message to others if they in trouble,’ he says. ‘I work out that and I try to tell Fish and Game. They wouldn’t listen. They fool around with fish too much, give them tag and number. I don’t know why today they monkey around with fish. King salmon is our food. Sure all the fish are edible. But king salmon is something, eh?’
He sits back, and I wait. I have learnt not to interrupt when an elder is speaking.
‘Last fall we caught sockeye here,’ he says. ‘That’s Fraser River fish. In Alberta they’re squeezing oil out of the sand. Now they poisoned the big river. The sea is dying. When you see those big whales come shore to die you know there’s trouble. They got no place to go. I shouldn’t just say white people, but they cause a lot of trouble. They know it’s going to happen, but the dollar comes before. The fish didn’t change. We change.’
Before 1897, life had not changed significantly for the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in for several thousand years. Each year was cyclic, as families moved through a series of camps, following the resources that they lived by. By the time that the last of the fall chum were dried, the summer was nearly at its end. In the final days of warmth they picked and preserved berries and roots, and built the snowshoes and sleds that would see them through the winter. As the autumn drew on they moved up into the hills, hunting caribou and sheep, drying the meat until it froze and storing it in caches that they would return to later. In winter they dressed in furs and lived in rapidly constructed dwellings insulated with moss that they lined with caribou skin. Late in the winter they hunted moose, and by spring they would be at the head of the Klondike, high up in the hills, trapping beaver and muskrat and birds. When the ice went out they built boats out of mooseskin and floated down to the Yukon. This was the time of gatherings, and sometimes, as a boy, Percy remembers his family poling their canoes upriver to the White River, where they would meet Tutchone and Tanana people. It was a time to see friends and share food, for couples to meet and marry, and then they would float back to the Klondike to be there for when the kings came. The details changed, of course: where they went, and who with, and for how long. But there was constancy and rhythm.
If this was a typical summer, Percy and his family would already be out at fish camp, getting ready. They have already heard the first of the thunder, the salmon tails hitting the water in the distance, saying we’re coming! Prepare yourselves! Percy remembered the enormous fish of his childhood. They worked all day, cutting fish and drying fish, and when it was time to eat, people would sit down in a circle and put in the middle what they had, bannock and blueberries and dried meat and fish. If you were too old to fish, or too poor, or too weak, then people would look after you. They would take as much fish as they needed for the year and let the rest carry on upstream.
Percy smiles at the memories. ‘I’m not real elder,’ he says, leaning forward in his chair, conspiratorially. ‘I’m old, but I experienced modern day. If you listen to real old people, before white man, they can tell you lotta things. They can tell you future.’
Joe Henry had lived to see the future. Percy’s father was born in 1896, the year of the first gold strike, and he died a few years after a ban was placed on the commercial fishing of king salmon by bureaucrats he had never met, living in a city he had never seen. White men had been turning up here and there since the 1870s, gold prospectors and fur traders and missionaries and government officials, but it was with the discovery of the Klondike gold that the floodgates really opened.
It was late spring, 1897, when the first influx of goldrushers arrived, and within weeks the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in had been displaced from their fish camps on the Klondike. The natives crossed to Dawson, only to find that the land had already been occupied by speculators and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. In the space of one season they were evicted from lands that their people had known for ever. Their traditional fishing grounds had showed scant trace of their millennia-old presence except for some stakes to set the weirs and a few simple dwellings. Now there were several hundred tents, a sawmill, two saloons, a red-light district and a typhoid epidemic. The Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in called it, in the new language they were acquiring, Lousetown.
An Anglican missionary, Frederick Fairweather Flewelling, purchased forty acres at Moosehide, two miles downriver on the Dawson side. He built a church, and gave the rest of the land over to the displaced natives, yet despite this gesture, Flewelling could not hide his contempt: ‘They have as a race neither worldly nor spiritual ambition … They have few or no traditions and have as a race no individuality … Work among them is difficult because of their nature and because for nearly nine months of the year they are off in small bands hunting and fishing.’
Hunter-gatherers are perceived to be nomadic, but it is quite the other way around. Certainly the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in and other First Nations were in constant motion before the white man arrived and built for them their churches and their schools. But they remained upon their land. It is the pastoralists, the farmers, who are the restless ones. It is Columbus and Cortés, urbanites both, who came to the Americas. There is a distinction to be made between nomadism and restlessness, and it is restlessness that drives one further, beyond the lands one knows. It was city-dwellers who went to the moon.
