First Wilderness, Revised Edition. Sam Keith

      I LEARNED I COULDN’T BE TOO trusting. I’d read too much about the trapper’s code and the unwritten laws of the North. You didn’t have to lock doors—that was only done in cities. Stealing was out of the question.

      My first wash jarred me back to reality.

      After scrubbing my clothes in the community sink (which I later discovered was also used as a urine can rinse, a mop bucket, a fish cleaner, and a king-sized ash tray), I hung my laundry on the lines in the drying room. When I returned to check it, I noticed that a set of lightweight long johns, a large thirsty towel, and two pairs of socks were missing. That wouldn’t happen again. Back in my room, I strung up a clothesline of my own. I bought a washtub, too. Evidently, cleanliness was a virtue some of the inhabitants enjoyed at the expense of someone else’s efforts. “It’s easy to be dirty,” my mother used to say, “but it’s work to keep clean.”

      I didn’t lend any money, either. When I first arrived, I had some Traveler’s Cheques left. I played as broke to whoever approached me for a loan. If men wanted to blow their paychecks, then let them suffer for it. I didn’t intend to bail them out, nor did I expect them to come to my rescue either. I was going to steer my own ship. I certainly didn’t intend to go under because of the indiscretions of men I hardly knew.

      The food in the cafeteria was plain, and there was plenty of it. I had the choice of sitting at a long counter off to one side of the serving line and ordering pretty much what I wanted, but the price reflected that luxury. I was working hard. Fancy food didn’t appeal that much to me. Quantity was more essential than quality. Anything hot was good. I listened to the old, familiar complaints that came loud and often: “All them cooks know about seasoning is salt and pepper, and they leave that up to you.” “That’d gag a maggot!” “That goddamn grease is pluggin’ up my drain.”

      FOR ALL OF THE FISH TALES I’d heard in Harry Mae’s café, I limited myself to the role of a spectator. The bay resounded with the splashing of salmon. Sailors lined the ramps and piers casting hardware into the clear salt water that swirled and flashed with fish. I enjoyed the action, the frustration of tangled lines, the hopeless backlashes, and the sight of many salmon in the air at one time. As tempted as I was, I left my gear in the room. I wasn’t going to let the salt corrode the innards of my reels. Besides, it really wasn’t my kind of fishing. Crowds weren’t for me.

      Fishing was a private affair, or something you shared with a companion who loved it as much as you did. A few of the streams we had crossed during the garbage run to the dump were more to my liking. They were worth more than a few hours after supper. A man could lose himself walking their banks toward the mountains where they began.

      To make up for working Sunday, I had a day off in the middle of the week. That suited me just fine. At last, it was time to get out of here and wet a line on the Buskin River. I bought a frying pan at the commissary to go with the tea pail, tin plate, and enamel cup I had brought with me. I also picked up a few supplies that included a small piece of bacon, some bread, a package of tea, salt, flour, and cornmeal. The game pockets of my canvas coat bulged when I left the barracks with an unstrung fly rod swinging on the end of my arm.

      Although it had rained during the night, passing vehicles swirled up a faint dust. The green slopes that rose to one side of me blushed with the blooms of fireweed. Now and then I followed the flight of a magpie that blurred black and white and iridescent out of the alders to float over a tall growth that displayed giant white umbrels like Queen Anne’s lace. I passed beneath tall cottonwoods that lathered the road edges with a froth of catkins. Through the quivering leaves, I saw the high peaks, and I could hear the salmon splashing before I came to the bridge.

      I looked down into the clear water sweeping beneath me. The pool was restless with shapes and shadows and flashes that hurried over the rounded, flat stones of the bottom. Salmon arced in playful rolls. Everywhere the plunging and thrashing of them, the flirting of their tails, and the ringing slaps of their mingling sides. I was alone with them, thrilled.

      I slid down the banking of loose shale. I strung the fly rod and tied on one of the Colorado spinners that Seattle chef Harry Mae had given me. My hands were shaking. The lure dropped with a tinkling into midstream, and I watched the tiny blade twirl into the throng. I felt it nudge one fish, then another. Suddenly the line hissed tight and sliced into the current. My reel screeched. Out he came, scattering the water white. I kept a steady pressure on him, following him along the bank as if he were a spirited dog on a long, fragile leash.

      My heart raced as I worked him into the shallows and up on the stones. He gasped with a metallic glitter of gill covers. His upper jaw overhung his lower, and his back rose into a narrow-bladed hump. Viewed from above, his snout tapered like a shark’s. He was not quite as bright as the fish in the bay. Olive green, flecked with black, irregular ovals, shaded the upper half of his body, while through his midsection gleamed a silver and lavender streak to his spotted tail. The inside of the lower jaw and tongue were black. I had caught my first humpback, pink, or black-mouthed salmon. He would weigh perhaps five pounds, much more fish than I needed. I watched him revive in the shallows, then feebly wag back to where he had come from.

      I caught several more. Their frenzied splashes mingled with my whoops of delight. The females were beautifully streamlined, smaller-headed, and reminded me of large rainbow trout. My wrist ached from the fish I had landed as well as those I had lost. Not all had struck the lure. Some had been accidentally snagged in the fin or the tail. I had been introduced to salmon. Now I wanted to meet the Dolly Vardens.

      As I followed the curving of the creek bank, I noticed definite changes in the salmon. The farther I moved upstream, the more aged they became. They were losing their glitter. The males were developing hooked beaks and grotesque humps. Dorsal fins masting out of the current were margined with a white fungus.

      I came to a small, abandoned bridge. My attention was drawn to what I thought was a phoebe or some other kind of flycatcher, flittering about and disappearing into the shadows of the girders. Suddenly this foolish bird dropped into the current, swam like a field mouse, and popped into full view once more atop a moss-covered rock. He bobbed as if doing calisthenics. His upright stub of a tail gave him the appearance of a large, gray wren. Fascinated, I watched him submerge and forage along the bottom. He surfaced powder dry, his bill full of wriggling things, and flew up beneath the bridge to silence the shrilling of the nestlings there.

      “Son of a gun,” I muttered. “That’s got to be a water ouzel.”

      Along the hillsides grew large-butted alders, their trunks sheathed in moss for several feet before giving way to a bleached, scaly growth sprinkled with reddish caps. These thickets were dappled in gloom. The hoarse yelps of ravens, the complaining gulls sliding their shadows over the black sand before me, and the thrashes of spawning salmon provided fitting background music for a dramatic entrance. I looked about apprehensively. It wasn’t hard to imagine a shaggy Kodiak shouldering out of the tangle and towering on his hind legs to look me over.

      I stopped at a glassy run where many salmon hovered and flirted above their gravel territories. Holding positions below them were the barely visible, sleek, gray shapes … the Dolly Varden waiting for the eggs to flow.

      I cast the small spinner and fly across the current, letting it swing downstream, twitching my rod tip to make the lure twinkle. A gluttonous flash … WHOP … that abrupt downward swipe of the tip and the telegraphing into my wrist of squirming life. The trout writhed on the surface like a bright grub doubling itself to get out of the light. He tumbled and thrashed until he ran out of water. I studied his fifteen-inch length and wished I had a camera. Although he resembled a brook trout, he was more slender, and his tail was slightly forked.

      I had read that the name “Dolly Varden” came from either a pattern of cloth or a Charles Dickens character who wore brightly colored petticoats, but the present silvery sheen of the fish from a sojourn in the sea had all but erased his red spots and mottled shades of green.

      “So