In the Valleys of the Noble Bey - John Zada Page 0,56

negative impact on the salmon runs. By the 1990s, sockeye salmon were returning to the area in just the tens of thousands. It was barely enough fish to provide Wuikinuxv’s residents with their main winter sustenance. Those foreboding signs were mitigated only by the knowledge that salmon runs had declined and rebounded naturally in the past.

But in 1999, something inconceivable happened: the legendary Rivers Inlet salmon run collapsed. For the first time in the town’s memory, sockeye salmon, a mainstay of the diet and culture of the local people, stopped turning up in fishing nets. Roughly thirty-six hundred salmon, about 0.1 percent of historic levels, returned to the Rivers Inlet ecosystem that year.

“It was devastating to walk by the river knowing there was no fish,” Lena tells me. “Because that’s part of who we are—and what we look forward to. But that was only part of the problem. We knew that if we weren’t going to get any fish—neither would the bears.”

Local grizzly and black bears congregate at rivers and streams in the late summer and early fall to gorge themselves on spawning salmon. During the several-week feeding frenzy, an adult bear will consume many dozens of fish, to get the fat reserves it needs to survive the winter hibernation. Because of the historically bountiful salmon runs, and the huge size of some of the fish, Owikeno’s grizzlies had a reputation as some of the largest on the coast. To say that bears once thrived here is an understatement.

Every year, the animals passed through the village to access feeding spots along the Wanukv River. But in the autumn of 1999, when the salmon didn’t return, hungry grizzlies invaded the town. In a last-ditch effort to find food, around two dozen weak and disoriented bears, some with cubs, took up residence in and around Wuikinuxv. Some foraged for scraps at the town’s garbage dump. Others ventured close to homes, digging through people’s front yards. At first, residents tolerated the invasion. But as the weeks went on, the bears became bolder and more unpredictable, sleeping on people’s porches and trying to break through doors and windows.

Lena, living in another home in Wuikinuxv at the time, had one starving grizzly sow with cubs in her yard. “One day,” she recalls, “one of the cubs came right up to my window—and I looked into its eyes. It was a powerful moment. I felt I was looking into the face of a family member, and not being able to do anything to help. We had nothing to give them.”

When the bears started breaking into trailers and threatening people, the decision was made to put them down. By early winter, sixteen grizzlies had been shot dead. One black bear, among the many that had wandered through town on the heels of grizzlies, was also put down, bringing the total to seventeen bears. Locals say they’re certain many more bears starved in the forests during the winter months.

The ecological chain of events resulting from the salmon die-off—a symptom, in part, of a rapidly changing habitat—ran deeper than even the residents of Wuikinuxv initially suspected. Only in retrospect did a few locals realize that the bald eagles had gone missing that autumn. Like the bears, they had always been plentiful around Wuikinuxv during salmon season, perched on conifers by the dozen, their white heads gleaming like ornaments on a Christmas tree.

Take any street in small-town North America and transplant it into an impossibly rugged terrain that smacks of some northwest coast version of Jurassic Park and you’ll have Wuikinuxv. The physical village—a collection of homes set on spacious plots of unfenced, overgrown land along a gravel road—nestles in the shores of the Wanukv River, with the slopes of craggy mountains towering over it. The nation’s school, government building, and cultural big house cluster at its center. The main road continues past the town in both directions through thick, brushy rain forest before dead-ending at Wuikinuxv’s two points of arrival and departure: the government dock at the head of Rivers Inlet at one end and the airstrip and an abandoned logging depot on Owikeno Lake at the other.

Wuikinuxv is small to begin with, but the vast scale of the surroundings and the difficulties of life shrink the village even further. The skyline of towering conifers across the river is dwarfed by rocky bluffs, which serve as the bases of mountains that rise ever higher, toward the white, glaciated alpine zone. As Lena had mentioned, there are no fully stocked