In the Creation time, said a tale Deryn once told, Coyote subdued the monster of the Columbia for the animal people. The wisest and smartest of all animals let Nashlah swallow him and then cut out the monster’s heart.
“A new race of people are coming, and they will pass up and down the river,” Coyote told the monster. “You may shake their canoes if they pass over you, but you must not kill all of them. This is to be the law always. You are no longer powerful.”
Thereafter, though the wind still blew unchecked through the river’s winding gorge, Nashlah slumbered in the deep waters. And Eagle and Beaver and Bear and Salmon came to the river without fear.
The world had changed, and animals no longer spoke like men. But in fulfillment of mythic prophecy, the once-wild Big River had been thoroughly tamed by the new race of people which came to live along its banks. The Army Corps of Engineers had finished what Coyote had begun. The river’s flagstone rapids and net-fishing falls had vanished below the surface of the lakes which formed behind the great dams. Its currents were now shaped by the needs of turbines and barges, rather than by gravity and geology.
But the salmon, Chief of the Fishes, still ran—over the concrete falls and ladders, under the barge props and jetboat hulls, through the silted, oft-polluted water. And when Christopher woke in the chair, stiff and twisted, his neck and back aching, and found his father’s chilling essay on the comsole display, he knew where he had to go.
His father had taken him to Bonneville Dam once before, a dozen years ago, to look down into the long generator bay in the north powerhouse, to marvel at the navigation lock slicing through the Oregon shore. They had spent less than an hour in the visitor center on Bradford Island, and a spare few minutes of that on the lowest level, where the fish ladder’s underwater windows and the counting room were located.
Dimly, Christopher remembered dirty water and silver fish which all looked alike to his eyes. But it seemed his father had seen something more.
To someone traveling upstream from Portland, Bradford Island appeared as a mere sliver of land, flat and forested with red and white transmission towers. It was the sole natural barrier in the string of dams and powerhouses spanning the two-and-a-half-kilometer width of the river; the smaller Cascades Island had been created when a third channel was carved out of the Washington shore.
The Corps maintained a flight control zone over the site, so Christopher was forced to merge the Avanti into the I-84 flyway and dive down with the wheelies at the Bonneville exit. A few minutes later, he was climbing out of the car in the nearly empty parking lot outside the visitor center.
“Lila, when do they open?” he said, his DBS band relaying the query.
“In half an hour, Christopher. Winter hours are ten a.m. to five p.m.”
He was not well disposed to waiting. “Damn.”
Even though the building was closed, the courtyards and walkways behind it were not. The walkways paralleled the fish ladder, the surface of which appeared as a staircase of tumbling water, passing beneath a small bridge and curving out of sight. Leaning out over the railing, he tried to peer down through the turbulent water into one of the cells. It was impossible to see anything but swirling silt and a chaos of bubbles.
His arms crossed and ungloved hands tucked in his armpits for warmth, Christopher settled on a concrete bench and waited for the silver flash, the white-foam splash of a sockeye or coho breaking water for an upstream leap. But in half an hour of watching the ladder, not once was he rewarded with that sight.
If there was life in the churning cells of the ladder, it was hidden below.
Finally, a stoop-shouldered brown-clad ranger appeared to unlock the lower-level doors behind where Christopher was seated. The ranger seemed surprised to find him waiting there.
“Morning,” he said, holding the door open as Christopher approached. “I don’t usually have company this early, ’specially not between Winterfest and the New Year. Welcome to Bradford Island—”
Christopher brushed wordlessly past him.
The lower level was much as Christopher remembered. The center of the room was filled with museum-style exhibits on the life cycle of genus
But the focus of the room was the Living Theater—a row of large viewing windows which looked out into the ladder itself. Spaced across the longest wall, each window marked a bend in the ladder’s serpentine underwater path. An electronic map of the maze appeared above, its color-coded tracking lights marking the progress of several shad, three steelhead trout, and one solitary chinook salmon.
Christopher came to the railing at the window the chinook was approaching. The water rushing by beyond the glass was a soupy yellow-green, as though it were some bilious paniculate stew. A small American shad, a wriggling silver submarine, fought its way around the turn and vanished into the liquid fog. Another, darker fish squirted by, tail fins beating furiously.
But the solitary chinook in the ladder seemed stuck midway down the last leg of its maze, its bright white marker edging forward and then easing back.
“Come on, come on,” Christopher said aloud.
“This is the slow season,” a voice said behind him.
It was the ranger, come to check on his curious visitor. Christopher turned at the rail to see him standing beside the exhibits in the middle of the room. “What?”
“Chinook and steelhead pretty much quit running by the end of November, and the king won’t start up again till March, at least. That’s worth seeing. Still fill up the windows at the peak of the run, day and night, like the river’s half quicksilver. Those-uns are stragglers—not likely to get where they’re going, or to make anything of it if they do.”
Christopher settled his buttocks against the railing, hands grasping the wood to either side. “Sounds like I’d be better off talking to you instead of waiting for the show to begin,” he said. “How long have you worked here?”
“Twenty-two years next May.”
“That long? Then you were probably here the last time I was,” Christopher said. “In ’81.”
Nodding, the ranger said, “Probably was. Hope you picked a better day back then.”
“I was with my father,” Christopher said. “He just died a few days ago.” He could not understand why he blurted that out to this stranger. But when it was said, there was a sudden tightness in his throat that made it hard to swallow.
Sage and sympathetic eyes answered him. “That’s hard. I guess you’d like me to leave you be.”
“No,” Christopher said quickly, suddenly afraid to be alone. “You must know a lot about salmon, working here that long.”
“I know my piece. Used to work the counting room over there, before they brought in the AIP. Fifty minutes on, ten minutes off, eight hours a day with an eye on the window and a hand on the tally bar. I can tell one fish from the next, I guess.”
“That sounds incredibly dull.”
The ranger stepped forward, tucking his hands in his back pockets. “People thought so, but it never seemed so to me. I put in six years as a counter. It was kind of like being plugged into the river, to the whole cycle of things. No two days alike.”
An impolitic chuckle escaped Christopher. “Really?”
“Laugh, but it’s true. And when I was done, I was done. Never took my work home to my lady,” he said with a self-amused smile. “Never any complaints about the guys at the office.” The ranger looked past Christopher and nodded toward the window. “There. Looks like she might make it this time.”
Christopher turned back just as the thick-bodied shape of a chinook salmon, tail fins thrashing the water, hove into view at the right edge of the window. The upper third of the body was freckled with black spots. Below them, behind the pectoral fin, a triangular tear the size of Christopher’s palm flapped in the current, baring red flesh beneath.
There were rips and notches in the tail fins and first dorsal as well, and the silver skin seemed pale and flaccid. The chinook hovered for a few seconds before the window, then was swept backward into the maze. The tracking lights marked its retreat, and in less than a minute it flashed past the next downstream window, its body at an odd angle, making only the most feeble effort against the current.
“Not much longer for that one,” the ranger said, clucking. “Probably failed at The Dalles, upstream, and been
