Paul Herbert, "Snook," cuts the fish he caught in his wheel - Part 2 of 2

The fish that Paul Herbert, "Snook" caught in his fishwheel have been put on the cutting table, directly in front of his smokehouse.

Snook has sharpened his knife. He feels the edge. It is smooth and sharp, ready to slice through salmon flesh.

Just as he learned to do as a boy while living with his grandmother, Belle Herbert, Snook cuts his fish. He works swiftly and expertly.

He fillets a salmon, leaving the two halves connected at the tail.

He cuts the end off at an angle, to create a shape that will facilitate the drying process.

Pushing down hard, Snook runs the knife over the cut fish in a way that will squeeze out the blood. Too much blood left behind could ruin the meat.

Snook makes angle cuts through the flesh at regular intervals. 

Each cut leaves a clean strip of white on the inside of the skin. This will allow the skin to stretch so that the segments of cut meat are separated through the drying and smoking process.

Applying considerable pressure, Snook runs the knife over the salmon skin to begin the stretching process.

He soaks the cut fish in brine for a spell.

After the fish soak, Snook places them on a rack where they will hang briefly.

As they hang, he stretches the skin some more. He wants to be certain that segments that he has cut do not come in contact with each other, as this could cause them to spoil.

After the fish hang for a spell on the outside rack, Snook transfers them into his smokehouse.

The fish that Paul has cut hang in the smoke.

Snook had been a little worried that the big red king might have been too far along on its spawning journey, but when he cut into it, he found that the flesh was still good. He will cut this one up into sections for freezing.

He places the cuts sections in a large bowl for washing.

His wife Alma washes the cut sections.

Snook had also cut salmon strips, which he will now transfer from the outside rack into the smokehouse. Yellow jacket hornets gather around, hoping to get a share.

Harold Frost who had come from Old Crow, Yukon Territory, to play his fiddle at the Gwich'in Gathering stops by. Alma gives him a box of salmon that she had jarred the day before to put in his boat and take home with him.

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Paul Herbert catches fish in his wheel - Part 1 of 2

This is Paul Herbert, last Saturday morning, just after 8:00 AM, driving his boat up the Yukon River from his house on the bank of a slough in Fort Yukon. He is headed to the fishwheel that he built two months earlier and hopes he will find a good number of salmon in the box.

Paul made this boat 22 years ago. He says it is an old, tired, boat but it skims across the surface of the Yukon quite nicely.

When he arrives, Paul finds some 15 fish in the box, including these. Driven by the swift current, the wheel keeps turning and the baskets plunge into the water over and over again. Every now and then, a basket will come up with a fish and then drop it into a chute from which it slides down into the box.

Fish in the box. The day before, there had been 30. 

Paul transfers salmon from the box into his boat. 

Paul spreads the salmon out across the bottom of the boat. A few of them are missing their anterior dorsal fins. Paul explains that this identifies them as having been born in a hatchery in the Yukon Territory.

Paul washes his hands in the river.

Paul checks his wheel two, sometimes three times a day. Each time, he adjusts it to make certain it is secure and aligned as he wants it. Each time the baskets plunge into the water, they should barely scrape the bottom. When we hear the sound pebbles tumbling through the wire mesh of the baskets, Paul knows he has the wheel properly set. 

Note the fence that barely protrudes above the water between the bank and the wheel. That fence will direct fish that come to it into the path of the fishwheel baskets.

When he was a boy living out in the woods with his grandmother, Belle Herbert, Paul would sometimes fashion toy fishwheels from sticks. When he grew older and started to fish by wheel himself, he just made them bigger.

The structure that holds the paddles that the current pushes against to keep the wheel turning...

...and turning and turning and turning. It is an easy thing to stand for awhile and watch the wheel, hoping with each half-rotation that a salmon will appear in the basket as it rises from the water.

After watching for awhile, accompanied by the sound of the current, the paddles and baskets splashing into and rising out of the water and the groaning of the wooden axle turning in its sockets, I felt almost as though I was being hypnotized.

No fish appeared in the basket during any of the three visits that I made there with Paul.

Paul with a King Salmon. At sea, the salmon are silver, but grow redder and redder as they migrate upstream to spawn. When they reach this shade of red, Paul notes, the run is nearly over. As the red deepens, the flesh of the fish will become inedible. It has been a poor year for kings. The river has been unusually high and the drift of wheel-smashing, net-ripping sticks and logs heavy.

