Kokanee
Martha S. Mitchell
Three of us from the madrigal group drove over Spanish Ridge to a stream that once wandered through the meadows of Bucks Ranch. Long ago, a dam had drowned that verdant place under a lake, but landlocked salmon still thrived in its waters and ran up the inlet to spawn. We planned to go fishing, sort of.
Above us on the ridge, the dark emerald-black of red firs stood in bleak contrast to the snow that lay like a luminous blanket about the mountains’ flanks. We pulled the car to the edge of the road among the blue shadows of lodgepole pine that fell across the snow-smoothed folds of the dark-and-bright landscape.
The first blush of another pregnancy had overtaken my body. My breasts ached. I wanted to be lifted into the white sky’s gyre where I could wheel like an osprey, far from the upwelling currents of my remorse. I knew I wouldn’t be able to take care of another infant.
My companions, my best friend and a young man with a tenor voice like trembling water, chattered and laughed as we crunched over the crusty snow. I couldn’t bear to witness the heat of their desire, so I studied where a solitary weasel had bounded across fresh snow some days ago.
We followed the creek that made its way to the lake like a black ribbon hemmed in by snowy folds, and set our buckets down on a gravel bar. While my friends flirted and nuzzled, I watched a water ouzel walk along the bottom of the stream, then break through the water's surface like a shot. I saw its jeweled eye.
I was to do the killing, my companions announced. And so, it became a grueling initiation to this new friendship. The afternoon became a Mobius strip in which over and over again I reached for a flopping Kokanee salmon, slammed it against the blood-stained rocks, and paused to wipe fish eyes and scales from my slicker. I never looked up. I could hear the two of them dashing about in the shallows though, laughing and splashing as they heaved the nets to shore.
I sat in the back seat, disconsolate, as we drove back to town. Later, in her kitchen, they sang old English ballads in harmony while they squeezed streams of pink roe and pearly milt into separate bowls to be saved aside to cook with eggs for breakfast. I listened as I cut hundreds of spawn-running Kokanee from vent to gill and pulled out the guts. We wrapped the eyeless egg-stripped fish in newspaper and carried them out over the frozen backyard to the freezer in her woodshed. I drank a glass of elderberry wine by the wood stove, then left for home with a bundle of two dozen Kokanee tucked under my arm.
The black sky held no moon that night. The Milky Way floated like a diaphanous scarf over the river when I crossed the footbridge toward our cabin. As I neared, men’s voices roared with laughter from within. There would be cigarettes, pot, and a bottle of Jack on the table, bills, coins, and chips. I didn't want this for myself or my toddler. I needed to figure out a way to leave these mountains and this cabin by the murmuring river so I could finish college and make a life of good work. Tomorrow, I'd call the clinic before it was too late.
I let myself into the screened porch and listened until I was certain the baby slept, then set the fish on the tool bench and turned back into the bitter night and wept.
Marty Mitchell lives and writes in Portland, Oregon and Palm Springs, California.
