The Spawning Grounds Read online

  ALSO BY GAIL ANDERSON-DARGATZ

  The Miss Hereford Stories

  The Cure for Death by Lightning

  A Recipe for Bees

  A Rhinestone Button

  Turtle Valley

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2016 Gail Anderson-Dargatz

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2016 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.​pengui​nrando​mhouse.​ca

  Alfred A. Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from the foreword “The River Spirit” by Alan Haig-Brown in Adam’s River: The Mystery of the Adams River Sockeye by Mark Hume (New Star Press, 1994).

  Reprinted by permission of the author, Alan Haig-Brown.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Anderson-Dargatz, Gail, 1963–, author

  The spawning grounds / Gail Anderson-Dargatz.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-0-345-81081-6

  eBook ISBN 978-0-345-81083-0

  I. Title.

  PS8551.N3574S63 2016 C813′.54 C2016-902494-6

  Ebook ISBN 9780345810830

  Cover images: (trees) © Seamartini Graphics, (wolf) © eva_mask, (antlers) © diana pryadieva, (salmon) © Ivan Kotliar, (background) © wawritto, all Shutterstock.​com

  v4.1

  a

  For Hadarah,

  Graham,

  Jasper

  and Lydia

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Advent: September 1857

  1: Initiation

  2: Unmooring

  3: Surfacing

  4: First Light

  5: A Hummingbird’s Flight

  6: Homecoming

  7: Ties That Bind

  8: The Red Door

  9: Skipping Stones

  10: Madness from the Walls

  11: Elopement Risk

  12: The Dance

  13: A Numinous Truth

  14: Bones of the Salmon

  15: Those Who Saw

  16: Captain’s Chair

  17: Inviting the Lightning

  18: Blessing of Snow

  19: Ripples in the Air

  20: The Crow

  21: Dark Water

  22: At the Threshold

  23: Cut No Trees

  24: Ghosts

  25: A Blue Scarf Floating

  26: The Wooden Horse

  27: A Bucket of Ashes

  28: Family Services

  29: Welder’s Flash

  30: Restless

  31: Spring

  32: A Leap of Faith

  33: Dead Man’s Bend

  34: River Restoration

  35: The Spawning Grounds

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Without the salmon, the land and the rivers

  would only survive as a corpse survives

  the death of the nervous system and

  the departure of the spirit.

  ALAN HAIG-BROWN

  Advent

  September 1857

  EUGENE ROBERTSON WOKE in his tethered dugout to a thunderous rush, as if the river had let loose a flash flood upon the narrow valley floor. But the furor travelled upriver, not down, and the wave that lifted and pounded his boat was not made of water.

  He sat up and peered into the current, then immediately recoiled: multitudes of dark forms swam under him. For a dream-laden moment, these strange spectres were the “water mysteries” the Indians had warned him of. Like the water sprites of his homeland, these spirits would drag a man down into their world, a land that in many ways mirrored this one but was home to creatures that were neither man nor beast, but both, as in the beginning. Pictographs of these spirits covered the cliff face upriver, above the narrows. Lichen and the roots of trees growing, incredibly, off the cliff surface, covered many of the images. One was still clearly visible, though, even to Eugene sitting in his dugout this far downriver: a huge zigzag painted on the cliff face, a red lightning bolt. A creature sprang from the lightning, part fish, part man, surrounded by sketches of the bones of salmon. On Eugene’s arrival that summer, one of the Indians had warned him to stay out of these waters or he would be taken by the spirit that haunted the river at this place.

  Eugene thrust a hand into the dark water—into his irrational fear—and felt them there, sliding against his fingers, these terrible phantoms with their gold eyes, fang-filled jaws and monstrous humps on brilliant red backs. The sockeye salmon had returned. Flying overhead or perched on scrags that lined the river, hundreds of eagles had arrived to feed on them.

  The river was thick with salmon, red with them, from shore to shore. Here was the biblical plague, Eugene thought, the river of blood. The noise the fish made as they fought their way upstream was the rumble of an oncoming squall, the collective splash and slap of thousands upon thousands of bodies upon bodies, tails beating water, as they thrashed in their struggle to the spawning grounds. When the throng of fish reached the white water at the narrows, the rapids slowed their advance upriver. Unable to breathe in the waters now starved of oxygen by the smothering number of fish, the sockeye panicked and rushed back downriver, where they met the fish travelling upriver behind them. Eugene fell backwards in his boat as it heaved up on the mass of undulating fish, a red tide of sockeye, their bodies spilling out of the riverbed and onto shore.

  Eugene Robertson wasn’t the first white man to fish this river—the fur traders had been coming for decades—but this past summer, the summer of 1857, he was the first to stake a claim along its rocky shore; the first to muddy its waters with a gold rocker in his hunt for riches; and the first of the many miners who followed within the next five years, eating the salmon and stirring the silt of this river so that it blanketed and suffocated the sockeye eggs as they slept in their gravel nests. The miners would all but wipe out the salmon run; the fish would never return in such numbers. When the other miners had taken what little gold they found and moved on, Eugene became the first of the homesteaders to call the shores along the Lightning River home; the first to take down trees on the thin strip of river plain; the first to put up fences; the first to water his livestock from this river and pollute its waters. Each future generation of Robertsons would take more from this river and this land. And Eugene was the last white man to witness this miracle on the river, the mass return of the sockeye.

