Taku Inlet ran mainly north and south, with the glaciers crawling down to the western shore, but on the eastern bank, directly opposite the snout of a beautiful emerald glacier, a small but lively river with many waterfalls debouched, and nine miles up its course a lake of heavenly grace opened up, not large in comparison with many of Alaska's lakes, but incomparable with its ring of six or, from some vantage points, seven mountains which formed a near-circle to protect it.
This remote spot, which not many visitors, or natives either, ever saw, had been named by Arkady Voronov, during one of his explorations, Lake Pleiades, as his journal explained:
On this day we camped opposite the beautiful green glacier which noses into the inlet on the west. A river scintillating in the sunlight attracted my attention, and with two sailors from the Romanov, I explored it for a distance of nine miles. It would be quite unnavigable for even a canoe, because it came tumbling down over rocks, even forming at times small waterfalls eight and ten feet high.
Since it was obvious to us that we were not going to find a better waterway on this course, and since grizzly bears started at us twice, to be deflected by shots over their heads, we had decided to return to our ship with nothing but a fine walk for our labors when one of the sailors, who was breaking the path upstream, shouted back: 'Captain Voronov! Hurry!
Something remarkable!'
When we overtook him we saw that his cry was not misleading, for ahead of us, rimmed by six beautiful mountains, lay one of the clearest small lakes I have ever seen.
It lay at an elevation, I should guess from the nature of our climb, of about nine hundred feet, not much higher, and it was marred by nothing. Only the bears and whatever fish were in the lake inhabited this magnificent refuge, and we decided on the moment, all three of us, to camp here for the night, for we were loath to depart from such an idyllic place.
I therefore asked one of the men to volunteer for a hurried trip back to the Romanov to fetch tents and to bring with him one or two other sailors who might like to share the experience with us, and the man who stepped forward said: 'Captain, with so many bears, I think he should come too,' indicating his partner. 'And he better bring his gun.' I consented, for I realized that I, with my own gun, could protect myself in a settled spot, while they, being on the move, might attract more attention from the bears.
Off they went, and I was left alone in this place of rare beauty. But I did not stay in one place, as planned, because I was lured by the constantly changing attitude of the six mountains which stood guard, and when I had moved some distance to the east, I saw to my surprise that there were not six mountains but seven, and in that moment I determined the name of this lake, Pleiades, because we all know that this little constellation has seven stars, but without a telescope we can see only six.
As mythology teaches, the visible six sisters each married gods, but Merope, the hidden seventh, fell in love with a mortal, and thus hides her face in shame.
Lake Pleiades it became, and on three subsequent visits to this eastern area I camped there. It remains the happiest memory of my duty in Alaska, and if, in future generations, some descendant of mine elects to return to these Russian lands, I hope he or she will read these notes and seek out this jewel of a lake.
In September 1900 one hundred million extremely minute eggs of the sockeye salmon were deposited in little streams feeding into that lake. They were delivered by female salmon in lots of four thousand each, and we shall follow the adventures of one such lot, and one salmon within that lot.
The sockeye, one of five distinct types of salmon populating Alaskan waters, had been named by a German naturalist serving Vitus Bering. Using the proper Latin name for salmon plus a native word, he called it Oncorhynchus Nerka, and the solitary egg of that hundred million whose progress we shall watch will bear that name.
The egg which, when fertilized by milt, or sperm, would become Nerka was placed by its mother in a carefully prepared redd, or nest, in the gravelly bottom of a little stream near the lake and left there without further care for six months. It was abandoned not through the carelessness of its parents but because it was their inescapable nature to die soon after depositing and fertilizing the eggs which perpetuated their kind.
The site chosen for Nerka's redd had to fill several requirements. It had to be close to the lake in which the growing salmon would live for three years. The stream chosen must have a gravel bottom so that the minute eggs could be securely hidden; it must provide a good supply of other gravel which could be thrown over the redd to hide the incubating eggs; and most curious of all, it had to have a constant supply of fresh water welling up from below at an unwavering temperature of about 47° Fahrenheit and with a supersupply of oxygen.
It so happened that the area surrounding Lake Pleiades had varied radically during the past hundred thousand years, for when the Bering land bridge was open, the ocean level had dropped, taking the lake's level down with it, and as the different levels of the lake fluctuated, so did its shoreline. This meant that various benches had been established at various times, and Nerka's mother had chosen a submerged bench which had through the generations accumulated much gravel of a size that salmon preferred.
But how was the constant supply of upwelling water at a reliable temperature delivered?
Just as some ancient river had existed where John Klope's present-day Eldorado Creek flowed, but at a much different level, so another subterranean river, emerging from deep in the roots of the surrounding mountains, surged up through the gravels of that sunken bench, providing the rich supply of oxygen and constant temperature that kept both the lake and its salmon vital.
