Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [35]
A LITTLE WHILE after high tide, the sea turned back. The Inlet’s gray water began to pull strongly against us, and my arms started to ache from the strain of holding the net upright against the current. John and I were standing in the river as shouts began to fly up around us. A woman a few yards down the beach ran up the sand dragging her net behind her. A salmon as long as my arm jerked in her net. “Got one!” the man next to John called out before heading out of the water. Down the line of dipnetters, people began jogging out of the river with their nets. “They’re here!” someone announced. The fish had hit. John hollered to me as he waded out of the water with a salmon in his net. I felt a thud in my net and then flipped it flat against the river’s sandy bottom. The weight disappeared. “I lost it!” I shouted to John. “Turn your net downstream,” he called out as he untangled the fish from his net and carried it up the beach to where Cynthia and the kids were sitting on the sand. Everyone around me was catching fish; I was dying to catch my own. A moment later, I felt the thud again and rotated the net downriver until it was flat. I waded out of the water as fast as I could, dragging the net behind me. As the mouth of the net emerged from the water, I could see what had been thrashing in it: my first Kenai River red salmon. It was a few inches longer than the silver salmon we had caught the previous summer and weighed about ten pounds. Fresh from the sea, its bright silver skin darkened to a deep blue-green along the back, and its sleek body hadn’t yet started to contort into its spawning form.
I left the fish with Cynthia and the kids, and as I was rushing back into the water, John came out with another red in his net. All around us, people cheered in excitement as they felt that particular tug of fish pulling against their nets. I let out a surprised yelp as one bumped against my submerged thighs.
A man in a plaid shirt and baseball cap a few spots down from me pulled his net out to find a flounder the size of a platter. “That’s a nice size,” his neighbor said. “You gonna keep that?”
“Na. These things are mush. Even my dog won’t eat ’em.” And before his neighbor could ask for it, he threw it back into the river.
When the pull of the retreating tide and the river’s current became so strong it was nearly impossible to hold our nets upright in the river, the line of people at the edge of the water began to move downstream with the flow of water like a conveyor belt. John and I followed. Once we got a few hundred yards down the beach, we would pull our nets out of the water and hike back up the beach to the mouth of the river and wade out again. With the tide going out, the river was narrowing and the edge of the water migrated down the beach. Sand sucked out from beneath my boots. We trailed along, always staying about chest-deep with our nets stretched toward the center of the river. Beyond the edges of our nets, a man and woman in wet suits and flippers were floating downstream holding dip nets afloat in front of them. Smiling, they waved at us on shore and we waved back. When they reached the mouth of the river, they got out of the water, slowly walked up the beach in their awkward footwear, and started the process again. But there was hardly a need to go anywhere. A minute after John and I put our nets back into the water, we each caught another fish. A man in front of me caught two reds in his net at once. The gray sea suddenly seemed full of life and a constant rush of footprints turned over the surface of the beach.
Being immersed in such an excess of fish was dazzling. They were being drawn out of the milky gray water all around me. We couldn’t see the fish, but knew they had to be there in the thousands, moving upstream together toward their spawning ground. I felt a strange kind of mania when the fish came in thickly like that, creating a new kind of hunger in me. I couldn’t feel that water had gotten into my waders and dribbled down my