1.
2.
So let us start like this: there are three salmon mating in the river. The young man knows the jargon. He knows the males are engaged in intersexual competition. He knows the female is digging out a redd in the gravel substrate with the paddle of her tail. She will then lay her eggs in the disturbed sediment, and the victorious male will spill his milt in the water over them.
The young man is reminded of something, perhaps apocryphal, that his cousin once told him – that the ocean is at least one per cent whale sperm.
3.
But let us start like this: there are three salmon courting in the river. The male salmon charge each other like horny torpedoes and the female is preparing both their lover’s bed and the cradle. The young man feels like a voyeur, watching them. He feels even more like a voyeur because he is getting aroused. This is not, he hopes, because they are fish, but because, he hopes, of the earnestness of the act. There is so much desire, he thinks, thrashing around in the water.
Let us also say the young man used to take Prozac and he has recently stopped. He has gotten through the nausea and mood swings of the withdrawals, and he is sadder now, but he can finally feel his penis again.
4.
And yet, let us start like this: there are three salmon dying in the river. That is what they do when the mating is done. The young man knows this. The young man smells this. The corpses of several other salmon litter the banks, the ones that have not yet been dragged away by bears or coyotes.
The salmon were born in the river, but they live in the sea. They return to the river only to mate and to die. They return to the same river they hatched in. There are some who travel as far inland as Montana. The salmon eat nothing on this journey. By the time they arrive, they are already mostly dead.
The young man thinks, though he does not know, that they can smell the water they belonged to. Or something like smelling. Something close enough for him to sniff the air and agree with the dying salmon. This must be the place.
5.
We should probably start like this: there are only three salmon dying in the river. That is not entirely true. There is a fourth a hundred feet upstream at the foot of a waterfall. It is a tall waterfall, the roaring, cascading kind that the local chamber of commerce would put in tourism advertisements if it weren’t a waterfall near a quarry. But there is a single salmon throwing itself at this waterfall. Salmon are used to leaping over waterfalls, but never any this tall. Each time it throws itself against the slick rocks, it dies a little more. But the young man does not think it counts, because it is dying in vain. It is not dying the way it should.
Even if he were to include this fourth salmon in his tally, it is still not enough. There should be hundreds of salmon courting and dying on this stretch of river. There should be, but fisherman have caught them, or dams have stood in their way, or the rivers have been too warm, or erosion from clearcut hills have buried their redds.
‘Don’t you know this?’ he asks the three mating. ‘What’s the point?’ And the young man is very sad. He feels like they are, all of them, just the same as the salmon throwing itself against the waterfall. He feels like he should have stayed on his medication.
6.
Maybe we should start like this: there is a young man standing on the undercut bank of a river who has recently stopped taking his anti-depressants. He started taking the medication because of affirmative answers to certain questions on a quiz:
Over the last two weeks, how often have you been bothered by any of the following problems?
- Little interest or pleasure in doing things
- Feeling down, depressed, or hopeless
- Trouble falling or staying asleep, or sleeping too much
- Moving or speaking so slowly that other people could have noticed? Or (and) the opposite — being so fidgety or restless that you have been moving around a lot more than usual
He never felt he would be better off dead, but that always seemed like a failure in logic.
The young man answered these questions this way – indeed, he took the quiz to begin with – because he believed he was living at the end of the world. There were many reasons for this, and good reasons too, but the salmon were high on his list. Not these salmon, but salmon in the abstract. Salmon as a metaphor for something greater.
The young man’s favourite place in the world is here: the high forests of Idaho. He loves this place because both he and his wife are from here. They met in school, across the mountains, but did not fall in love until they came home. The first time they made love was out picking huckleberries in a redcedar grove. She tripped and was swallowed up by the patch. He waded over to help her up. Her hand had reached out from beneath the leaves. When he grabbed it, she pulled him down with her. He remembers thinking, as he struggled not to finish, that the trees were the second-most beautiful things he had ever seen.
Idaho’s are maritime forests, so lush and full four hundred miles from the ocean because of the salmon. Without the salmon, there would be no huckleberries, no redcedar, no slim vine maples. Salmon grow fat on smaller fish at sea, then carry all those oceanic nutrients inland when they migrate home to spawn. Their bodies, washed up on the sides of the river, are God’s way of spreading fertiliser.
Idaho’s are maritime forests, so lush and full four hundred miles from the ocean because of the salmon. Without the salmon, there would be no huckleberries, no redcedar, no slim vine maples
7.
So we start like this: There are three salmon and a young man gathered on a river at the end of the world. The three salmon are mating, because that is what they do. The young man is watching, because he does not know what else to do. The salmon have travelled over five-hundred miles of river to get here. The young man has recently stopped taking his anti-depressants. He took them because he thought he was living through the end of the world.
He was, but they made him feel less sad about that.
He stopped taking them because they made him feel less of everything — less interested in courting and mating most of all. Less interest in sex led to less physical intimacy led to larger and larger gaps between him and his wife in their bed. They did not pick huckleberries anymore, or watch salmon, or touch each other at all. And despite the Prozac, this made him sadder than the end of the world ever had before.
He has come to the river today to watch the salmon run, maybe the last salmon run on earth. He wanted his wife to come with him, but she did not think it was a good idea. She was, in fact, worried about this decision of his. Is, in fact, worried about this decision. She watches the clock and fiddles with her car keys.
He watches the salmon and he does not know how to feel. He watches them from an undercut bank above the river. He is holding to the slim waist of a vine maple, but when the undercut begins to give way beneath him, his grip is not strong enough.
The young man tumbles into the river. The river swallows him up. He hits his head on a tree root or a rock or a furious, horny male, and everything goes black.
He wakes beneath a foot of water. His body has nestled in the redd the female had just dug. The salmon drift beside him. From this angle, he’s pretty sure he’s met the males before – they were duking it out in front of the Dirty D in Astoria and, having expended all their energy, were slumped together on the curb. The female he knew in Spokane. They kissed once and never went on a second date.
The young man blinks and remembers he should be drowning. He remembers he should be drowning when he notices there is a silhouette beyond the refraction of the surface. It is a frantic silhouette, scrabbling down the collapsed bank towards him. He wants to tell her it’s alright, but he can’t speak through the water.
A hand reaches out to him. He grabs it and pulls. His wife tumbles into the water on top of him. They are too big for the redd, but the female, annoyed, has already begun to dig another.
8.
Let us start like this: there are five salmon dancing at the birth of the world.
IMAGE
Cedra Wood
Fishbone Beast Portrait
Graphite on paper
This drawing is the culmination of a project about the Salton Sea, an environmentally compromised site in Southern California. I gathered the remains of tilapia from where they lay on the lakeshore, their die-off charting the water’s yearly evaporation like dendrochronological rings, and made a wearable sculpture from the bones. I depicted the character in a series of paintings and drawings to evoke the ominous beauty found there, a sort of manifested genius loci.
Cedra Wood lives in New Mexico, USA, creating paintings and drawings that explore human ecology through visual metaphor. cedrawood.com
Dark Mountain: Issue 29
Our Spring 2026 anthology is a hardback collection that steps outside the human bubble and puts animals at its heart
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Thank you, Jaden McGinty. This is the most wondrous piece of writing I have read in a long, long time. I read it yesterday and felt so filled with it all day, I had to read it out to my husband early this morning. He was just as overcome, calling it a work of genius.
I am telling you our reactions rather than saying anything analytic about the piece because you already know what the piece means, and anyone who hasn’t read it needs to read it themselves, untrammeled by my reflections on it.