So for six months, his parents long dead, Nerka in his minute egg nestled beneath the gravel while from below flowed this life-giving water. It was one of the most precise operations of natureperfect flow of water, perfect temperature, perfect hiding place, perfect beginning for one of the most extraordinary life histories in the animal kingdom. And one final attribute of Lake Pleiades could be considered the most remarkable of all, as we shall see six years later: the rocks which lined the lake and the waters which flowed into it from the submerged rivulets carried minute traces perhaps one in a billion parts of this mineral and that, with the result that Lake Pleiades had a kind of lacustrine fingerprint which would differentiate it from any other lake or river in the entire world.
Any salmon born, as Nerka would soon be, in Lake Pleiades would bear with him always the unique imprint of his lake. Was this memory carried in his bloodstream, or in his brain, or in his olfactory system, or perhaps in a group of these attributes in conjunction with the phases of the moon or the turning of the earth? No one knew.
One could only guess, but that Nerka and Lake Pleiades on the western shore of Alaska were indissolubly linked, no one could deny.
Still only a minute egg, he nestled in the gravel as subterranean waters welled up through the bench to sustain him, and each week he grew closer to birth. In January 1901, deep under the thick ice which pressed down upon the tributary stream, the egg which would become Nerka, along with the other four thousand fertilized eggs of his group, underwent a dramatic change. His egg, a brilliant orange color, showed through the skin an eye with a bright rim and an intensely black center. Unquestionably it was an eye, and it bespoke the emerging life within the egg; the unwavering supply of cold, fresh water welling up through the gravel ensured the continuance and growth of that life.
But the natural attrition that decimated these minute creatures was savage. Of Nerka's original four thousand, only six hundred survived the freezing gravel, the diseases and the predation by larger fish.
In late February of that year these six hundred eggs of Nerka's group began to undergo a series of miraculous changes, at the conclusion of which they would become full-fledged salmon. The embryo Nerka slowly absorbed the nutrients from the yolk sac, and as the interchange occurred, he grew and developed swimming motions. Now he obtained the first of a bewildering series
of names, each marking a major step in his growth.
He was an alevin.
When his yolk was completely absorbed, the creature was still not a proper fish, only a minute translucent wand with enormous black eyes and, fastened to his belly, a huge sac of liquid nutrient upon which he must live for the next crucial weeks.
He was an ugly, misshapen, squirming thing, and any passing predator could gulp down hundreds of him at a time. But he was a potential fish with a monstrously long head, functioning eyes and a trailing translucent tail. Rapidly in the constantly moving waters of his stream he began to consume plankton, and with the growth which this produced, his protruding sac was gradually resorbed until the swimming thing was transformed into a self-sufficient baby fishling.
At this point Nerka left his natal stream and moved the short distance into the lake, where he was properly called a fry, and in this condition he showed every characteristic, except size, of a normal fresh-water fish. He would breathe like one through his gills; he would eat like one; he would learn to swim swiftly to dodge larger predators; and it would seem to any observer that he was well adapted to spend the rest of his life in this lake. It would, in those first years, have been preposterous to think that one day, still to be determined by his rate of growth and maturation, he would be able to convert his entire life processes so radically that he would be completely adapted to salt water; at this stage of his development salt water would have been an inclement milieu.
Ignorant of his strange destiny, Nerka spent 1901 and 1902 adjusting to life within the lake, which presented two contradictory aspects. On the one hand it was a savage home where salmon fry were destroyed at appalling rates. Larger fish hungered for him. Birds sought him out, especially the merganser ducks that abounded on the lake, but also kingfishers and stiltlike birds with long legs and even longer beaks that could dart through the water with incredible accuracy to snap up a tasty meal of salmon. It seemed as if everything in the lake lived on fry, and half of Nerka's fellow survivors vanished into gullets before the end of the first year.
But the lake was also a nurturing mother which provided young fry a multitude of dark places in which to hide during daylight hours and a jungle of underwater grasses in which they could lose themselves if light, dancing off their shimmering skin, betrayed their presence to the larger fish. Nerka learned to move only in the darkest nights and to avoid those places where these fish liked to feed, and since in these two years he was not even three inches long, and most things that swam were larger and more powerful than he, it was only by exercising these precautions that he did survive.
He was now a fingerling, a most appropriate name, since he was about the size of a woman's little finger, and as his appetite increased, the comforting lake provided him, in its safer waters, nutritious insect larvae and various kinds of plankton. As he grew older he fed upon the myriad tiny fishes which flashed through the lake, but his main delight was twisting upward, head out of water, to snare some unsuspecting insect. Meanwhile, in the town of Juneau, a scant seventeen miles distant over a glacier-strewn route, impossible to travel on foot, forty miles by an easy water route, creatures of a much different life history were working out their own tangled destinies.
WHEN TOM VENN CAME DOWN TO JUNEAU TO OPEN THE Ross & Raglan store in the spring of 1902, he found the thriving little town a joy after the bitter cold and raw lawlessness of Nome. The settlement which many had been proposing as the new capital of Alaska, replacing outmoded Sitka, which lay off to one side at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, was already an attractive place, even though it was cramped into a narrow strip between tall mountains to the northeast and a beautiful sea channel to the southwest.
