Question 1   Glossary

Return to the River The life of a Pacific Salmon. Mother Chinook had been digging her spawning redd for ten days now. Her tail was frayed and torn. Her gray skin was producing slime. A fungus spot was growing on her head, blinding one eye. She was very tired and the current continued to pull at her rotting body. Mother Chinook finally released the last of her thousands of eggs into the nest she had dug for them. A male salmon quickly fertilized the eggs. Mother Chinook carefully covered the eggs with sand as small stones settled on top of the sand. Old Senator Evans was leaning over the river bank watching intently as Mother Chinook completed her inborn spawning ritual. This didn't startle the salmon in the least. She was having a hard enough time keeping herself afloat with the rising river current. Over the next three months, the old man kept coming back to the redd Mother Chinook had left behind. "The river is rising high this season," thought Senator Evans to himself, "but I'm sure those little embryos are doing just fine in their nest." Meanwhile, Baby Spring, the salmon of this story, had hatched as an alevin into her redd. Spring's yolk sac, attached to her body, was her only food for another month. After a month, she and the other alevins in her nest pushed their way up through the gravel of their redd. Spring emerged as a little salmon fry. By this time, her yolk sac had become part of her body. Old Senator Evans kept his eye on little Spring and watched her begin to feed on caddis grubs, mayfly nymphs, aphids, and sedges. She was now a whole three inches long. The senator enjoyed coming down to Canyon Pool (where Spring was born) to go fishing, but he also liked to watch Spring and the other young chinooks grow. "I wonder how many of these fry will make it back to Canyon Pool?" he thought. With this in mind, the senator decided to keep a pair of small clippers in his fishing vest. He would try and mark as many of these little chinooks as he could before they began their long migration to the open sea. One day he did catch Spring with his fly rod, clipped her fins in two different places, and released her back into Canyon Pool. Over the next two weeks, Senator Evans caught and marked another fifty chinook fry. Top of page.