The Spawning Grounds (2 page)

September, present day

THE SOCKEYE ARE
, by nature, transformers. They change in appearance throughout their lives, protecting themselves in this way. As fry, their skin is striped and spotted to conceal them within the vegetation of the lake as they grow. As they make themselves ready for their journey to the sea, their skin becomes reflection, becomes ocean.

Then, four years after their lives began in gravel, they come out of hiding to reveal their warrior natures. As they return home, their skin reddens, a hump appears on their backs, and their faces flush green. The sockeye paint themselves for battle as battle they must: they fight every inch of their way home, upriver, upriver, upstream. By these vestments, they know their own generation—who they can wrestle for territory and who they can take as a mate—once they reach the spawning grounds.

White settlers thought the story of the sockeye's return was incredible, impossible. But the
Secwepemc
—in English,
the Shuswap—knew the sockeye followed the faint scent of home all the way from the Pacific up the Fraser, through Hells Gate, and then up the Thompson to their home river and spawning grounds, and even to the marriage bed in which their parents had conceived them.

The sockeye Hannah Robertson picked up this day was at the end of this long journey, exhausted from it. She carried it up the middle of Lightning River, a river that was no longer difficult to traverse, at least not here, at the shallows near the lake. To her right, equipment sat idle by the unfinished houses of the new lakeshore development as protestors had blocked the construction crew's passage at the bridge. To her left, her grandfather's fields and pastures bordered the river from the lake all the way up to the road. Here, the river widened, dispersing into shoals and sandbars as it spilled into Shuswap Lake. The water was so muddied and shallow, the few sockeye that had returned couldn't swim in it. Silt, sand and gravel, washed downriver from farms in the lower end of the valley and from the logged hills along the upper river, had collected here, blocking the salmon's entrance to their spawning grounds. The river grew narrower and the water progressively deeper as Hannah headed upriver towards Dead Man's Bend, but it was still far shallower than it should have been.

A line of her grandfather's fence posts dangled from barbed wire over the section of eroded bank at Dead Man's Bend, where the bodies of the drowned were often located. Shortly before her father was born, her grandfather had straightened the river there, attempting to add the fertile
soil to his hayfield. With no bush to hold the soil in place, the reclaimed land had simply washed away from under the fence, clogging the estuary with silt.

To make matters worse, trees from the logging upriver had formed a dam under the bridge over the narrows, lowering water levels below it. The many farmers and landowners who lived along these shores also drew water for their crops and lawns from here. After three years of hot, dry summers, water levels were so low that the sockeye attempting to swim from the lake to the spawning grounds couldn't navigate the lower part of the river. A few made it, but most beached on sand or got hung up on snags deposited by spring freshets and died.

Hannah had arranged to miss the coming week of classes in her environmental studies program to save the fish, to carry them upriver alongside a handful of other volunteers from the reserve. Her instructors understood. Every living thing around them depended on the return of the salmon. The rotting fish would nourish the water this fall and again in early spring when the sun warmed what was left of the sockeye's frozen bodies. Their flesh would feed the tiny creatures that in turn fed the sockeye fry when they burst from their stone nests come spring. In this way, the sockeye fed their young with their own bodies and were resurrected within their children's flesh. If not enough sockeye returned during this run, if not enough died here, the river would starve, the sockeye fry would starve, the lake would starve, the eagles and bears and the land around them would starve.

Hannah carried the fish around Dead Man's Bend and released it into the spawning grounds. Then she squatted to rinse her hands, reminding herself not to touch her mouth. Along with the rotting bodies of the few salmon that had made it this far to spawn, the water was also fetid with leaks from septic fields and the feces of cattle from farms up and down the river, and poisoned by pesticides and herbicides sprayed on riverside fields and lawns.

On shore, her brother, Brandon, waited for her on Eugene's Rock, the name etched into the boulder by an ancestor she knew little about:
Eugene Robertson, September 1857
. Eugene had also chiselled a crude representation of a fish, a symbol of his faith, Hannah had assumed as a child when she still had a faith of her own. Now, at eighteen, she wondered if Eugene had simply loved fishing as much as her grandfather did.

“Finally decided to help, did you?” Hannah asked her younger brother. Brandon
was
supposed to help her this weekend, as the other volunteers were at the protest on the bridge, but he had quickly grown tired of the chore. He had complained that his hands ached from carrying the heavy fish and his feet had lost feeling from walking through the cold water.

