ahta III

Ahta is the queen of streams. The water here is clean and cold, the river basin wide and covered in smooth cobble-stones. As streamwalkers, Lauren and I swing our legs and trip over moss and fallen old-growth to climb along the banks, balancing on huge fallen trees-as-bridges to criss-cross our way upstream. We gaze down into pools of hundreds of fish, sometimes eight or nine deep, multiplying and calculating the population, seeing numbers in the thousands.

Located at the mouth of Bond Sound on the mainland coast, Ahta is thought of as the southernmost extent of the Great Bear Rainforest. Indeed, Great Bears are found here; each time we visit to salmoncount, we share this river space with grizzlies. They walk by us on the streamside, ears attuned to the splashing fish, lifting onto back legs and rubbing against trees. We've seen them in the river eating salmon, peeling the skin off the bones, or swimming through pools, arcs of fish avoiding their huge claws. Their footprints are everywhere, deep, earthy holes in the forest floor. As we move upstream, through thick matted moss and decaying Douglas fir, we follow the bear highways created by these creatures putting their feet into exact footprints of the bear before it, pressing scent into the pathway, reinforcing their belonging to this place, and Ahta's belonging to them. 

The salmon here have been pairing up, digging redds in the cobble, pushing stones aside and hoping their eggs will stay safe while they incubate for the winter months. The spring will see tiny pink and chum fry emerge and sweep and tumble out into the sedgy estuary. Water ouzels, small songbirds who run on the river bottoms, hide away salmon eggs, and feast on the pink-jewels after shaking the fresh cool water out of their grey-black feathers. Juvenile eagles beat their ruffled wings over our heads, and we follow wolf prints along portions of the sandy banks.

This is where the salmon-forest came alive for me. I have read that the rich ocean-derived nutrients brought back by these fish to their natal streams would carry into the surrounding forest and feed the entire community. Here, at Ahta's banks, this picture is carnally painted; the sharp smell of decaying chum, pink, and coho carries far into the surrounding forest and grizzly, blackbear, ouzel, wolf, heron, eagle, gull, merganser, harbourseal, and kingfisher, to name a few, are making their seasonal homes here to feast. This place is thick with salmon carcass, flung everywhere, disintegrating bodies in the loam. The trees, the cedar and hemlock and Douglas fir, the salmonberry shrubs, huckleberry, azelea, salal, are drinking up these nutrients. Linnea borealis, Polypodium glycyrrhiza, Cornus canadensis. The thick moss is dotted by hedgehog mushrooms, yellowfeet, chanterelles, Zeller's Bolete, and angelwings clinging like shingles to rotting logs.
As we turn to go downstream again from the misting waterfalls, the air hangs with whispers of fish ghosts Their gill filaments gasping, their tails ragged, bellies hollow, eggs expelled, and scales rubbed off, protein foam tumbling back down the creek.

streamwalking shoal harbour

I'm working a short autumn contract as a streamwalker, enumerating salmon populations in the little creeks around Gilford Island. Responsible for monitoring six main streams, I visit each one every week-or-two. Ahta, Shoal, Scott Cove, Embley, Gildford, Viner; these systems are often small, their chum, pink, coho, sockeye numbers revealed in a range of annual and seasonal fluctuations.

Shoal Harbour is just around the corner from the my home, the research station; we boat over to the estuary in less than five minutes. As with all of the streams we walk, we drift silently at the mouth of the river for twenty minutes while counting jumping salmon, throwing their bodies out of the water all around the boat, giving us a clue to the relative numbers hiding below the surface.

A few weeks ago we couldn't count fast enough, calling out numbers while coho, chum, and pink danced and splashed around us. I peered into the water, trying to make out their dark bodies, counting schools of thirty, no, eighty fish and spot a harbour seal just below the surface. Skimming below the waves, she is hunting and her sleek watery body is fat from the easy meals.

Yesterday the fish were splashing their way to the creek mouth -- we could see them sliding their bodies over the rocks, stepping up the ladder of fresh water, the coho silver-rose blush, giant chum-green-gold fire stripes, or pink freckled tails and white underbellies. We only see each one for a brief moment, tally, and continue scanning.

