Elisa Segrave

Fish in troubled waters

Elisa Segrave is enthralled by a description of kayaking from McNeil Lake to the Bering Sea — the longest salmon run in the world

‘Help!’ I thought, when I read the Author’s Note. ‘It’s about salmon, and I hate fishing.’ But by the first page I was hooked. Adam Weymouth writes well. He is poetic, but also precise.

His subject is the return of the ‘king’ salmon to their birthplace and final destination, the north ridge of McNeil Lake in Canada.

These fish are many pounds of muscle, toned from years of swimming headlong into Pacific storms, and their flesh is as red as blood. They force against the Yukon’s current, shouldering their way upriver, setting their fins like sails. Eventually they will push thousands of miles into North America’s interior. They will reach mountain lakes; they will reach the clouds.

Weymouth canoes along the Yukon — at almost 2,000 miles, the longest salmon run in the world — starting at McNeil Lake (the salmon that return there will have travelled further than any on the planet) and ending at the Bering Sea.

On his four-month odyssey (his Swedish girlfriend joins him) he meets a varied cast, all intimately involved with the salmon, some descended from ancient tribes. One such is Percy Henry, a Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in ‘elder’, one of two surviving speakers of the Hän language. Weymouth writes: ‘Before 1897, life had not changed significantly for the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in for several thousand years.’ In 1896, gold was found, and within three years, around 100,000 prospectors came to the region — the Klondike Gold Rush. For the first time, ‘the flesh of the Yukon king was given monetary value when it was sold in camps. Many men had arrived, woefully unprepared, and many were starving to death.’

Weymouth meets the 89-year-old Percy in Dawson City — present population 1,375. During the Gold Rush, it had escalated from 5,000 to 40,000 in a single year.

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