Brandon shook his head. “I figured you'd want to know Grandpa's protesting the protest.”

Hannah shaded her eyes to look to where Bran pointed. The protestors had nailed signs to the bridge railings:
They Disturbed a Secwepemc Burial Site!; This Is Unceded Secwepemc Territory;
and
O Canada, Your Home on Native Land
. And
from the white environmentalists:
Stop Overdevelopment on Our River! Save Our Fish!
Indians from the reserve on the far bank had started the protest after a construction crew widening the road to the development had dug up the shallow grave of a toddler, an Indian kid, old bones from the gold-rush era. White environmentalists had jumped on board for this day's protest rally, hoping to bring attention to the damage the new lakefront development would inflict on the river and the spawning grounds.

Just below the bridge, their grandfather, Stew, had ridden his horse into the water as he could barely stand on his own, to fish the deep pool below the rapids, thumbing his nose at the protestors on the bridge above. He knew he couldn't fish the river anymore. The band had posted a sign on the far shore that read:
This river is closed to all fishing. By order of Lightning Bay Indian Band Council
.

“Shit,” Hannah said.

“You want me to handle it this time?”

“No, I'll deal with it.” She started towards shore, but then a shadow passed over them both and Hannah looked up. “Bran, look!” She pointed to the sky.

Brandon squinted as they watched two eagles lock talons and spiral down together. They disengaged and flew off, only to meet again in the sky. “Are the eagles fighting over territory?” Brandon asked. “The salmon?”

“Sometimes that's what it's about,” she said, “but that's a male and a female courting. They cartwheel like that in spring, for hours.”

“So why are they cartwheeling now?”

“I don't know. Sometimes their talons lock and they'll fall to the ground and starve to death. Remember those eagle skeletons Grandpa showed us in the bush over there?” She pointed to the reserve land above the new lakeside development, one of the few places where trees still grew along the river shore.

Brandon nodded. It had been strange to see the eagle claws still clutching each other. The bones had been ancient and moss covered. He expected they were still there, hidden beneath snowberry bushes and kinnikinnick.

He shielded his eyes to watch as the cartwheeling eagles once again fell from the sky. The huge birds separated just before hitting water. It was then he saw the boy about his own age standing naked in the middle of the river.

“Hey, do you see that?” Brandon asked his sister.

“See what?” she said.

The boy sank under the surface before Brandon could explain. He stepped into the water, wading upriver, as he scanned the depths for the boy. A sockeye salmon, startled by his intrusion into the spawning grounds, flicked out of his way, its snout and teeth terrifying, an image from a nightmare. Brandon saw something coming towards him from behind the fish, something that moved like a swimming snake. The thing was transparent, not quite there, made from water, like a wave.

Brandon panicked, fell backwards into the river, attempted to take a breath and took in water instead.

Hannah ran to him and helped him onto a shore churned into gumbo by the stinking hooves of their grandfather's cattle. “You okay?” she asked, as he coughed.

“There was something in the water,” he said, when he was able. He could still see the thing, rippling just beneath the surface, heading back to the narrows.

Hannah looked back at the river. “What, the salmon?”

“A water mystery, I think,” Brandon said.

“A
water mystery
?” Hannah laughed. “You don't actually believe Alex's stories, do you?” Alex was one of their friends from the reserve. Hannah had known him for as long as she could remember, but she rarely sat through his storytelling sessions. Bran did, though. It was Alex's accounts of his people's initiation rituals that interested Bran most. In the old days, Shuswap kids had gone out alone into the bush to hone their survival skills and seek visions of their guardian spirits. That appealed to Brandon. He craved some ritual to mark his entrance into manhood.

Brandon didn't bother to answer. Instead he grabbed his cell from the jean jacket he'd dumped on shore and texted Alex about what he had just seen. He turned to look upriver at the bridge over the narrows where Alex sat with other young men from the reserve, and as he did so, he saw the naked boy rise from the river to once again stand on water. The boy watched him as intently as Brandon watched him.

“What is it?” Hannah asked her brother.

But as soon as she spoke the boy was gone again. He didn't sink into the water this time. He simply vanished.

