Another tributary is “stream enrichment.” Since wild populations have dwindled, far fewer salmon now decay in rivers and creeks, and the ecosystem suffers. As they melt into the shallows, salmon leave an important wave of nourishment from the ocean. Now ODFW casts carcasses into waterways, trying to replicate the fertile casualties of former times. They’ve used helicopters—very messy. Pitchforking them from bridges is cheaper, with the added advantage that it’s still good and messy. Personally enriching for volunteers.
Fish are also sold commercially to American Canadian Fisheries, a company in Washington State that sells fillets to stores like Safeway. You could be eating a marinated Cole Rivers fish tonight for dinner. The Rogue’s salmon are often a sore sight when they arrive at the hatchery. “But if you cut them open,” Dave Pease told me, “they’re an awesome-looking fish. I mean it’s red, bright red.” Hatchery programs are supported by this “carcass fund.”
Later in the season, American Canadian Fisheries then donates its services, filleting and packaging salmon for the Oregon Food Bank, which sends the fish throughout the state to outlets like the St. Henry’s Food Pantry in Gresham, near Portland. Its manager, Ann Prester, told me that in recent Februaries they’ve given coho, a winter arrival, to everyone who walks through their door: thirty-five families a day, almost four hundred pounds of salmon a year. “These are people who don’t have access to salmon otherwise, not at eight to nine dollars a pound,” said Ann. “Their eyes just light up.” Many have never seen a living salmon, she said, but they’re thankful it doesn’t live in a can.
Before all these possible ends for excess salmon, however, Oregon tribes are allowed fish for ceremony and subsistence, as outlined in their treaties. I had journeyed to the Rogue to see salmon be given to the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians. This was the tributary of a salmon’s disposition I hoped to follow to its terminus. Members of the Cow Creek Band would arrive in the morning to haul off a fresh load for their annual powwow and salmon rite in a couple of weeks. I asked Dave when the fish I’d just seen collected would go to the chair. To the brail, for a stronger pulse. “If you come back around nine, you should be fine,” he said.
I camped on the Rogue’s upper reaches that night, above what’s known as Natural Bridge, where the stream is swallowed by a lava tube and disappears briefly from the light, a molten river turned cold. Down unmarked jeep trails, I found a stretch that poured over the wall of a deep basalt channel within the river, creating a long curtain of white facing the bank. In the morning, I rolled up my sleeping bag and drove the twenty minutes through towering pines to Lost Creek Lake, where the river also disappears.
To my chagrin, the fish had been zapped ahead of schedule. The Cow Creek Band’s volunteers were backing up a trailer on which rested two identical, empty turquoise containers, perhaps five hundred gallons each. I met Teri Hansen, her son Jake Ansures, and his five-year-old boy as they stepped from their white pickup. She had satiny black hair to her waist, bangs cascading down her brow, and a powwow T-shirt with short red sleeves that exposed her pale arms. Her voice was smoky, graveled. She was a clerk for the tribal court. Jake was athletic, in a scarlet DC skater’s shirt and a black cap with a stiff brim. His eyes were wide, his grin elastic. He worked as a sales and marketing manager for the tribe-owned Umpqua Indian Foods, known for its steak jerky.
Dave soon drove out of the spawning house on a forklift with a white plastic container that looked like a giant mail bin, a USPS flat tub. Inside was a thousand pounds of salmon. Fifty-nine fish, as it turned out. Their skins were mottled, jaundiced in patches. Some were without their snouts, which had been removed—severed—to extract those coded-wire tags. Other tribes want all of their fish entire, but the Cow Creek Band needed only two. “You could gut and fillet them also, if you’d like,” said Teri. Dave laughed, said his crew probably wouldn’t go for that.
The lift whined as Dave tilted the bin, and another technician swept and dragged the fish so that they spilled, slowly, into the tribe’s turquoise counterpart, leaving it speckled and streaked with drip marks. In black gloves and a white apron, he had the appearance of a butcher, and he took his time, to minimize splatters. He’d done this before. Blood as thick as syrup ran over the sides and, when I edged a little too close, my shirt paid a small price. My forearm, too. Jake shoveled ice into the fish as they fell like a lumbering waterfall, and before long it seemed they would all fit in just one of the turquoise containers. “One less tote to clean,” said Dave.
When the fish were tied down, we took a quick stroll around the grounds. The ponds looked like lap pools, but were tented with netting to prevent gulls and eagles, and maybe anglers, from diving in. They rippled with the backs of trout and salmon, and juveniles at all stages: fry, parr, smolt. We walked toward the fish ladder and collection pond. Sun poured through the ladder’s entrance, a roofless hallway into the river, where big fish were holding in the shadow of the wall. You could see them if you trained your eyes, if you squinted, and if the school nosed momentarily into the slant of light. They were poised as if waiting for some signal. Some decision.
I asked Jake when he had caught his first salmon. Nine or ten, he said. I asked after its size. “It was all right,” he said. “It tasted good, I can tell you that much.”
He put his kid on his shoulders, and they stood on the bridge above the ladder’s last step, the one that ultimately lofted those scarred-backs from the Rogue to their origin. Through the grate that separated the pen from the ladder, water roiled in an incandescent foam. As we stared down, mesmerized, instantly and inexplicably a slick teardrop form broke the surface and glided through the air into the hatchery’s motionless pool. “Ooooh,” we all said, as the salmon hurdled.
“Good job,” said Teri. “He wasn’t wasting any time.”
“He looked like he knew what he was doing,” said Jake.
Then another he, or she, leaped up and deflected off the concrete sidewall into the holding pond. It was a triumph and a bittersweet moment of finality. For this was the gate to heaven. And these fish were a day late for the ceremony.
The totes pulled out of the hatchery lot, and I followed. Salmon flies fluttered before the windshield and lay dead on the pavement. We turned toward Medford, but before we’d gone far, the fish swung right and headed skyward. Caution, a road sign announced, Limited Maintenance After Dark. This was OR-227, Tiller Trail Highway, the short-but-steep cut to Canyonville over a mountain pass. We were lifting the fish from their native drainage to the neighboring one, the South Umpqua, which seemed to embody the peculiar migrations of the modern age: Even in death, these fish were being transplanted to another river, the way planes let trout free-fall into alpine lakes; the way seedling invasive mussels hitch rides on trailered hulls.
The road was hemmed in with fir, oak, and lustrous madrone. Then it ran through clear-cuts with heaping slash piles hard on the shoulder. I felt as if I were in the wake of something remarkable, clandestine even. The turquoise of the container took on a kind of glow, freighted not just with the weight of the fish, but with their import to the tribe and the Northwest more broadly. The drive was a procession, a caravan into the clouds.
We crested the ridge and slalomed to Elk Creek, which joined the South Umpqua River at the townlet of Tiller, where many of the Cow Creek’s forbears are buried. They had built the first roads and bridges in the drainage for the government, some over the mountains on old Indian trails. Teri and her boys stopped at the general store. Inside was a framed black-and-white photo of a man with a pistol in one hand and a skunk dangling by its tail in the other: He was an official Douglas County champion skunk hunter, a dubious accolade. Teri and her grandson bought morning ice cream bars. Then we flowed on, past sturdy and decrepit barns, stacked wagon wheels, and shrink-wrapped hay bales that looked like fresh mozzarella in the fields; past signs for Eggs $2 (then, closer to Canyonville, Eggs $3)