  He righted himself in the pitching boat, then removed his suspenders, jack shirt and pants, his long underwear, and sat for a time watching the fish writhing around him. In the milky morning light, his ginger hair glowed and his muscular body shone white. A drift of freckles ran along his shoulders and down his arms and legs. Already, dragonflies hovered over the shallows where his boat rocked, flitting like winged folk, the capricious woodland faeries—the old gods—of his grandfather’s stories. They darted away as he slid from the dugout into the water, into a river made almost entirely of fish.

  The salmon’s skin was slippery and cold and yet Eugene grew erect from their jostling against him. The water, like the air abov
e it, was charged, electric, permeated with the overpowering smell of salmon, of ocean, of sex. In the sky over his head, two eagles shrieked and flew together, grappling with their talons. They fell, cartwheeling, and only pulled apart as they were about to hit water. As the eagles flew back into the air, Eugene saw a boy ascend naked from the river, as if lifted by the eagles, to stand on the surface of the water. The panic that had gripped Eugene on the sockeye’s arrival returned. Surely this was no human boy, though he appeared to be. He was perhaps fifteen or sixteen, no longer a child, not yet a man. The salmon leapt all around him, frenzied, as if rejoicing in his presence. Yet it was Eugene the boy watched intently and not the fish. Eugene wiped the water from his eyes as he struggled to keep the strange boy in view, but the countless salmon spun him and carried him around the river’s bend. For a moment, Eugene’s soul was adrift. He was water. He was fin. He was fish.

  — 1 —

  Initiation

  September, present day

  THE SOCKEYE ARE, by nature, transformers. They change in appearance throughout their lives, protecting themselves in this way. As fry, their skin is striped and spotted to conceal them within the vegetation of the lake as they grow. As they make themselves ready for their journey to the sea, their skin becomes reflection, becomes ocean.

  Then, four years after their lives began in gravel, they come out of hiding to reveal their warrior natures. As they return home, their skin reddens, a hump appears on their backs, and their faces flush green. The sockeye paint themselves for battle as battle they must: they fight every inch of their way home, upriver, upriver, upstream. By these vestments, they know their own generation—who they can wrestle for territory and who they can take as a mate—once they reach the spawning grounds.

  White settlers thought the story of the sockeye’s return was incredible, impossible. But the Secwepemc—in English, the Shuswap—knew the sockeye followed the faint scent of home all the way from the Pacific up the Fraser, through Hells Gate, and then up the Thompson to their home river and spawning grounds, and even to the marriage bed in which their parents had conceived them.

  The sockeye Hannah Robertson picked up this day was at the end of this long journey, exhausted from it. She carried it up the middle of Lightning River, a river that was no longer difficult to traverse, at least not here, at the shallows near the lake. To her right, equipment sat idle by the unfinished houses of the new lakeshore development as protestors had blocked the construction crew’s passage at the bridge. To her left, her grandfather’s fields and pastures bordered the river from the lake all the way up to the road. Here, the river widened, dispersing into shoals and sandbars as it spilled into Shuswap Lake. The water was so muddied and shallow, the few sockeye that had returned couldn’t swim in it. Silt, sand and gravel, washed downriver from farms in the lower end of the valley and from the logged hills along the upper river, had collected here, blocking the salmon’s entrance to their spawning grounds. The river grew narrower and the water progressively deeper as Hannah headed upriver towards Dead Man’s Bend, but it was still far shallower than it should have been.

  A line of her grandfather’s fence posts dangled from barbed wire over the section of eroded bank at Dead Man’s Bend, where the bodies of the drowned were often located. Shortly before her father was born, her grandfather had straightened the river there, attempting to add the fertile soil to his hayfield. With no bush to hold the soil in place, the reclaimed land had simply washed away from under the fence, clogging the estuary with silt.

  To make matters worse, trees from the logging upriver had formed a dam under the bridge over the narrows, lowering water levels below it. The many farmers and landowners who lived along these shores also drew water for their crops and lawns from here. After three years of hot, dry summers, water levels were so low that the sockeye attempting to swim from the lake to the spawning grounds couldn’t navigate the lower part of the river. A few made it, but most beached on sand or got hung up on snags deposited by spring freshets and died.

  Hannah had arranged to miss the coming week of classes in her environmental studies program to save the fish, to carry them upriver alongside a handful of other volunteers from the reserve. Her instructors understood. Every living thing around them depended on the return of the salmon. The rotting fish would nourish the water this fall and again in early spring when the sun warmed what was left of the sockeye’s frozen bodies. Their flesh would feed the tiny creatures that in turn fed the sockeye fry when they burst from their stone nests come spring. In this way, the sockeye fed their young with their own bodies and were resurrected within their children’s flesh. If not enough sockeye returned during this run, if not enough died here, the river would starve, the sockeye fry would starve, the lake would starve, the eagles and bears and the land around them would starve.

