THE PINK RANCHERS
It was slack tide when we broke out our waders, slipping into them on the edge of Dayville Road, the eagles and gulls perched above us, watching from the spruces as we strung up our rods and tied on silver flash flies. Not that the flies we picked would likely matter much, what with the sheer numbers of salmon cutting wakes in the bay. Standing on the edge of Valdez Arm—some thirty miles south of where the Exxon Valdez and its fifty million gallons of crude oil ran aground on Bligh Reef thirty-two years earlier—the six of us were now ready to wade across a section of flats that would not disappoint, as the tide was about to turn and push with it waves of the 16 million returning pink salmon that had been pumped from Solomon Gulch Hatchery into floating pens just two years prior. The sun had been up for an hour, but the fog was still heavy and low. We waded in together and soon lost sight of one another as we began casting among what felt like clouds. But we could hear what was going on—each of us stripping line from our reels, casting farther now, pushing out into the bay with the bottom firm underfoot and the wading easy.
When we were waist-deep we began to feel them. They pushed past us the way packs of dogs might, with a single hive-mind, unthinking, reactive, and unable to see clearly in the glacial water. The salmon—pods of them, great gangs of them—surged past us, tails beating on our thighs, our knees, our ankles, pulsing at times between our legs, parting around us, moving like flocks of crows or starlings—responding only to each other, assured and confident in their sheer numbers. They moved, I imagined, just as they had been moving through Prince William Sound and the Gulf of Alaska since they’d been released from their pens: as a pack, preying on what may come, mowing through anything that might fit into their little jaws.
We didn’t catch them on every cast, but for the next two hours there was not a moment when someone was not fighting a salmon, and there were times when all six of us were doing so at once. Sometimes you’d see only the arc of a rod above the fog. Sometimes you’d hear the sound of a tail pinned and slapping on waders, or—from above—the cry of a circling, covetous gull. More than anything, though, we heard the thrashing of fish. It was non-stop action. The fishing was unbelievably good. Amazingly good. Too good to be true. And the reason it seemed too good to be true is that it