“Bran, what's going on?”

“Nothing,” Brandon said. He watched the river for a time, searching for ripples in the water, for the boy to resurface. Above them, the eagle pair circled and cried
eye-EYE
, as Alex's ancestors had, to urge a storyteller on.
Eye-EYE!

STEW
'
S BORDER COLLIE
, Abby, stood on alert, staring at something in the water. His mare watched the river with the dog, her ears cocked forward, and it was then, as Stew looked to see what had caught his animals' attention, that he saw the boy standing on the water. A naked Indian kid in his teens. In recent years, as this world loosened its grip on Stew, he often saw this boy watching him from the river. He glanced at the bridge to see if any of the protestors had noticed the boy. When he looked back at the river, the boy was gone.

Stew sat on Spice, a strawberry roan who stood up to her chest in rushing water. This horse's legs were his now. His hips and knees were so far gone that he was lame without her, and couldn't stand upright in the river to fish. Here, at the deep pool below the rapids, the water boiled as it did nowhere else on this river, and could pull a man under. The water appeared thick, the consistency of glycerine, and was
jade green, reflecting the algae clinging to the rocks beneath the surface; tiny bubbles rose up from below as if from a submerged creature. As he cast, he kept a firm grip on his glass rod, his old friend. The line arched over water and caught light, like spiders' silk floating on the breeze. The protestors on the bridge upriver booed at him. Stew cast and cast again, just to taunt them.

In the past, before those logs had dammed the flow above the bridge, sockeye had grouped here like pilgrims paying reverence at a holy place. They had waited for some signal, some change in light, some clue in the smell of the water that only they could discern, before leaping the rapids to spawn in the clean gravel of the upper river. Rainbow trout had often waited with them to eat the orange-red eggs. The trout, following the salmon up this river, were the fish Stew cast for, but now there were only a handful in the water beneath him and they weren't biting.

Abby barked from shore and Stew turned to see a woman walking up the river path. As the dog bounded towards her, Stew squinted at her in the way a lost hiker searches the forest for human trails. A wave of relief passed over him as he recognized her as his own granddaughter. “Hannah,” he said.

“What are you doing, Grandpa?” she called.

“What does it look like? I'm fishing.”

She pointed at the rifle in his scabbard as she reached him. “With a gun?”

“Gun's for trespassers. Those protestors left my gates open. Cows got onto the road, into Gina's yard.” He nodded
at their neighbour's small acreage across from his own front gate. “I had a bugger of a time getting them back in.”

As Hannah attempted to get as close to her grandfather as she could, she stepped onto a rock outcropping over the river that had been rounded into a bowl of stone by swirling eddies. River breezes carried the smell of the horse to her, along with the smell of rum from her grandfather. The red feather in the brim of his cowboy hat fluttered in the breeze. Over the summer his face had taken on the gaunt look of the terminally ill.

“Grandpa, you know you're not allowed to fish here anymore.”

“And that asshole's not allowed on my property.”

Hannah turned to follow her grandfather's gaze to Alex, who was heading towards them from the bridge, following the river path that ran the length of her grandfather's land. He looked so different from the boy she'd known in her childhood. He had grown muscular and was almost too well groomed, like an actor on a movie set, purposefully setting himself apart from both the rez community where he lived and the valley at large with his expensive jeans and leather jacket, this urban identity he had assumed. Hannah felt intimidated by him now in a way she never had before he went to university, when he was still that gangly teen.

Stew tucked his fishing rod between his thigh and saddle, pulled his rifle from the scabbard, and tipped back his cowboy hat as he aimed the gun at Alex. Alex stopped in mid-step and gave Hannah a look that said,
Here we go again
.

“Grandpa, put the gun down.”

Stew ignored her, peering at Alex through the scope on his gun. “What the hell do you want?” Stew yelled. “What are you doing on my land?”

Alex held out both hands as if to offer himself up. “If you're looking for something to fill your freezer, I'll take you moose hunting on my uncle's hunting ground,” he called to Stew. “Nothing but tough meat on these bones.”

“So you
are
off the reserve, then? You look Indian, though it's hard to tell these days. All these red-haired, blue-eyed Indians. My granddaughter here says she's going to college with a blonde who claims she's Cree. Says she's got status and everything.”

