The Spawning Grounds (4 page)

JESSE ROBERTSON RATTLED
along the highway in the baby blue '57 Chevy pickup that had once belonged to his father, Stew, a truck that Jesse had intended to restore for as long as he owned it, which was almost a decade. He carried his equipment in the truck bed: his welder and tanks, his toolbox and grinders, torches, hoses, rods. The one bumper sticker read,
Welding Ain't for Wimps
.

He had put off this trip back home for a full week, telling his daughter he had a welding job to complete, which was not the truth. But now, as he drove through the arid country past Kamloops, he felt the emotion start to rise:
home
. Bunchgrass, sagebrush, ponderosa pine. At Little Shuswap Lake the landscape shrugged off its austerity and grew lush: the small green farms and acreages of Chase, the emerald hills that surrounded the town.

The GPS unit stuck to his front windshield told him where to go, as if he didn't know.
In two hundred metres, turn
right
. He turned off the highway at the Squilax Bridge, then followed the slow, winding road along Shuswap Lake, over the bridge at Adams River and then at Scotch Creek, heading for the home in which his parents had conceived him, where his father had been conceived, and his grandfather too.

The road diverted from the lake and rose over Lightning Hill. At the summit, Jesse pulled into the community hall parking lot to smoke a joint before facing his family. He stared at what was left of the forest, pines in the red attack stage of pine beetle infestation, still alive but dying. A sign read,
Mountain Beetle Salvage Harvesting
. The pines looked like an army of rusted tin soldiers standing at attention, interspersed with the dead, propped corpses, grey hair hanging. At their feet yearling pines no more than a foot or so high were also red, also dying.

Below him, Lightning River snaked through the narrow strip of river plain. Above the bridge at the narrows, the valley was still dominated by small farms of one kind or another. Holsteins lounged in pastures outside dairies, Herefords munched on dry grass, and he could even spot llamas out to pasture.

Stew's cow-calf operation stretched from the bridge to the lake. He could see the farmhouse nestled in an orchard close to the shore, the barns and outbuildings scattered around it, the beef cows—Herefords—drinking from the river. The snaking wooden rail fences that bordered the Robertson homestead had been built by Eugene a hundred and fifty years earlier. He had constructed them without nails and they still stood, hugging the curves of what
had once been a wagon road, and before that an Indian trail. On the opposite side of the river, the reserve houses were tucked between the shore and the benchland. The cliff face of Little Mountain towered over the community, monolithic.

Jesse breathed in a last toke as his gaze settled inevitably on Gina's property just across the road from his father's. Smoke curled from the chimney, so she was home. He felt a tug in his gut at the thought of seeing her again. He had talked to her on the phone a few times in the years since he left, most recently about Stew's health and his plans for the sale of the property, but they hadn't spoken face-to-face since Elaine's funeral, and even then Gina had only whispered a few guarded sympathies under her husband's watchful eye. Jesse hadn't been sure Grant knew about them until that moment. But conjecture had obviously spread after Elaine took her life. Grant had not offered his hand or his condolences to Jesse. He had stood behind Gina in his tailored suit and kept his eye on the crowd, standing guard as if he was on duty.

Jesse pinched out his roach and pocketed it, to roll into another joint later. He rubbed his face as he prepared himself for the difficult afternoon ahead, then he slipped back into his truck and headed downhill.

A big yellow “community watch” sign welcomed Jesse to Lightning River Valley.
The Details of Your Vehicle Will Be Recorded
, it cheerfully warned. Jesse crossed a Texas gate, a cattle guard, past another sign telling him to
Watch
for Livestock
and then drove through a patch of swampy wetland. The foliage and bulrushes were a wash of fall colour, but even so, on this cloudy September day, the swamp was dreary and forbidding, covered in a haze of fog. On a day like this one many years before, when Jesse had noted how haunted the swamp looked, Stew, seated in the passenger seat beside him, nodded and said, “Good place to hide a body.”

Turn right
, the voice on his GPS told him. The contraption was wrong: he wasn't yet at the farm gate. He slapped the side of the unit in the way he attempted to fix most of his electrical gadgets.

It was then Jesse spotted a figure standing in the mist on the shoulder. A teen, a boy. Was he naked? He
was
naked. As Jesse passed him, he recognized him with a start: it was Brandon, his own son. Jesse hit the brakes and looked in his rear-view mirror, but Brandon was gone, just
gone
, as if he'd never been there in the first place.

A sockeye salmon thumped on the truck windshield, cracking it, and rolled down the hood of Jesse's truck.

“Shit.”

Turn right
, the voice said.

Jesse jerked the Chevy to the shoulder using both hands; the steering was stiff as molasses. He turned off the ignition and, shaking, grabbed the leg bone of one of his father's long-dead cows from the front dash and got out to place it under the front tire as an emergency brake. He left the door open as he peered at the salmon in the middle of
the road, a salmon that had dropped from the sky. A passing Dodge pickup flattened it, leaving a streak of blood and flesh down the road. Jesse searched, but the naked boy—his son—was gone. Above Jesse, the eagle that had dropped the fish on his truck circled and laughed,
eye-EYE!

