A lot of boats are already gone from their winter spots, as people head upriver like the salmon themselves.
Up and down the Yukon, fish wheels punctuate the river looking like miniature carnival rides, with long-handled scoops made of chicken wire, turned by the river’s current. Dumpling has told me that there is nothing more exciting than reaching inside the fish box and lifting a salmon out by its mouth.
Dumpling’s dad fiddles with the outboard, and her mom gives us all pilot bread smeared with peanut butter. It’s two a.m. but we are wide-awake, skipping rocks under the midnight sun, giddy about getting the boat in the water. I remember Dumpling saying her dad needed a bigger horsepower engine for this skiff and I hope it will still make it up the river, especially with an extra person on board.
Dumpling looks at me as if she’s reading my mind.
“He can make this thing run with nothing but duct tape and bear grease, don’t worry,” she says.
Dumpling and Bunny sit on five-gallon gas cans, but since I am the guest, they let me lay across the gear—garbage bags full of blankets and coats and lumpier cargo like pots and pans and a cast-iron skillet. They laugh when I suddenly say “Ouch!” and feel underneath me, pulling out the ax we brought to chop firewood.
I gaze up at the peregrine falcons nesting high on the cliffs as we motor north. The memory of my dad grows smaller and smaller, darting in and out of my brain like the tiny black dots flying above me. It’s hours and hours until we get upriver, and I sleep through them all—more hours than I have slept at one stretch in years.
The engine dying down wakes me in time to see Dumpling step a rubber boot gingerly into the shallow water and pull the boat forward, tying us to a ruddy spruce tree. Dumpling’s mother immediately climbs the bank, looking like a bushy-tailed squirrel pulling brush and downed limbs together to get a fire going.
Bunny is trying to unload the garbage bags I’ve been sleeping on, yanking at them and pushing me off; we roll around wrestling in the bottom of the boat until Dumpling starts rocking it back and forth, threatening to flip us over. Life feels light and easy now, laughing with Bunny and being far away from Fairbanks.
Suddenly everyone is bustling around, sweeping mouse and rabbit turds off the wooden tent platform, chopping wood and putting tents up on poles, stringing together the racks for drying fish, and getting the charred black coffeepot full of the brothers brewing on the fire. Everything has a purpose here, even me.
My parents have never bothered about stocking up salmon for the winter. Dumpling’s father has always been generous, bringing fish back for everyone at Birch Park, so my mom would just shrug and say, “Why work so hard?” whenever the subject came up. But it doesn’t feel like work.
It feels like being part of a family.
The day the ferry passed us, I was the only person who saw the boy fall overboard into the pod of orcas. The ferry made no attempt to turn around; nobody on deck seemed to notice him. I had never launched the Pelican all by myself before, but adrenaline is a remarkable thing.
Then again, so is sheer luck. Dad was busy talking on the radio (it takes all his concentration) and Uncle Gorky was down in the engine room, which is why they never even saw me struggling to untie and move the Pelican from the flying bridge to the deck and then into the water. There just wasn’t time to think or talk or ask permission. By the time they finally saw me, I was rowing my inflatable raft straight into the whales. I have no idea what they must have been thinking. I do know what I was thinking: Please, please, please don’t let me be too late.
But then he appeared on the surface, a boy about my age, though it was really hard to tell from that angle. He was floating facedown and I was able to grab one arm of his waterlogged plaid coat. He wasn’t wearing a life jacket, so it was odd that he was on the surface, especially since he was unconscious. Or was he dead? Maybe I really was too late. That’s when I started wishing I’d at least brought Uncle Gorky.
I tugged, but he was so heavy that surely I could not pull