After our float, we tie the boat to an old dock trestle, it remembers the big logging operation that ran out of Shoal Harbour a few years ago. The roads here are still in fairly good condition, with the alder only beginning to take root along the centre of the old road, the salmonberry just thinking about sending out prickly trailing vines over the cleared areas.

We walk a ways down this old road and turn into the bush next to the creek. Climbing down into the forest, it becomes cooler, more shaded, and smells of bear and moss and decomposing salmon bodies. There are several pink and chum, gorbuscha and keta, bear-claw punctures on their sides, pulled into the deer fern and salal, they are becoming the forest, ocean nutrients feeding the huckleberry, the rubus spectabilis, the red cedar.

The water in this stream is a dark, reddish tea-colour. As with many systems on Gilford Island, high tannin content in the water, a result of decaying vegetation, stains it and increases the acidity levels. These pools of dark water make it difficult to count salmon, who will sometimes hide under logs, roots, or banksides, and lie still with only their gills and tails undulating in the current. Even in the pools with low water, we sometimes toss stones hoping to startle a fish, hoping to add another to the count.

This creek is filled with large moss-covered boulders and pools of egg-sized cobble. We move up the stream by jumping from rock to rock, balancing on fallen trees, and pushing our way through vaccinium. I stand on stone, river flowing around me on all sides, and watch fish below my feet fighting current, jostling for their space, digging redds, pushing cobble aside, sliding up waterfalls, falling down, down, hitting the air and surface and gravity and pushing forward.

hope ponds

The stretch of the Fraser River that runs between Hope and Mission, BC is known for its gravel substrate and highly productive biotic communities. It contains over thirty species of fishes including the endemically endangered white sturgeon, an array of minnows, sculpins, suckers, and sticklebacks, as well as supporting critical spawning habitat for all five species of Pacific salmon.

The stones that make up the gravelly bottom of this river turn and roll with the fast-moving current, smooth polishing, edges worn, they become a veritable speckled rainbow of marbled stones, as remarkably coloured and diverse both under the moving water as they are in the drying light.

I'm working with a crew of three others, students of salmon and moving water; we are studying the habitat viability of ponds adjacent to the Fraser’s gravel reach near Hope. Using a thirty-meter seine net, we dream and map the pathways where we drag out our net, encircling and capturing fish to identify, count, mark, and puzzle over. The hours spent with our hands pulling rope, waist-deep in moving currents, and careful handling of small fish in cold buckets gives us a sense of the species representative of these ponds and their mother river.

Many of the fish we capture are young salmon. Coho, Chinook, and sockeye have all been netted, weighed, measured, and set free back into the Fraser and the adjacent ponds. It is often challenging to distinguish between these species, as the fish are very young and lack many of the distinct features of these three salmon species as they mature into their adult life phases. Their parr marks, or small oval circles along the lateral line of their bodies, are often indistinct or underdeveloped; the tell-tale colouration and speckles on their fins is difficult to distinguish. Chinook have a sickle-shaped anal fin, with a light white edge to them, their eyes large and their parr markings oval and evenly spaced apart. Sockeye are silvery-bright and particularly slippery. They jump out of our cold hands much with quicker agility than their coho cousins. We puzzle over our captures, making lists and lists of these individuals, learning to distinguish between species, tripping over the various shapes, colours, sizes, and markings of each group.

We hope to answer questions about our study sites in the coming months: what is the relationship between the spring river flows and species found in these sites, their type and population numbers? Do our ponds aid in the survival of these little salmon, or do they act only as a fish trap, starving these young creatures in the winter months?
And we hope to see if there is a possibility of making these ponds more productive and safer habitats for juvenile fish. As we know, the challenges they face on their alluvial and oceanic journey render their chances of return to these spawning sites tenuous and reserved for only a lucky few. We hope to give a few more of these fish a protected and healthy beginning to their journey before they head out to sea on fantastic migrations, to aid their return to the gravelly Fraser.

felt fish

We've been working on a project to track pathogens in the Broughton salmon population. By carefully examining both the exterior and interior of our subjects and taking little samples of salmon hearts and gills and fins, we send our work off to a lab to be tested for viruses and origin of the individual fishes; how healthy are these creatures? where where they headed before they met a hook and net? are they at risk for developing infection that could compromise their sisters?