Jesse sat on Eugene's Rock scratching Stew's dog behind the ears as he waited on Hannah. Behind him, the yellow leaves of a lone poplar rattled with a sound like falling rain.

His daughter sloshed upriver towards him, cradling a salmon against her chest as if it were a child. The fish was big, and already the fungi that would consume its body had taken hold: white around its snout, its eyes, in spots on its back. Turbulent river breezes lifted the curls that escaped Hannah's ponytail. From this distance, Hannah could have been Elaine, dressed in her waders as she and Jesse fished in this river in the years before her drowning, before her illness, before they had children. She looked so much like her mother that Jesse felt momentarily disoriented.

Beyond Hannah a row of other volunteers—all women, all from the reserve, and all related by the looks of them—formed a relay up the river, handing the sockeye one to the other before the last released the fish to the spawning grounds. On the shore behind them a handful of eagles waited on the rocks for the women to leave so they could scavenge the carcasses. When Jesse was a kid, dozens of eagles had
lined these spawning grounds to gorge themselves on salmon flesh over the spawning season. Stew had told him that when he was a child, he had counted nearly five hundred along the river. Now so few salmon returned, the eagles were forced to hunt for other food sources. They ate the afterbirth of Stew's cattle, the entrails of sheep slaughtered behind the Wilkinsons' barns, and plucked Gina's chickens from her fence posts.

“You're taller,” Jesse called across the water to his daughter as she moved closer. He paused, lowering his voice so she wouldn't hear him. “You're a woman now.”

Hannah stopped and looked him over. “You don't look so different.”

She was being kind, he knew. He had much more grey in his ginger curls, and many more lines around his hazel eyes. He had acquired that rumpled look men get when they don't have a woman around. The lines of his palms were black with grease, his fingers gashed and covered in burns. His jeans and T-shirt were shot through with holes and his workboots were burned in spots from the fiery spray of his welding torch.

Hannah released the sockeye into the water at her father's feet and together they watched as it slid away to the spawning grounds.

“Is Bran around?” Jesse asked her.

“He's in the house.”

“Are you sure?”

Hannah cocked her head. “Yeah, why?”

The naked boy he'd thought was his son. The fish that fell from the sky. “Nothing,” he said. When she raised an eyebrow to him, he said, “I knocked and no one answered.”

“He was sleeping when I got back from the hospital a couple of hours ago.”

“Sleeping?” Jesse checked his watch. “It's nearly one o'clock.”

Hannah shrugged. “He had a late night.” She shook river water from her hands as she stood. “I've got something to show you.”

“I thought we'd head straight into town to see Dad.”

“I was already at the hospital, this morning.”

“It would be nice for Dad, don't you think, for all three of us to visit?”

Hannah crossed her arms. “You just don't want to face Grandpa alone.”

Jesse scratched the dog's head as he looked back to the house, to the yard, to his truck. She was right. He didn't want to face his father's judgment of him, another recounting of his many failures.

“I'd like you and Bran to come with me,” he said finally.

Hannah turned her back to him. “This won't take long.” She set off downstream, clearly expecting him to follow. Abby abandoned him to trot behind her.

Jesse jogged to catch up with his daughter. “Where are you taking me?”

“You'll see.”

Along the shore, there was a path worn first by coyote, deer and bears, then by the ancestors to the modern
Shuswap, and then by white fur traders, miners, settlers and their cattle, and finally by tourists walking to and from the beach at the lake. The remains of the dead fish that bears had dragged from the river, along with the occasional mound of bear excrement, were scattered along the trail.

Hannah led Jesse across the sandbars over to the new development, then up the river path to reserve land.

“Here we are,” she said and waved her hand at the shore. The riverbank in this area was shored up with boulders and logs and planted in young willow.

“So what am I looking at exactly?” Jesse asked.

Hannah pointed to one of the many willow saplings along the bank, its leaves now yellow, and launched into the same presentation she had given the elementary school kids during their field trip at the beginning of September, at the start of the three-week sockeye run. “I planted this willow last summer,” she said. “The roots of the tree swim through dirt, seeking water, holding the soil in place. In two or three years, this bank will be bush again. The trees will provide cover for the river and fish, keep the water cool and stop the soil from washing away and suffocating the salmon eggs.”

“This is what you want to do on our side?”

“We're losing the salmon,” Hannah told her father. “And Grandpa is losing his land.”

Jesse turned to survey a line of Stew's fence posts dangling from barbed wire over the section of eroded bank at Dead Man's Bend, nothing holding them in place.

Hannah said, “The flow of water will continue to eat away the bank until we deal with the problem.”

Abby trotted towards them and Jesse threw her a stick to fetch. “So what's involved?” he asked as he watched the dog run off. “What were you asking Dad to do?”

“The first step is to keep the cattle away from the water. We have government funding for fencing materials and volunteers to help put up new fences along the river. Next summer, after the salmon fry are in the lake, we can shore up the banks with boulders and logs and plant willows to hold the soil in place.”

“Next
summer
?”

“We'd have to do the work then. If we do it at any other time, we risk disturbing the spawning salmon or their eggs or the fry.”