The silver salmon run should begin soon. Paul hopes it will be better. When the silvers run heavy, the baskets will sometimes pull one up with virtually every scoop - sometimes, the wheel will grab two, three, or even four fish in a single scoop.

This means a lot of work, but also a good staple of food to eat through the winter, and to give to friends, relatives and community members who, for reasons of age or health, may not be able to fish for themselves.

It is time to go back to Fort Yukon, where Paul will soon be cutting fish.

Heading downriver, fish in front.

A young couple from Norway had pulled up in front of Paul's cabin in a canoe several days earlier and he had invited them to set up camp. Julie takes a photo of Paul with the big red king, which he is hoping will still be good.

After Julie gets her photo, Paul gives her a fishing pole, tells her to hold it and pose with the fish and get her picture taken. Now she will have a good picture that she can lie about when she gets home, he tells her.

Paul has some serious work ahead of him. He transfers the salmon from his boat to a box on his fourwheeler. Next, he will take them to the cutting table in front of his smokehouse and then cut them, just as his grandmother Belle taught him to do.

The cutting and smoking will be the subject of my next post.

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The Gwich'in grandmother who lived to be perhaps the oldest person in the world; the grandson she taught with his fish wheel and King Salmon

After thinking about it for a bit, I decided that before I start posting my various little photo stories from the Gwich'in Gathering, I needed to set the context, to run a photo spread that says something about the traditional way of life for the Gwich'in as it has evolved into modern times. Although the term most frequently used to describe this way of life is "subsistence," that word has always struck me as very wrong, for in most American minds it denotes poverty, ways of living that people suffer through only because circumstance has forced them; ways of living that they would flee to join the masses who live the suburban lifestyle if only they but had the chance.

I believe that the word "subsistence" has helped to create the justification that exists in the minds of many Alaskans, Alaskan politicians and writers of Alaska law, most of them urban residents of Fairbanks and Anchorage, that, as citizens of the State of Alaska, they have every bit as much right to harvest the wild animals and fish that live with the Native people in the rural areas as do the rural, Native residents themselves, even if their doing so badly impacts the lives of those who have lived by these animals and fish for thousands of years.

So I decided to begin with a series of photos of Paul Herbert harvesting the salmon that have helped to sustain his Gwich'in people since time immemorial. However, it became clear to me that if I were to do it this way, I would not succeed at getting the essay up until maybe four in the afternoon. I feel a need to post something sooner than that.

So I went searching through my computer and found a photo that I took of Paul's grandmother, Belle Herbert, at an athletic event in Fairbanks in the winter of 1982.

When he was a child, Paul spent much of his life living in the woods with his Grandmother Belle. She is the one who taught him how to catch and cut fish, how to live off the land. She gave him a rich education and a rich life the likes of which cannot be found in any city or university anywhere.

This was the first and only time that I ever saw Belle Herbert, for she died not long afterward. She was said to be 129 years old.

During my first years in Alaska, it seemed that I would find a centenarian or two in just about every Interior Athabascan Indian village that I would visit. There are still a few to be found out there, such as Fort Yukon matriarch Hannah Solomon, now living in Fairbanks, who will turn 102 in October, but I don't find them everywhere the way I did back then.

I think it is because the traditional diet of wild animals and fish, supplemented with wild berries and greens as nature provides, is much healthier than the diet most of us eat today. I sometimes hear vegetarians claim that a vegetarian diet is much healthier than a meat diet but, no, I don't think so. If this were true, then these centenarians that I have met in Alaska Indian country, where a vegetarian would literally have died of starvation, would not have lived such long lives.

I think it's just that so much junk and so much unhealthy stuff has worked its way into our modern diet. It is not the meat, but the junk and the overindulgence that kills us.

This is he, the grandson, Paul Herbert still living from the foods and according to the knowledge that his Grandmother Belle taught him. It's a little tough right now because so far this summer the numbers of harvested salmon have been low.

Still, they have been coming and people such as Herbert have been harvesting them. On the day that I took this picture, this King Salmon was one of 15 that swam into the fishwheel that he had built two months earlier, out of the resources that surround him.

Tomorrow, I will post a series that will show a bit more of the process.

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