Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/14/its-time-to-watch-that-alask.html
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I wish I was a bear in a stream.
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Instead of always being the salmon?
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I just looked, there was a bear, but he went away hungry. Lots of sc’win leaping, and dead too, the bear not interested in those. Some animals would consider decaying flesh a delicacy.
Every time we go to the park in the summer, Pokey likes to take a dip in the artificial stream. He pretends he’s hunting sc’win, but none ever swims by.
One of the jobs my dad did while in Alaska was counting salmon runs on one particular river. He even helped some of them up stream building some sort of path out of nets to get them up where they needed to, and living some of the bigger ones up by hand, IIRC.
They can dine at the buffet, good for them. I’m definitely not envy.
If there’s one thing that the Norwegians, the Japanese, the Jewish People and the Grizzly Bears can always agree on it’s “raw salmon is the bomb.”
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Spawning salmon are less delicious, btw. They stop eating and their tissues start to get broken down to make eggs and milt. They eventually basically rot to death, and post-spawn salmon are at best good for spiced fish cakes. Fishermen call them “Zombie Salmon”.
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I saw three bears.
The one in the middle seemed just right.
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It is so weird how some species have basically an “off” switch. Lots of insects like that. Mated, now die.
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120 salmon a day? That’s thousands of dollars of sushi right there!
Which is why the Copper River Reds are really the best salmon–when they’re caught they are still 1,000 miles from the spawning grounds.
In a book about the people of the northwest (actually it’s really the coastal people, Vine Deloria Jr writes about his thinking salmon were small, but when he finally got out there, he was surprised how big they were. I forget the quote, but big enough to feed many.
There’s a line in “Smoke Signals”, something about Dances with Salmon. Salmon being the North west equivalent of the bison.
We were in Alaska last summer. We were staying in a remote cabin in one of the parks, and the woman from the gear outfitter we were renting from is married to a guy whose family owns a fishery. They go on annual boat runs for salmon, and she had a freezer full and gave us some red sockeye. We told her how much that would cost back home, and she told us they have so much they use it as dog food.
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