Four Fish by Paul Greenberg Page B

train station and said our good-byes, I remembered one last thing I’d meant to get his opinion on. I told him how I’d heard that farmed salmon descending from the original Norwegian breeding lines had escaped from their net pens in Canada, and there was evidence that they were establishing themselves in west coast rivers. At this, Gjedrem smiled and smacked the steering wheel of his little blue car.
    “Hah!” he said. “I was wondering when that was going to happen.”
    There was neither concern nor criticism in his voice. Just the quiet observation of someone of an earlier generation. Someone who saw the interplay of wildness and domestication as an ongoing drama where mankind was the central character and human starvation the archest of enemies.

    S tarvation is a phenomenon still very much alive in the memories of the Yupik nation, particularly the memories of tribal elders. True, the younger generation has grown up accustomed to having access to frozen packages of chicken parts and ground chuck from the lower forty-eight, but grandparents still recall a time when the only thing that got you through the winter was salmon.
    A day after our processed meat-for-wild salmon swap on the Yukon River, Ray Waska drove me two hours upriver to his family’s fish camp. There Laurie Waska, the seventy-five-year-old matriarch of the Waska clan, put me to work breaking down four hundred pounds of salmon. The camp consisted of a tidy blue house at the center of a clearing, a corrugated-steel smoking shed, and a four-legged corrugated-steel canopy under which Laurie and I sat. Dozens of grandchildren, some directly related, some adopted, ran around in the grass and mud.
    Using a fan-shaped ulaaq —a fish-cutting knife—fashioned from the blade of an old circular saw, Laurie got to work on the salmon. Opposite from the way a commercial fish cutter would work, she started her filleting at the bottom of the animal, making a slit on either side of its anal fin and then hewing the meat upward toward the top. The fillets were smooth, orange, and flawless. If subsistence fishing doesn’t pan out, Laurie could probably make a good living behind the counter at Zabar’s or any other premium New York retail salmon outfit.
    When I gave it a go, I was extremely conscious of her staring at me . In this subsistence environment, I was trying to fillet as close to the bone as possible. Laurie frowned at what I had done and took the ulaaq away from me.
    “Too much meat,” she said.
    “I was trying not to waste.”
    “Too much meat.”
    I tried to do another salmon following her instructions, angling the ulaaq up as I cut to make a fillet about an inch and a half thick. A thinner fillet, it turns out, is better for smoking and drying. It is moisture that ultimately causes rot, and a thinner cut will allow water to work its way out of the flesh. Laurie picked up another ulaaq, and we worked silently in tandem. She did three salmon for every one of mine.
    “That one’s pretty good, isn’t it?” I said, holding up my second fish.
    “It’ll dry . ”She stared down at the pink-orange mess of meat and bones that accumulated at our feet. We were literally up to our ankles in lox.
    The inherent seasonality of wild salmon, the handful of weeks of extreme salmon abundance followed by months and months of no salmon at all, is a problem with which both Native American subsistence fishermen and Western salmon entrepreneurs have always had to contend. The Yupik address the problem by building smoking and drying sheds. Nonnative Alaskans, however, dealt with the problem by putting salmon into a can.
    Before salmon farming was invented, most people did not have access to fresh salmon. Pollution and dams had ruined any salmon river that was unfortunate enough to be near a large human population center. Industrialized human societies and wild salmon have, with very few exceptions, never found a way to live harmoniously in proximity to one another. And so