Wherever Tom looked in Juneau he saw variation, for even nearby Douglas Island, which crowded in from the south, had its own distinctive mountains, while big ships from Seattle berthed a hand's breadth from the main streets. But the majesty of Juneau, which differentiated it from all other Alaskan towns, was the huge, glistening Mendenhall Glacier, which nosed its way to the water's edge west of town. It was a magnificent, living body of ice that snapped and crackled as it ground its way toward the sea, yet so available that children could take their picnics along its edge in summer.
Another glacier, less famous and visible, approached Juneau from the opposite direction, as if it sought to enclose the little town in its embrace, but the encroaching ice did not determine the temperature of Juneau, which was warmed by the great currents sweeping in from Japan. It had a pleasant climate, marked by much rain and fog but punctuated by days of the most enchanting purity when the sun made all components of the varied scene sparkle like jewels.
After he had been in town for only a few days, Tom selected the location for his store, a lot on Franklin Street near the corner of Front. It had the advantage of facing the waterfront, so that he could have easy access to the ships that docked there. But it also had a disadvantage, because a small hut already occupied it, and he would have to buy the shack if he wanted the land. In the long interests of his company, he decided to do so.
When the time came to close the deal, he learned that the land and the building had different owners. The land belonged to a gentleman from Seattle, the building to a local Tlingit who worked along the waterfront. So, after paying for the land, Tom found himself in negotiation with a fine-looking, dark-skinned Indian in his late thirties. An able fellow according to reports along the docks, he bore the unusual name of Sam Bigears, and as soon as Tom saw him he supposed that he was going to have trouble with this taciturn fellow. But that was not the case.
'You want house, I glad to sell.'
'Where will you go?'
'I have land, fine spot Taku Inlet. Pleiades River.'
'So you're leaving Juneau?'
'No. One day canoe trip, tassall.' Tom was to learn that Sam Bigears used this comprehensive word to dismiss a world of worries: 'Fish broke the line, got away, tassall,' or 'Rain seven days, tassall.'
Within fifteen minutes Tom and Bigears agreed upon a price for the shack sixty dollars and when Venn handed over the check, Bigears chuckled: 'Thank you. Maybe house worth nothing. Maybe belong Mr. Harris, along with ground.'
'Well, it was your house. You were living in it. And I'd be very happy if you stayed around to help me build the store.'
'I like that,' and the informal partnership was formed, with Sam Bigears assuming control of materials and the time sheets of the other workmen. He proved himself to be an intelligent, clever craftsman with a positive genius for devising new ways of performing old tasks. Since he was good at woodworking, he took charge of the doors and stairs.
'Where did you learn how to build a stair?' Tom asked one day. 'That's not easy.'
'Many buildings,' Sam said, pointing to Front and Franklin streets where stores and warehouses clustered. 'I work with good German carpenter. I like wood, trees, everything.'
One morning when Tom reported for work, having had a spacious breakfast in his hotel, he was astounded to find that a gigantic iceberg, much larger than his entire store and three stories high, had been driven into the channel by a westerly storm, and there it rested, right at his worksite, towering over the men hammering nails.
'What do we do about this?' Tom wanted to know, and Bigears replied: 'We wait till somebody tow it away,' and before noon a surprisingly small boat with a puffing steam engine hurried up, threw a lasso and chain around a projection from the iceberg, and slowly towed it out of the channel. Tom was amazed that such a small boat could dictate to such a monstrous berg, but as Bigears said: 'Boat knows what it's doing.
Iceberg just drifting, tassall,' and that was the difference. Once the berg started slowly moving away from shore, the little boat had no trouble keeping it headed in the right direction, and by midafternoon the berg was gone.
'Where did it come from?' Tom asked, and Bigears said: 'Glaciers. Maybe our glacier.
You ever see Mendenhall?' When Tom said 'No,' Sam punched him in the arm: 'Sunda
y we make picnic. I like picnics.'
So on Sunday, after Tom had attended the Presbyterian church and surveyed with satisfaction the progress of his building, he waited for Bigears to fetch him for the trip to the glacier, and to his surprise the Tlingit appeared in a two horse carriage rented from a man for whom he had worked and driven by an attractive young Indian girl of about fourteen whom he introduced as his daughter: 'This Nancy Bigears. Her mother see glacier many times, stay home.'
'I'm Nancy,' she said, extending her hand, and Tom felt both that she was very young, and that she was quite mature in her solid posture toward the world, for she looked at him without embarrassment and handled the horses with confidence.
Bowing to the girl, Tom asked: 'Why Nancy? Why not a Tlingit name?' and Sam said:
'She got Tlingit name too. But she live with white people in Juneau. She have name of missionary's wife. Fine name, tassall.'
Nancy was an Indian, no doubt about that, with an even dark skin, black eyes and hair, and that saucy air of freedom which came from living in close association with the land. She wore Western clothes, but with a touch of piping or fur here and there to retain the Indian look, but the two things which typed her as Tlingit were the handsome dark braids which hung below her shoulders and the big decorated boots that covered her feet. They gave her otherwise slender body a heavy pinned-to-earth look which matched her pragmatic approach.
The ride to the glacier was extremely pleasant, with Bigears explaining where he lived, now that his shack had disappeared, and Nancy telling of her days in school.