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fishing.
     
     
     
    A n hour so later, a Yupik Eskimo named Ray Waska Jr. threw the hrottle all the way forward on his 150-horsepower engine, and his tiny metal skiff hurtled down the channels of the Yukon Delta. Francine, his wife, sat next to him in a camouflage outfit, and their teenage son, Rudy, perched at the front of the boat. Their three-year-old daughter, Kaylie, in racing-style pink sunglasses and a matching pink jacket, crouched between Francine’s knees at the bottom of the boat. Their five other children were at the grandparents’ fish-smoking camp, hidden away in the channels twenty to thirty miles upriver.
    If e. e. cummings had wished to retire to a place where the world was truly “mud-luscious” and “puddle wonderful,” then the Yukon River floodplain would have made a good choice. Minnesota boasts on its state license plate of being the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes. Alaska has 3 million, and it seems that a good number of them are the potholes and broken-off oxbows that surround the Yukon, the greatest of Alaskan rivers—a kind of Mississippi of the Arctic that bisects the state and continues far into Canada. There is so much of everything natural here—sky, wind, water, and, most memorably, clouds of insects that make a stinging helmet around your head the second the boat slows down.
    How the Yupik find their way amid this shifting matrix of green sluices and bald shoreline is any white man’s guess. Hardly a tree or rock marks the route, and as with any truly productive salmon delta, land is semipermanent, sinking or rising at the whim of the river. Yet there was never a hesitation in Ray Waska’s steering. Turns were made with unquestionable assurance, until the engine cut out abruptly and Rudy Waska rushed to the front of the boat and started paying out net line, hand over fist. Suddenly we were subsistence fishing.
    Once we set up, there was nothing to do. The net hung vertically in the water, a surface-to-bottom curtain a few dozen yards long blocking passage in a small portion of the river. There were so many salmon in the river at that point that even a partial obstruction in the current would result in fish. We were fishing with gill nets that had mesh openings big enough to accommodate the head and shoulders of a chum salmon—a less illustrious fish than a king salmon and sometimes called a “dog salmon.”
    The buoys strung along the top of the set net started to twitch. I had seen only one wild salmon in my life—that single fish I sighted in my fish-counting days in Oregon two decades ago—and I rose in my seat with excitement. But on the Yukon, even though this year was turning out to be a poor one, there were still several hundred thousand king, chum, and coho salmon expected to arrive throughout the summer. Ray and Rudy Waska barely noticed the salmon slowly filling their net, twitching the buoys. The rarer kings have heads that are bigger than the day’s allowed mesh size, and they would be able to bounce off unharmed if they hit the net . It was all chums today. While chums are perfectly good to eat and also very sleek, beautiful animals, they are smaller, much more common, less fatty, and thus less prized by both Yupiks and nonnatives. Kwik’pak has recently been trying to rebrand chum salmon as “keta”—the native name—but the fish has yet to catch on. Nobody was in a hurry to haul.
    But haul we finally did. After just four hand-over-fist pulls on the nets, the first three salmon were in the boat.
    “Chums,” Ray said, pronouncing the last consonants hard and sharp, the way that the Yupik tend to do with English words, making it come out as “chumps.” We hauled some more and fish after fish flopped in the boat, their mouths and gills ripped up by the nylon net. The big white plastic well, about the size of a concert grand piano, in the center of the boat quickly filled up with salmon. It was a little like factory work. Haul, haul, salmon, salmon, flop, flop.