‘Help!’ I thought, when I read the Author’s Note. ‘It’s about salmon, and I hate fishing.’ But by the first page I was hooked. Adam Weymouth writes well. He is poetic, but also precise.
His subject is the return of the ‘king’ salmon to their birthplace and final destination, the north ridge of McNeil Lake in Canada.
These fish are many pounds of muscle, toned from years of swimming headlong into Pacific storms, and their flesh is as red as blood. They force against the Yukon’s current, shouldering their way upriver, setting their fins like sails. Eventually they will push thousands of miles into North America’s interior. They will reach mountain lakes; they will reach the clouds.
Weymouth canoes along the Yukon — at almost 2,000 miles, the longest salmon run in the world — starting at McNeil Lake (the salmon that return there will have travelled further than any on the planet) and ending at the Bering Sea.
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