The Spawning Grounds Read Free

cried
eye-EYE
, as Alex’s ancestors had, to urge a storyteller on.
Eye-EYE!

— 2 —
Unmooring
    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 wasjade 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 noddedat 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