King Salmon

King Salmon

            Under the bone white moon lattices of king salmon ribs litter the banks of their birth streams.  Below the murmuring surfaces of westward running streams, smolts burst from their clear coral eggs stell wearing yolk sacs on their bulging bellies.  If the embryonic fish survive the hungry mouths of predators on their westward trips to Lake Michigan, they will return to their birth place at maturity.  It is their place to be born, to spawn and to die.

            The imprint of their birth place enters into their bodies along a sense organ called the lateral line that carries an accurate map and compass.  It is a network of circuitry more intricate than the West Michigan river systems.  The fish will be able to return with the certainty of the cycling planets and constellations of stars.

     In the jade green waters of the inland sea, Lake Michigan, king salmon gorge on smaller fish and crustaceans.  Their skins speckled with dark colored spots carry the blue sheen of sky and the earth tones of forest.  They feed their voracious dream of the birth stream until their bodies grow heavy with it. Their bodies are stuffed with coral eggs or pearly white milt—female and male.  For both sexes the dream is the same.  It enters the tops of their heads as the sun streams into their pineal gland and gathers force.

     In the freedom of the sweetwater sea, they bide their time, slowly fanning their tails, drifting through layers of warm and cool water called the thermocline.  They drift. In their bodies they carry the wordless undeniable dream: a rocky stream bottom in the shadows of pines, the traceries of ferns, and wildflowers.

            The dream gathers force as the harvest moon grows heavy on the horizon.  Sleek and round from a summer of feeding and their cargo of coral or pearl, they grow restless and cease their feeding.  All at once they streak toward the estuary, linger there for a while, then streak upstream toward their place.  It has been so since the Pleistocene times when the salmon breathed glacial melt water through their red gills.  It is still the same water and still the same urgent force: birth, procreation and death.

           So they ignore baited hooks, snares and leap dams following the ghosts of their migratory ancestors.  Finally they reach the place where they wriggled free of their gelatinous eggs and begin their journeys.  The female fans a hollow in the stones with her tail while the male waits and watches.  She releases the clear coral eggs then the male releases his pearly white milt to fertilize them.  The king salmon have spent it all.  They die and their elements enter other life cycles along the stream. Only their clean bones remain while the new generations gestate on the bottom of the stream.