IT WAS DAYLIGHT on the river. The shadowy forms of overhanging trees appeared like a tunnel in the twilight. There was the sound of water roaring through the rocks and the smell of death. I blamed myself. My boat stinks.
Was it the bait bucket that might have been salvaged from the Ark? Or the tackle box where I suspected something must have died inside weeks ago but was afraid to look? No. It was a spawned-out salmon lodged in a tree limb that was way above our heads.
I told the tourists I had hooked and lost that salmon weeks ago when it took off down the river and jumped into the tree. The tourists didn’t believe me.
One look told them the salmon was spawned out. It’s sleek blue back, white belly and silver sides that made the fish almost invisible in the salt water had been gradually transformed into a grotesque version of itself upon entering the river. The scales of the fish fell off, revealing a tough hide that turned green, brown, red and black to blend in with the rocks of the stream.
As it neared the spawning bed where it was born, the salmon grew an enlarged jaw with dog-like teeth. When it had found its mate, the tail became frayed and worn down from digging holes in the rocks to lay their spawn. Once the eggs were fertilized and buried in the gravel, the fish slowly died, drifting downstream tail first with empty eye sockets and fungus-covered gills until its lifeless, gelatinous body was returned to the river and the forest where it becomes the most important element of our ecosystem.
Life goes on. There’s an estimated hundred and some odd bugs, birds, animals and plants that feed on spawned-out salmon carcasses. Bears usually get the first pick.
Native Americans called the bear the mother of all creatures because they caught more salmon than they could possibly eat and left the rest so everyone shared in the catch. In a healthy salmon stream, bears can be gourmets. Feasting only on the caviar, bellies and brains of the fish. Leaving the rest of the carcass to the lesser varmints and birds. What’s left melts back into the soil as an odiferous deposit of nitrogen, phosphorous, fat and protein.
The bathroom habits of bears in the woods being what they are meant the bears kept the trees fertilized. During the floods of autumn, the high water washed spawned-out carcasses all through the woods along the river bottoms. Causing trees along healthy salmon streams to grow larger faster.
The early pioneers used spawned-out salmon to fertilize their gardens. That’s illegal now. We need every spawned-out salmon we can get back on our rivers to get them to stink again like the good old days. Maybe it’s not too late to learn something from spawn-outs and their gift to future generations.
Our futile attempts at salmon restoration have ignored the single most important element of our ecosystem next to water, spawned-out salmon. While managing our fisheries for a maximum sustained harvest, we’ve ignored the importance of dead spawners and destroyed a key function of the ecosystem.
Since the melting of the continental ice sheet some 15,000 years ago, salmon have represented an unbroken cycle of life and an exchange of nutrients and energy from the ocean to the rivers and back down the rivers to the ocean again. It’s an ecosystem that we have destroyed with the best available science before we knew how it worked. Hopefully, someone is studying the problem.
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Pat Neal is a Hoh River fishing and rafting guide and “wilderness gossip columnist” whose column appears here every Wednesday.
He can be reached at 360-683-9867 or by email via patnealproductions@gmail.com.