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But just as things started to seem commonplace, Ray tensed up. He pushed his son out of the way and expertly handled the net. He made one last haul, and thwap! —a much bigger, more beautiful salmon lay on the deck. It had accidentally snared itself in a net meant for chums, the twine wrapped thrice around its jaw.
    “King,” said Ray, the faintest trace of excitement in his voice. The fish was about thirty pounds, twice as big as the chums, and had a steel-colored head that stood out from the rest of its body like a knight’s helmet over chain mail. If the fish had not opened its mouth when it approached the net, it would not have snared its jaw. It would have bounced off and slipped through and advanced perhaps all the way to White Horse, Canada, where it might have laid its eggs and lived a fulfilled life. But instead Ray reached in and ripped out two of its gill arches, and blood poured onto the deck. A bled fish dies faster, and its value is increased because it lasts longer frozen.
    Since Fish and Game had declared a subsistence opening only, the king salmon could not be sold to Kwik’pak Fisheries. But nobody had said anything about barter, something I supposed fit loosely into the category of “subsistence.” When the grand-piano fish well was full to the brim with salmon, we pulled up anchor and blasted our way farther upriver. The wind was starting to penetrate my rubber overalls. The only parts of my body that were warm were my feet, stowed snugly in Jac Gadwill’s socks.
    Around a bend our boat slowed again. The insect helmet formed over each of us, and suddenly, rising up from the water, was a black oil tanker. It was making the long haul, taking oil out of the area of Alaska that is nowhere and transporting it to somewhere. We pulled up next to the ship and banged on the hull. Some prior communication had evidently taken place, because a few moments later a dude appeared on deck carrying two ten-pound packages of frozen chicken parts. Francine Waska stood and smiled and took the packages and laid them on the deck of the boat. They were an ugly reminder of the way the world is going. Yellow foam backing. Plastic wrap. A bar-code sticker that said “$19.99.” Francine appraised the packages.
    “Gee,” she said, “I hope this doesn’t have freezer burn.”
    Ray nodded to the galley cook and reached down into a cooler. With one huge haul, he grabbed the king salmon and threw it up onto the ship’s deck, where it landed, shimmering beautifully, steel-colored in the watery sunlight.
    A pause.
    “Holy shit,” said the cook. He looked down at it and shuffled his feet and glanced at the frozen chicken he’d traded in return.
    “Hold on a sec.” He slipped a hand into the gill plate of the salmon, dropped the fish, picked it up again, and disappeared into the galley. He returned in a moment with two more Safeway packages of frozen ground beef.
    “Gee, thanks,” said Francine. She looked at them and turned to me. “Do you think these have freezer burn?”
    Before I had time to answer, Ray had loosened the rope and pushed his skiff back and once again we screamed down the river.
     
     
     
    T he Yupik don’t seem to hold many grudges . Even after many centuries of unfair trading with the rest of the world, these kinds of exchanges are made with a minimum of reflection. Perhaps it’s because the Yupik see the wild raw materials so plentifully within their grasp as essentially mysterious. The processes by which the world synthesizes sun, water, and earth into a slab of endlessly useful pink, healthful salmon flesh are unquantifiable. What is important is that those pink slabs return each year, uninterrupted, in large enough numbers to fill the Yupik smokehouses and drying racks so that folks can make it through the winter or sell enough to educate their children and improve a community that suffers one of the highest suicide rates in the United States.
    The Fair Trade Certification of the Kwik’pak