Kokanee

Nate told us the kokanee salmon Maddie caught today had been swimming one hundred fifty feet below us when she started to pull it up. When it finally broke the surface we looked at the shimmering fish as if it were something from another world. The length of my thigh, it flopped onto the boat floor and the blast of air entering its lungs made its mouth gasp in Os.

The Os got smaller with each inhale, and the water it had been swimming in was now only droplets streaking down its silver scales. The wild fish slapped its thick tail against the boat floor and we flinched. What world is this? its widening eye seemed to be asking us. I was struck by the absence of eyelids, as if so fully did I see myself in it that I expected its eyes to be like mine. The slap of its abruptly useless tail slowed. Nate scooped it up and threw it in the cooler with the beer. As it suffocated slowly on the ice, I said, “Look at it looking at us.”

Nate picked it up with both hands and hammered its breathtakingly beautiful head three times against the handrail. On the third hit its eye splattered against the metal and its muscles gave way under its miraculous silver sheet of mirrors.

Nate lay it back in, its head mutilated. We could neither keep looking at it nor tear our eyes away. It disturbed me that its good eye, large and blind, glared up at us but I dared not say a word about it.

A moment ago, my cousin Clairie, her friend Maddie, and Maddie’s friend Nate, and I had been enjoying a gorgeous afternoon gently floating along the placid surface of the most impressive body of water any of us except Nate had ever seen, the Green River Gorge. The idea to catch a fish had sounded so pure. How did we think it was going to go? For its part the fish had understood everything, in its own way, even as its pupils dilated: It experienced itself as pure life-force, and now, on the grill at the picnic area under tall pines, it was spiced meat on foil. Now it was silver calories coursing our veins, livers, and brains, where its understanding that to pass through worlds is not to die must now pass through us.

Nate said he felt the same way the first time something had been killed in front of him. But he was four, not nineteen. He said this neither with derision nor with a wish to go back. “It is what it is,” he said, taking a swig from his beer. He’d given fishing up awhile out of boredom but lately he’d fallen so much back in love with it that he was going out four to five times a week. “What changed?” Maddie asked. He shrugged. “Frame of mind,” I guess. “A beautiful fish, Maddie,” he had said in the boat as he had carefully removed the hook from its mouth. “That’s got to be one of the largest I’ve seen,” he’d said, gripping it with both hands, laying it gently on the ice.

Identifying with the fish instead of with Nate, whose callousness had repulsed us, but who, we had to admit, had a point in everything he said, we had grimaced when its eye broke open and blood spurted onto the boat and Maddie’s left calf. “You’ll forget about it when you eat it,” he said. “You’ll say, Mmm.”

We felt we had murdered the fish and felt like the fish and so we felt sick and double-crossed by ourselves since its death was our fault. Its death was our idea of a nice afternoon on the water.

“It’s dead now, it don’t feel a thing,” Nate said. “Stop worrying about it.”

There was no arguing with Nate. It was dead, that was all there was to it. Whatever it had felt, it no longer felt, and would never feel again. And we ate its flesh that was as bright and deep a red as the walls of the gorge as if this color match had had some design behind it that justified us killing it and eating it. When Nate filleted it Maddie turned away and sat on a rock over the reservoir and looked into the deep green water where she could not see all the other still-alive fish swimming but knew they were there all the same, looking for food themselves, and this gave her some comfort. She had caught it, yes, and she would eat it, because it smelled delicious and there was no other prepared food for miles and no sense in letting it go to waste, but no, she would not watch it get cut up, thank you. As if that part would have been the one part that was going too far. Clairie went to be with Maddie. I watched Nate fillet the fish. And now, cut up, it was tasty and good and we all admitted it was so, because there was no sense in lying about it and besides, Maddie said, appreciating how it tasted was a way to honor it, and everything that had happened, and Clairie thanked God for the delicious meal and thanked Nate for preparing it for us.

Nate added evenly, as our lips got greasy, that maybe now that we’d given our thanks we could stop feeling like murderers and just feel like what we were, which was animals.