CREEKWALKING REFLECTIONS

It is late in the season and my legs feel strong as the river roaring before me. My heart however, feels more like the lone fish who lay dead at my feet.

A grey-black chum salmon spills a few precious eggs from her body; fresh dead on the riverbank. Doe-eyes shine; still carrying the shadow of her spirit. Maroon bars colour her flanks like war stripes earned through her fatal swim home. Bright red flesh was recently torn inside out by the jaws of a bear taking what they need before winter sinks it’s teeth into the river valley.

It’s that feeling of almost making it that’s got my heart sinking like a stone.

This lone chum is the only salmon I have seen in this stream all season. She made it all the way to the spawning gravel, where it appears no mate was waiting. There to meet her instead was the belly of bear who had been so patient in surviving the scarcity of the season that she seemingly gave her body, eggs unspilled, to that beast without question.

That is what salmon do. They give relentlessly.

And the feeling, well it is exactly how one might imagine it could feel: to have a bite out of your body, mission barely unfulfilled, scales marred and flesh scarred and tail tired and eyes still shining with the ghost of purpose, spirit hanging around with the birds of prey as the birds prey on what was once the form you called your own. The body you wore then becomes a part of theirs.

That’s a feeling, and I’m full of it.

My own two legs carry me back down to the ocean with her heavy on my mind. Every eagle, bear, raven, and the lesser-named creatures wait in the wings for me to take my feelings and go so they may do what they know how to do to make it through. All of the thirsty descend on the lone fish. The dippers too, will come and gladly swallow each egg spilled from her belly.

What’s left of her, the forest will drink through roots up to arms that stretch over the river. And so in this way she did not, could never, fail.

There are many forces that have taken and continue to take more than even salmon have to give.

This is not the way, yet it is the place we find ourselves.

There lay dead rivers in these parts. I walk them. They heal me. They haunt me. It’s a complicated tragedy.

We’ve got blood on our hands that no dead river can wash clean.

This is a time of man-made scarcity in these parts and I can feel it in every inch of me. This is not a time to blame any single beast or any one bloodied hand, but a time to halt the enforced systems that harm us all.

This is a time to nurture miracles and revolutions. This road we are being driven down is a dead-end. We are very nearly at that end.

This is the time to do what we need to do to see fish once again fill rivers full, to see people give like salmon do.

Only then will we come to live in a time when every being knows abundance as the gift of reciprocity, and never again a bottomless guarantee.

Images and words made in Kwikwasut’inuxw Haxwa’mis Territory.