Leaving himself on his bed, Ilmari walked to Deep River and waded out from the shore. The tide was ebbing fast, running past Stanley Point and Long Island, where Matti had found refuge; passing Needle Point where it was joined by the waters of the Klawachuck and the three Nemahs; past Goose Point, which sheltered the mouths of the Palix and the Niawiakum; and then past Leadbetter Point, where the waters joined with the water of the Willapa and the Cedar and where the fresh water of the land met the salt water of the sea. He went with the power of the many rivers and was swept into the deepest of waters. Then, growing afraid, he struggled against the current, but when he grew tired, he sank into the darkness and drowned.
There, deep in the ocean, the Salmon People came and took him to their village beneath the ocean, a village that looked like the villages of the Chinook and the Chehalis, the Clatsop and the Clatskanie, the Cowlitz and the Tillamook. They did not use their bodies, for they had left those behind for the human people and the animal and bird people to eat.
Ilmari joined them. Now he belonged to the Salmon People.
When they reached their village, he heard a child crying. The child was at the breast of its mother, but the mother looked up at Ilmari with hollow cheeks and sunken eyes and he felt her deep sadness because she had no milk. He watched the returning Salmon People enter their own lodges, but he saw that the lodges were no longer strong. The cedar-bark roofs needed repair and the smoke from the cooking fires, instead of rising into the clear air-like water above, seeped down from the smoke holes and lay along the paths and the meeting places where it stung the eyes and burned the nasal passages.
He entered a dancing ground in the village center and an old man and an old woman, elders of the Salmon People, invited him to sit before them. The old woman said her people’s milk would not flow until the bones of her people were returned to the sea. The old man said the lodges would not be made strong until the entrails of his people were returned to the sea. And Ilmari understood that his people should not take more than they needed from the Salmon People, lest their gift be withdrawn. The old woman said the women’s milk would not flow until her people’s eggs could be planted in clean gravel. The old man said the smoke would not rise above the village unimpeded until his people’s children could return to the sea unimpeded. And Ilmari understood. As a woman dips water from a stream for her use but the stream flows on, so too must flow the cycle of the Salmon People.
Then Ilmari heard children laughing and he walked to where a stream within the ocean flowed past the village and children of the Salmon People swam and splashed and laughed, moving like flashes of sunlight on the water. The old woman said, “Look closely.” And Ilmari looked beneath the surface of the water and saw that the children were missing feet or hands. “If you hunger, you may eat our children, but if you do not return their bones and entrails with respect, they will be reborn crippled and eventually they will die, and you will have eaten a child who can never be replaced.”
Ilmari stayed the winter with the Salmon People, learning their lore. When it was again spring and time for them to return to their birthplaces in the small creeks that flowed over the rocks into the deep currents of the great rivers, he swam, too, for he now belonged to them.
He swam to the opening at the end of the long north-running peninsula. The Great River had carried sand ground from the rocks of the mountains to the sea. The sea had carried it north and dropped it there, forming the bay that his former people called Willapa. Now, smelling Deep River, he found its mouth, and then smelling Ilmahenki, he found the beach in the slack water. There, Vasutäti caught him in her net.
When she pulled him from the river, she saw his dark eyes and broad chest and knew it was him. She took him to her campsite and held him, singing to him, until he began to shed his skin. On the third day, he was again human. She sat him down before her and said, “I will not stay with you much longer. You must remember what I have taught you.”
He walked to Deep River with her and stood at her side looking across to Ilmahenki and the smoke from the stove where Alma made breakfast for his children and he was filled with longing to cross the river and join them. Then he saw a huge salmon, an old tule who had fought the battle upstream to spread his milky sperm and now, spent, drifted slowly with the current, his flesh turning red and soft with decay, back toward the sea. He saw it was his own soul. He turned to Vasutäti, who nodded solemnly and handed him a spear. He thrust the spear into the old salmon and Ilmari died, as we all must.
Then he awoke, as we all do.