Hannah felt the heat rise to her face. She realized her grandfather didn't recognize Alex, even though he had been to the farmhouse many times over the years. To him, Alex was just another trespasser, another protestor, another Indian.

“Grandpa, this is Alex. You remember,
Coyote
.”

Alex made a face at hearing the nickname. His aunt Sara had given it to him, not because she thought Alex was the archetypal trickster of many of the stories he told, but because his aunt felt he—like Coyote—spent too much of his energy on getting laid. Or at least that used to be the case, before he went to university, when he seemed to have a new girlfriend every week. Hannah should have been too young at the time to be jealous, but she had been.

“Alex is Dennis Moses's grandson, his great-grandson,” Hannah told her grandfather. “He comes over to our place, remember?”

Recognition crossed Stew's face, and he lowered his gun. Alex took that as his cue to continue walking towards them. He joined Hannah on the outcropping over the river.

“Grandpa's pissed because the protestors left the far gate open,” Hannah told him. “The cows got out.”

“What the hell are you protesting anyway?” Stew asked Alex. “You people are always getting worked up about your bones. What does it matter? The kid is dead, isn't he?”

“How would you feel if I dug up old Eugene's bones?”

“You don't even know who that kid is.”

Alex licked his thumb and rubbed a smudge from Hannah's cheek before responding. She wiped her face with her sleeve, embarrassed both by his touch and her grubby appearance.

“He's family,” Alex said to Stew. “I'll tell the others to shut the gates if they go through the pastures. Most of them will be gone in a couple of hours anyway. But you've got to stop fishing. Zach is threatening to call Fish and Wildlife.” He waved and his cousin Zach waved back from the bridge. Zach was in his early thirties, several years older than Alex. He was more political than Alex, and bitter. Hannah did her best to avoid him.

“Nobody's going to tell me I can't fish in this river,” Stew said. “I've been taking fish out of these waters all my life, just like my father and his father before him.” Stew lifted his chin towards Eugene's Rock. “Every generation of my family—going all the way back to Eugene Robertson—fished here. And goddammit, my grandson is going to fish
here too.” Bran biked towards them now down a path so slender it was hard to believe Stew's cattle had created it. One cow had followed the steps of the next, their hooves slipping neatly into the hoof prints of the one before them, much like his own family had.

“Oh, I know all about it,” said Alex. “My family fished here for thousands of years before you guys turned up and trashed the place. Keep it up and there won't be any fish here to catch.”

“When are you Indians going to get over the fact that this land belongs to us now,” Stew said.

“You remember what my grandpa Dennis told you every time you asked him that?”

Stew looked away. He did remember. Dennis Moses had said white men were like infants in their baths who tried to grab the water their mothers poured over them, thinking the water was a thing they could possess. But, Dennis said, they would never own this river or this land. The waters, the soil, would run through the cracks between their fingers, the way bathwater runs through a child's fist.

Nevertheless, Stew tapped his chest and repeated himself, defiant. “It's ours now.”

Alex shook his head but didn't respond. Brandon skidded his bike to a stop next to him, as Abby leapt and barked around him. He petted the dog to calm her as he looked at the gun in Stew's hands.

“Where the hell have you been?” Stew asked him.

“Had to change my clothes,” he said. “I fell in the river.”

“I told you, never swim in that water. You know how many have died here? Christ, your own mother.”

“You don't need to remind him,” Hannah said.

“I said I fell in,” Brandon told his grandfather. “And I was just in the shallows.”

“So you saw your first water mystery, did you?” Alex asked Brandon, grinning.

“What was that?” At last Stew tucked his rifle back in his scabbard.

“I saw something in the water when I fell in,” Brandon said.

“Something like what?” Stew asked.

“I don't know. It was see-through. But it
was
there, you know?”

“Like a ghost swimming through water,” Alex said.

Brandon turned to look at him. “You've seen it?”

Alex paused, glancing at Stew. “Many people have seen it.”

“I thought I saw a boy, too, standing on the river,” Brandon said. “I mean he was standing right on the water, like he was Jesus or something. Then he sank and I saw that ghost thing swimming towards me.”

Alex nodded. “That's the water mystery. The boy and the river ghost are one and the same.”

Stew asked, “Your head wasn't underwater, was it? You didn't drink that thing in?” His grandfather's expression was so grim, Brandon laughed a little in confusion.