Percy is one of two surviving speakers of the Hän language, one of the seven languages of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in people. He cannot read or write. He has a computer, which he uses for listening to an audiobook of the Bible, in the same way as his mother used to read to him from a Bible written in Hän when he was a boy. Percy made it through school as far as the end of Grade 2 when one of the other pupils punched him in the head and knocked him out. When he came round he was perfectly unharmed, except for having forgotten his entire formal education. He told his father he was going to quit school.
‘What you gonna do then?’ his father said.
‘I’m going to go to your school,’ Percy said, and that winter he started with his father on the trapline. He still believes that punch to be the best thing that ever happened to him.
At age twelve he got a job as a fisherman’s assistant, working eighteen-hour days for a dollar checking nets on the river. Since then, in the frontier spirit of anyone who makes a go of it here, he has done almost every job going. He was nine years in the sawmill in Mayo. He worked in logging and for the highways. He has been on fire crews and has captained the Dawson ferry. For several years he worked on the barge that hauled supplies to the village of Old Crow, on the Porcupine River.
‘I first went to Old Crow 1943,’ he says. ‘I met lotta elder. Lotta elder alive then. And they tell me story. They always tell me story. The ducks there in Old Crow, there are million. They tell me you see that? I say yeah. If you live long enough to see what we’re going to tell you, in the future there’ll be nothing.’
Percy looks out of the window. ‘This highway, you used to drive through ducks. Ducks! Now you don’t even see one.’
Recently in Old Crow, his friends have told him, a lot of the female caribou have stopped calving.
‘That’s a bad news,’ he says. ‘They’re finding a lot of caribou dying, because the doctor quit bothering with them.’
‘Who’s the doctor?’ I say.
‘The wolf is the doctor of all animals,’ he says. ‘He chase caribou. He don’t kill ’em right there. He could. But his mother train him, you don’t kill ’em till one falls side. That’s a weak one. So that’s how they stay healthy. Make ’em sweat. You see that Yellowstone Park. Animal there were half dead. So they took some wolf in there and all the animal were happy. Bring their life back to where it should be.’
But now, Percy says, the young wolves don’t know what to do. It began when the state started culling wolves as a way of protecting caribou. They shot the old wolves, the ones that train the pups. Now Percy sees wolves coming into yards to attack dogs, he sees wolves chasing skidoos. They haven’t been taught fear; they’ve had no education from their elders.
‘But people don’t believe me,’ he says, without resentment. ‘Because you can’t read it in a book.’
In 1968 Percy was elected chief of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, a position that he held until 1984. I walk around the room, looking at framed photographs on the walls of Percy with various Canadian prime ministers: Jean Chrétien, Pierre Trudeau, Justin Trudeau.
‘That time land claim start too, eh,’ he says. ‘Non stop. I was so busy. First of my kids I hardly know them, they don’t know me.’
Land claims gained momentum in Canada through the 1970s and 1980s, as more and more First Nations challenged the Canadian government’s occupation of lands that were ancestrally theirs.
‘I was so busy that finally the wife left me,’ he says. Mabel came back though. They have been married a mere fifty-eight years. ‘Sometime we go down,’ he says. ‘Then we go back up.’
Percy has recently had a new outboard motor delivered, a Yamaha 150 horsepower. It is on the table in the front yard; he would like it to be in the shed. He had a heart attack a few years ago, back during his drinking days, and since then he is forbidden heavy lifting. He finds it hard to get anyone to help out. But now I’ve shown up through the door.
It is awesomely heavy. We grunt and heave. Yet after twenty minutes of rigging ramps and slings with bungee cords and lumber, we admit that there is no way we can move it between the two of us. I collar a middle-aged Australian with thick tattooed arms in the RV park across the street. Together the three of us manhandle the thing inside. It is a curious tableau. Afterwards we all shake hands and the man goes back to his deckchair. I lean against the shed, getting my breath back.
‘The world is good, but we ruined it,’ says Percy, continuing an earlier train of thought. ‘They got millions and billions of car. The government, the world, too busy trying to make better plane, better bomb, to kill more people eh.’
I ask him what he thinks we can do about it.
‘We can’t stop it now, too far. We all up shit creek.’ He smiles at his own swearing. ‘I think our kids will starve. I don’t know if you believe in Bible, but everything it say there is happening. Right now. I study Bible. I study the elders’ stories too. They’re not too far apart. In Bible, God say I will never do it again. Well, this time we going to do it to ourselves. We’re going to destroy our home.’
He chuckles at the madness of it all. ‘The other animals live by God’s commandments. What can we do? Die maybe. That could be our cure.’
