Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [6]
We let the canoe slide almost entirely of its own accord down the bluff, while we slipped alongside in rubber boots. The boat was not a seagoing vessel, and sitting on the gravel beach it gaped open, ungraceful and unseaworthy. But we had nothing else. So we carried it to the edge of the water, where the bay began to stroke its lemon sides, making it dance awkwardly.
I got in the bow on my knees, and John gave us a shove as he climbed into the stern. We paddled out to where the silver salmon bucked in the net, and John directed me to pull the top of the net into the boat so that I could free the fish. The boat bobbed as I leaned over the bow and reached my hands into the cold water to grab the float line. I heaved the line and the fish trapped beneath it over the gunwale. The fish hung in a mess of net in front of me. It was a handsome silver salmon, nearly as long as my arm. Its skin was fresh, metallic, and alive. The fish had spent more than a year at sea before making its run to spawn. As it had swum up the bay, it had hit the net, which was invisible in the murky shallows in front of our house. Its head had gone through the mesh but the line had cinched the fish behind its gills where the body widened. The more the fish struggled, the tighter it was bound.
Holding the net with one hand and the fish’s head firmly with the other, I traced its body back through the net the way it had entered. Its scales were slick between my hands. I pulled the blue filament over the head and yanked it out from beneath its gills. The line left dark scars where it had tightened behind the fish’s small dorsal fin. When it was free, I held the contorting body, about eight pounds of nearly all muscle, against the bottom of the boat. Its gills opened and closed, struggling in the air. I reached in my back pocket for a knife and pressed it through the gills and then into the head between its eyes, hoping I was reaching its brain. Though I only half-cared, a knife into the head seemed less cruel than letting the animal bleed slowly to death. Blood leaked from the gills toward the center of the boat and scales gilded my hands.
From the stern, John worked the bow of the canoe along the float line, and, bit by bit, I pulled sections of the net into the boat and plucked out other salmon. The fish lay twitching in the bottom of the boat. We ferried them back to the gravel beach in small batches. We spent the rest of the afternoon with the fish, taking them out of the net as the tide receded. John unbound an earth-colored flounder, palm-sized with skin like sandpaper, and lobbed it into the water where it smacked and then swam away. We undid jellyfish from the mesh and they dried on the mudflats, each its own gelatinous cosmos. John worked quickly, moved decisively. I was trying to figure out how to do the same.
By the end of the day, we had nineteen fish and had lugged them up the bluff with stringers through their gills. With the evening sun slanting across the yard, we lay plywood planks on the grass, and while John filleted, I cleaned the fish as he had shown me. One after another, I slit the bellies from tail to head. I pulled out sacks of roe—like red-orange pearls, deep red kidneys, other innards of white, browns, and green. I cleaned out the bloodline, scraping the coagulated blood along the fishes’ spines with my fingers. Brown, spider-sized parasites congregated around the tails. John filleted the fish, unpeeling their flesh in deep orange cakes iced in silver.
Even though the bay was rich, what you ended up combing from the sea was always a mystery, a surprise, a gift. And despite the hours of setting and picking the net, of carrying fish up the bluff, of cleaning, filleting and packing, what we pulled from the water felt free. We could scavenge a net and borrow a canoe to fill our freezer.
It was after midnight by the time we had wrapped all of the fillets in plastic and stacked them in the freezer. A rich indigo had begun to pull across the sky, east to west. John unraveled