“No. Hannah pulled me up.”

“Seriously,” said Alex. “That ghost in the water didn't get inside you, did it?”

Brandon shook his head. “No, I saw it on the river after.”

“What's this all about?” Hannah asked.

“Nothing,” Stew said, cutting off Alex's answer. Then he eyed Brandon. “Your imagination,” he said. He settled himself on his horse to face the river. Hannah raised an eyebrow at Alex, but he held up a hand as if to say,
Later
.

As Stew cast his line, Hannah said, “For god's sake, Grandpa, put the rod down. You don't want to get yourself in trouble.”

Stew reeled in his line and cast again. The fly hovered in the air until a swallow swooped down and nabbed it, flitting off with the fly in its mouth as it would a mosquito. Stew swore, cranked his line and the swallow fluttered towards him. “My own granddaughter thinks she can tell me what to do. Says I got to fence the river so my cattle can't get themselves a drink when they want it. Then all of them environmentalist assholes at that meeting last week told me I can't sell my own land.”

“They don't care if you sell,” Alex told him. “They just don't want you to sell to this developer.”

Stew grabbed the swallow and, tucking the glass rod under his arm, plucked the hook from the bird's mouth. “The lot of you can go to hell,” he said as he opened his fist to let the bird go. The swallow flapped, confused, then darted away to skim the surface of the water.

“You know, you're the only local who supports that housing development,” Alex told Stew.

“I don't give a rat's ass about that hellhole,” Stew said. “I can barely walk even with my canes. Won't be long before I can't get on the tractor. What am I going to do? Feed the cattle from a wheelchair? What kind of life is that? I want a few years of comfort before I'm gone. Is that asking too much?”

“You're always going on about how this farm has been passed on one generation to the next,” Brandon told him.

Stew turned in his saddle to face his grandson. “Are you going to take it over? You up to running a cow-calf operation?”

Brandon had nothing to say to that.

“Your father sure as hell isn't.”

“You didn't ask me if I wanted the farm,” Hannah said. “I suppose because I'm a woman.”

“You're a woman now, are you?” Alex asked her, and grinned. And Hannah realized that Alex still saw her as that girl he had left behind. Hannah had only been fourteen when he went to university.

“I won't hand you the farm because you're a goddamned environmentalist,” Stew told her. “You'd sell off the cows and let these fields go to bush.”

“And what's that developer going to do?” She waited for him to respond, but he only cast again. “You're right,” she said. “I would let the land along the river recover. The spawning grounds are on our land and they need protection. We're losing the salmon.”

“No way I'm backing out of the deal now. That developer's got his offer on the table, as long as the zoning change
goes through. All that's in the way now are those assholes.” Stew pointed his fishing rod at the protestors. “You tell your friends over there to get their cars the hell out of my field. They're frickin' trespassers. That goes for you too,” he told Alex. “Go on, get out of here.”

Stew leaned to poke Alex with his fishing rod and when Alex stepped back the old glass rod slipped from his grasp and fell into the water. As it circled on an eddy, Stew bent to save it but the rod disappeared as if something had yanked it down. Stew made one last attempt to retrieve it, lost his balance and slid from his saddle into the river.

“Shit,” Hannah cried. She jumped in after her grandfather, weighed down by her waders, and Brandon leapt in after her. Cold river water filled Hannah's boots, grabbed her legs, lit up her scalp, and tried to pull her below.

Brandon strained to keep his head above water as he reached for his grandfather, but they were all drawn under the surface by the boiling eddies. For a split second before he was submerged, Brandon glimpsed the naked boy standing in the middle of the river, as if on solid ground. Underwater, Brandon kicked and kicked and kicked, and then, his energy spent, he sank, drifting like a dying salmon. He was aware of the water that enveloped him, but he no longer attempted to remove himself from it. He opened his eyes as something brushed past his arm and saw a sockeye dart away. Then he saw the thing snaking through water towards him, this energy in the water, this ghost; it pushed into him, filling his mouth, travelling down his throat and through the streams of his body. He felt the thrashing in his
mind, a disturbance of black waters. He exhaled the last of his breath and bubbles leapt from his mouth, and with them his soul expanded: he was rushing water; he was blinding reflection; he was air, and robin's egg sky.