The old Hän fisheries factory on Front Street, built of corrugate, looks out over the river. It has been shuttered now for years. This is one historic building that the tours do not take in. But if you wanted to look for the first clues to the king salmon’s collapse, for where the end began, then this building would be one place to start.
Next door to the factory, inside the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in fisheries department, tacked onto the side of a filing cabinet, is a black-and-white photo, scribbled with a note: ‘King Salmon (85lbs) Caught in Dawson, YT, July 26th 1924.’ A man looking spiffy in a three-piece suit, flat cap and tie, on the boardwalk outside Jimmy’s Place, is staring at the camera. Beside him is his fish. It reaches from his cap to the bottom of his shin. June hogs was one of the names they were once known by. It is monstrous, a great reptilian torso. The biggest king ever caught on a line was 97 pounds, 4 ounces. In 1949, near Petersburg, Alaska, a 126-pounder was caught in a fish trap, the upper limit of a featherweight boxer.
If the salmon is the King of Fish, as it is so often called, then the Chinook is the King of Kings. Their scales are a burnished chrome, and each individual scale is picked out by the light so that it stands out, precisely, from the rest. In the ocean this makes for perfect camouflage, shimmering against the water’s light. They fade from the pale white of their bellies to a dark grey along their backs, so that predators above cannot distinguish them against the ocean bed, and those swimming beneath cannot tell them from the sky. Their backs, and their fins, are speckled, to enhance further the effect. A single line of darker scales, like a horizon line, runs from nose to tail. In Atlantic salmon this line is magnetized, in the manner of a compass, to help them find their way (the Pacifics carry their magnetite in their skulls). They are broad and stocky creatures, and they appear full of muscle, inflated with it. The Chinook’s flesh ranges from pearl white through pale pink to the deepest, richest red.
The first time the flesh of the Yukon River king was given monetary value was when it was sold in camps during the Gold Rush. Many men had arrived woefully unprepared and many were starving to death. In 1914 an agent for the US Bureau of Fisheries made a trip from St Michael, near the Yukon’s mouth, to Whitehorse, and concluded that commercial fishing on the river would not be profitable or advisable. He noted the crucial role that salmon played in maintaining the river’s ecosystem: for natives, for white people, for dog teams. Hunting was, by its nature, fickle, but the salmon runs ensured a glut of protein that arrived on schedule, year on year, and made life in this climate possible. The subsequent report warned that ‘there is strong prejudice against the establishment of canneries on the lower Yukon, if such an undertaking should ever be considered feasible, as it would mean cutting off or greatly reducing the supply of salmon up the river, the result of which would be great privation and hardship to the people of that district’.
The first cannery, owned by the Carlisle Packing Company, came just four years later. Along the Alaskan coast, there were already canneries supplying half the world’s salmon supply, but the first on the Yukon met with resistance. Chief Paul of Koyukuk was concerned that it would take ‘every fish that came up the Yukon’. In 1917 a poor run of salmon had led to villagers being forced to kill sled dogs because they had nothing to feed them on. Dogs were as crucial to river life as horses were elsewhere: they were needed for hunting, for hauling and for travel, and for delivering the mail. Locals were reluctant to see anything that might further impact the salmons’ run. The Carlisle company replied that if the natives didn’t put up enough fish, they were lazy and their fishing methods primitive. In 1919 the cannery caught over a hundred thousand kings, a number that would not be bettered until 1961.
It is true that runs have always fluctuated wildly. Gluts were followed by years of scarcity, when high water and poor weather could make for a year of hardship. In 1919, the year after Carlisle opened, many people went hungry, and one local priest testified that ‘the wolf really is at the door’. The US Bureau of Fisheries reminded natives that there were plenty of other types of fish, not to mention all the game, and besides, no report of undue privation had been substantiated. ‘Consideration must undoubtedly be given to the psychological effects of the establishment of the cannery on the Natives; they heard the cannery was in operation, hence at once assumed that there would be no salmon passing to upper waters,’ they wrote. The presiding judge tasked with investigating the matter spoke of ‘the rights of private property in a free society and the sacredness of honest investments made in good faith’. Two ways of envisaging the world were being forced up against each other.
Yet despite the Bureau’s confidence, they sent Dr Gilbert and Henry O’Malley to investigate. They found that the run of 1919 had been ‘one of the worst, if not the very worst ever known on the Yukon’, and that had the hunters and trappers not been particularly successful that year, the winter would have been catastrophic. Just how much Carlisle’s fishing had an impact on the run was hard to ascertain, but both local interviews and their own assessment indicated that the cannery was exacerbating what was already a bad year. Gilbert and O’Malley suggested that it was wrong ‘to experiment with the welfare of the people of the Interior’. In 1924 commercial fishing for export was banned entirely. Carlisle packed up and left for Bristol Bay, south-west Alaska.