Tonight I scalped up a giant -- a bright and powerful Chinook exactly one meter long and so heavy I could hardly lift her. She was bursting with eggs, tiny jewels, the potential to repopulate an entire forested stream. Her stomach was empty except for three small silvery capelin, hardly digested. She was silver-bright, her fins thick and powerful, her teeth the layered needles of a great predator.

Something here, in the the the gill filaments, the smooth belly, in the organs arranged on a plate, a flash of recognition: I have seen this fish before.

I made this fish out of felted wool and silk embroidery thread three years ago as a part of an exhibit at the Steveston Cannery; an old industrial building, decommissioned over twenty years ago but still smelling of fish grease and diesel.

I hung my sculpture fish, a ghost, in the heritage building; before I knew what the inside of a fish really looked like, felt like, smelt like, but embroidered and sculpted, and combined fibre upon fibre to create what I imagined a salmon be, how her body may fall apart and decompose.

Now here, where time runs in circles and knits back onto itself, I count and photograph these Chinook, Coho, Pink. I slip knives through their scaly skin and their pink membranes and record their colour, texture, shape -- the crisp edges of the spleen, dark red and pointed, the tan-mottled brown-green of the liver, and the deep blood red in the gill filaments.

With this project comes the actions of our relationships to these creatures; balancing on boats, tying knots to docks, filleting and smoking and canning these slippery fish. The weight of the downrigger and the arc of the fishing rod, the colour of dawn on the water, the shine of scales on your fingertips and in your hair. The imaginary of the art meets the salmon guts, spilling over onto parchment paper, the multiple of the fish, the unique texture and the realness of place once only dreamt about.

salmon coast

I'm in the beautiful Broughton Archipelago, at the Salmon Coast Field Station on Gilford Island -- home to noble fir, hemlock, and salal, huckleberry, cougar, and belted kingfisher.

We're working to sample individuals of chinook salmon, collecting tiny cuts of their heart and gill tissue to screen for viruses, but it's been slow; the fish aren't biting in this area. So we occupy ourselves with the tasks of not-science:

Coady built a fish smoker and we keep it running all day. Two early morning fishing trips out of Cramer Passage left us with several pink salmon and a few coho; we feast and feed the green alder fueled fire below the screens of fish strips, salmon candy for visitors and for the winter. We haul firewood up the hill, clean garlic bulbs from the garden, and watch the water for humpback whales lolling and rolling in front of Echo Bay. We harvest and chop kale, dig potatoes, and bake rhubarb cake.

Every day-or-so, I hike into the dockside community of Echo Bay, following up our waterline to a stream where our drinking water and showers are piped down from. From there, I follow a stream down to the estuary, scouring up and down the streambank for mushrooms and forest treasures; salmon bones, flowering succulents, animal scat, ripe huckleberries.

I jump in the green-grey cold sea every day, eyes open under the surface, looking for hazy fish darting between the kelp, log-floats, and barnacle-shoreline. Yesterday a seal lifted his head above the water, watched me kick my fin-feet through the deep. This evening some Pacific white-sided dolphins came close while we were swimming; the ocean is alive.

Coady and I run around on his little boat; we visit the nearby Blackfish Lodge, a floating fishing lodge located across the passage from us to collect samples for our project, to eat birthday cake, and giggle with four-year-olds. After the party, we peer through the pitch dark to guide our ride back to the station. Thousands of bioluminecent fish shoot away from the hull of the open aluminum boat; their bright silver bodies obscured by the opaque darkness of the midnight waters' surface -- our route guided by the forested silhouette shape of the hills imagining a whale-propelled galaxy of plankton exploding beneath our tiny boat.