Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [50]
That attitude, Ben said, is still a problem. “People say, ‘Do you want water for people in Reno, or a suckerfish in Pyramid Lake?’ It’s all about development. They don’t realize that when you start chipping away bits and pieces of the ecosystem, you get problems in the food chain. We’ve done all right in the court system—we were here first, our water claims have priority. But it’s hard to make people, politicians, understand—water is sacred. It’s for all life. Fish and Game, Reclamation . . . they all tend to separate it out. But if the tiniest creature—the frog, the fish—gets in trouble, the problems just head right up the line.”
The last spawning run of the original Pyramid cutthroat strain was in 1938. Tahoe’s last run was the same year; though Tahoe’s commercial fishery had been banned in 1917, Lahontan cutthroats had been declining since the 1880s. Before that time some seventy thousand pounds of fish were caught annually for long-distance sale, some with traps and nets that captured entire spawning runs. By the time twenty-two thousand pounds were shipped in 1904, the population was nearing collapse—when disease struck in force twenty years later, it was too much for the diminished numbers to handle. Tahoe’s cutthroats have never returned; most of Pyramid’s are a strain collected in Summit Lake in the seventies, maintained today only by the Paiute’s rigorous stocking program.
In the hatchery’s main room, fifteen men and women gather around a long wooden table with three round holes down its centerline. The flopping, stranded fish below Derby Dam were twenty or even thirty pounds, numbers I understood only intellectually; it’s when Steve Samson picks out a female trout, handing her through the window to Kia Blindman, that I realize how big even an eight-pounder is. She’s colored a dark olive, shining as though glazed, and like any fish straight from the water she looks vivid—in shockingly sharp focus. She’s big enough that Kia has to hug her against his rubber-aproned chest: this is a serious fish, over two feet long. The world hook-and-line record for trout is for a forty-three-pound Lahontan cutthroat caught here by Paiute John Skimmerhorn in 1925; there were unconfirmed reports, back in 1912, of a fish weighing in at a colossal sixty-two. Elizabeth Thomas, who works just up the hill with the cui-ui at the Dunn Hatchery, says that “a ten-pounder’ll kick us around pretty good,” and that’s clearly true. A sixty-two-pounder? Bring a harpoon.
Big as the trout at the hatchery today are, they don’t approach the size of the old ones. A lot of what made Pyramid Lake Lahontan cutthroat special was completely local, below subspecies level; the bigger the predatory lake dwellers got, the better they were at hunting tui-chub. The prospectors and settlers who seemingly called the trout of every mountain by a different name actually had a point; you can’t preserve what’s beautiful and unique about a species by maintaining it in one place. The challenge, and the hard work, comes in seeing the differences within a species, to see that even what seems like a single kind of fish can mold itself to the world—and the world to it—in a hundred different ways. Today there are Lahontan cutthroat trout in Pyramid Lake, but the largest trout in recorded history were the Lahontan cutthroat trout of Pyramid Lake. Those are gone.
Or so everyone thought. At some point (no one knows when) somebody (no one knows who) carried Lahontan cutthroat trout to Pilot Peak in Utah, depositing them in Morrison Creek. Genetically identical to the original Pyramid Lahontan cutthroats, the trout are now raised at the Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Lahontan Fish Hatchery; in 2004 over thirteen thousand fish were returned to Pyramid Lake, each with a coded tag that allows them to be separated from the Summit Lake stock during spawning. Lisa Heki, the project leader, is optimistic about the fish’s prospects with the right combination of stocking and dam breaches;