But in the 1930s aeroplanes began to replace dog teams, and with salmon no longer needed for dogfood, commercial fishing reopened, albeit at its inception with more rigorous restrictions. When Inspector C. F. Townsend, who had inspected the fisheries for more than twenty years, retired in 1942, he wrote of how industry was bringing a much needed income to ‘the few whites and all the natives in this vicinity’, but that ‘I would never recommend any increases in the limited catch now in force for just as soon as the limit is increased I am afraid trouble will begin.’
This balance held for a time, but the 1960s brought powerboats and monofilament nets, and the improved technology enabled a new fishing style of drift netting. A three-hundred-foot net, dragged through the middle channel of the river, could harvest kings at levels and in places that had been impossible before. In 1960 there were forty-six drift nets on the Yukon; by 1975 there were 314. In 1976 the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) released 700 drift-netting permits. Harvests boomed. In 1980, 150,000 kings were caught commercially, a number that has never been bettered. ADF&G interpreted these numbers as a sign that runs were improving, and upped the quotas accordingly.
The Hän Fishery plant opened in Dawson City in 1981, and Minister Don Meeks started running a riverboat to buy up catches and take them to the plant. Then they put a road in at Fortymile and all the fishermen would gather there at eleven each morning to help load up the catch. For a time business boomed, and money was good. Some days they hauled in 14,000 pounds of fish. ‘A huge human effort,’ one man tells me, with the glee that comes from the nostalgia of hard work, in the years before he got a desk job and a belly. ‘It wouldn’t be accurate to say I depended on the king, but it sure made life a lot easier.’
But the price fell out of the market as farmed fish began to dominate. And concurrently, the numbers and sizes of wild salmon began to collapse. In the 1980s the buyers of Chinook would refuse to take anything smaller than a fourteen-pound fish. Then they dropped to twelve pounds, then to ten. In the few years preceding 2007, when the Canadian Yukon’s commercial fishery was shut down, they would buy anything they could. In 2006, Dan Bergstrom, ADF&G’s management supervisor for the Yukon River, said: ‘We don’t see a crisis at this point.’ State and federal agencies on both sides of the border declared either ‘economic disasters’ or ‘fishery disasters’ in 1997, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012, and yet commercial fishing was not shut down on the American side of the border until 2011. By that point, the bottom had fallen out of the run. The historic average, before 1997, had been 300,000 fish. In 2013, 37,000 fish came back. In 2014 a complete ban was placed on all fishing for kings, subsistence included, on both sides of the border. Never before had the subsistence fishery been banned, and it left a lot of people hungry, and angry.
‘We were raised to be on that river,’ one Dawson elder, Peggy Kormendy, told me. ‘It was the strangest feeling when they said you couldn’t fish.’
What made it worse was that no one was able, or willing, to explain why it was happening. Fishermen stood on the banks all summer and watched the salmon pass.
In 2011, Debbie Nagano was entrapped by two fishery officers posing as tourists from Alberta, and fined $5,000 for selling Chinook.
‘The court case was totally crazy,’ she tells me when we meet. ‘They pointed the finger at me and they said “you should have known better”. After I went through it, I didn’t even want to look at a fish. I was too angry. I still can’t even talk about it. If they came to me and said “Are you selling fish?” I’d have said “Yes, I’m selling fish. You know I’m selling fish, I been selling fish all my life.” You gotta keep yourself busy, that’s why we fish. And if they take that away from you, holy crowly. Then what you gonna do?’
In 2011 limited trade was still permitted between First Nations. I ask Debbie why she didn’t just sell to her own people?
She shakes her head. ‘They come to you and they say “Come on, we’ve not had it for a long time.” I wasn’t raised to say you’re non-native, I can’t sell to you. When the white people first turned up here, a lot of them had nothing. No meat. They save a lot of non-native people, these native people.’
Debbie despairs. To hear the stories that her elders tell her, of how harmonious this place once was, and to see the pollution from the gold fields and the asbestos mines leeching into the rivers, and the destruction caused by the tourist boats, and how poorly all of it was managed by the managers for so long. To be pushed around by laws that once there were no need for, to be governed by people who have no respect for the environment. And now they want to frack up on the Dempster. That’s God’s country, her grandpa always told her.
‘We want our children to see what we saw in our lifetimes,’ Debbie says. ‘And if we continue to be disrespectful, they won’t know.’