  Hannah carried the fish around Dead Man’s Bend and released it into the spawning grounds. Then she squatted to rinse her hands, reminding herself not to touch her mouth. Along with the rotting bodies of the few salmon that had made it this far to spawn, the water was also fetid with leaks from septic fields and the feces of cattle from farms up and down the river, and poisoned by pesticides and herbicides sprayed on riverside fields and lawns.

  On shore, her brother, Brandon, waited for her on Eugene’s Rock, the name etched into the boulder by an ancestor she knew little about: Eugene Robertson, September 1857. Eugene had also chiselled a crude representation of a fish, a symbol of his faith, Hannah had assumed as a child when she still had a faith of her own. Now, at eighteen, she wondered if Eugene had simply loved fishing as much as her grandfather did.

  “Finally decided to help, did you?” Hannah asked her younger brother. Brandon was supposed to help her this weekend, as the other volunteers were at the protest on the bridge, but he had quickly grown tired of the chore. He had complained that his hands ached from carrying the heavy fish and his feet had lost feeling from walking through the cold water.

  Brandon shook his head. “I figured you’d want to know Grandpa’s protesting the protest.”

  Hannah shaded her eyes to look to where Bran pointed. The protestors had nailed signs to the bridge railings: They Disturbed a Secwepemc Burial Site!; This Is Unceded Secwepemc Territory; and O Canada, Your Home on Native Land. And from the white environmentalists: Stop Overdevelopment on Our River! Save Our Fish! Indians from the reserve on the far bank had started the protest after a construction crew widening the road to the development had dug up the shallow grave of a toddler, an Indian kid, old bones from the gold-rush era. White environmentalists had jumped on board for this day’s protest rally, hoping to bring attention to the damage the new lakefront development would inflict on the river and the spawning grounds.

  Just below the bridge, their grandfather, Stew, had ridden his horse into the water as he could barely stand on his own, to fish the deep pool below the rapids, thumbing his nose at the protestors on the bridge above. He knew he couldn’t fish the river anymore. The band had posted a sign on the far shore that read: This river is closed to all fishing. By order of Lightning Bay Indian Band Council.

  “Shit,” Hannah said.

  “You want me to handle it this time?”

  “No, I’ll deal with it.” She started towards shore, but then a shadow passed over them both and Hannah looked up. “Bran, look!” She pointed to the sky.

  Brandon squinted as they watched two eagles lock talons and spiral down together. They disengaged and flew off, only to meet again in the sky. “Are the eagles fighting over territory?” Brandon asked. “The salmon?”

  “Sometimes that’s what it’s about,” she said, “but that’s a male and a female courting. They cartwheel like that in spring, for hours.”

  “So why are they cartwheeling now?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes their talons lock and they’ll fall to the ground and starve to death. Remember those eagle skeletons Grandpa showed us in the bush over there?” She pointed to the reserve land abov
e the new lakeside development, one of the few places where trees still grew along the river shore.

  Brandon nodded. It had been strange to see the eagle claws still clutching each other. The bones had been ancient and moss covered. He expected they were still there, hidden beneath snowberry bushes and kinnikinnick.

  He shielded his eyes to watch as the cartwheeling eagles once again fell from the sky. The huge birds separated just before hitting water. It was then he saw the boy about his own age standing naked in the middle of the river.

  “Hey, do you see that?” Brandon asked his sister.

  “See what?” she said.

  The boy sank under the surface before Brandon could explain. He stepped into the water, wading upriver, as he scanned the depths for the boy. A sockeye salmon, startled by his intrusion into the spawning grounds, flicked out of his way, its snout and teeth terrifying, an image from a nightmare. Brandon saw something coming towards him from behind the fish, something that moved like a swimming snake. The thing was transparent, not quite there, made from water, like a wave.

  Brandon panicked, fell backwards into the river, attempted to take a breath and took in water instead.

  Hannah ran to him and helped him onto a shore churned into gumbo by the stinking hooves of their grandfather’s cattle. “You okay?” she asked, as he coughed.

  “There was something in the water,” he said, when he was able. He could still see the thing, rippling just beneath the surface, heading back to the narrows.

  Hannah looked back at the river. “What, the salmon?”

  “A water mystery, I think,” Brandon said.

  “A water mystery?” Hannah laughed. “You don’t actually believe Alex’s stories, do you?” Alex was one of their friends from the reserve. Hannah had known him for as long as she could remember, but she rarely sat through his storytelling sessions. Bran did, though. It was Alex’s accounts of his people’s initiation rituals that interested Bran most. In the old days, Shuswap kids had gone out alone into the bush to hone their survival skills and seek visions of their guardian spirits. That appealed to Brandon. He craved some ritual to mark his entrance into manhood.