Kotlik Round 2 Day 3

Waqaa!

I stayed up a bit too late last night and woke up this morning at 8am to the sound of country music blasting through the schools intercom system that the maintenance staff had decided to turn on. Needless to say I really couldn’t fall back asleep and mernurtua today. I think they get up earlier than anyone else in town, in fact I’m sure of it. This on top of the fact that a couple kids managed to get inside one of the Big Cat tractors around midnight and started honking the horn relentlessly. I don’t know why these 7-12 year old kids are allowed to stay out all night, I sure wasn’t until I was older.

Since I got up though I wandered around a bit, it was actually colder today than yesterday (about 47F) and rained several times throughout the day. I talked to some people and tried to set up a time to meet with a few elders but they weren’t around, it seems harder to set up times to meet this year, maybe I scared them off last summer…

So around 3 or so I went to a friend’s house and they decided to take me out fishing. We jumped in the boat and zipped down the river where we laid out the drag-net which was about 50 feet long and we just drifted back and forth in the river dragging the net back and forth for about an hour. It’s pretty cool when you catch a fish or more accurately a fish gets tangled in the net as you can see the net start splashing up and down widely. In the end we caught 12 fish, each about 2-3 feet big; 1 King salmon, 1 white fish, 1 chum, 1 (something), and 8 (different somethings). I thought it was quite a haul, but they weren’t impressed and ended up just giving them all away to another family. The boat further down river caught about forty but they had been out for several extra hours. The guys I was with told me that in their grandfathers time it was possible to go out for a few hours and catch the whole years worth of subsistence in one go and you could feel the boat rocking back and forth from the fish getting entangled in the net. This isn’t possible anymore because of the giant ocean trawlers that are taking up most of the fish (not to mention the bigger fish too) before they get to the rivers.

Once we got back, they gave me some dried fish to try, which is exactly what it sounds like: dried fish. You cut the fish into strips and hang it outside until its dried, then you can eat it. This is what’s done to most of the catch, as it will preserve through the winter. Ultimately it has the texture of beef jerky and the taste of raw fish. It was ok. I can still taste it in my mouth several hours later and I only had two small bits.

I joined them for dinner too and had the awesome privilege of trying seal! It was delicious! Seal is red meat and looks like stir fried beef (at least the way they cooked it) and is extremely meaty without much fat, at least on the meat I ate there wasn’t any fat. It was gamey but tasted a lot more like elk. You wouldn’t know it was seal except by the texture and only if you knew what seal meat looked like. Basically it did not taste like fish in anyway. I loved it, by far the best meat yet with moose coming in second and goose coming in third.

Anyways after hanging out and talking for a bit I headed back and have been trying to get my computer to connect to the internet, its getting an Ethernet connection with the LAN cord but my internet is still saying its offline. I don’t know what’s wrong. Maybe I can get wifi working tomorrow but for now I’m using a computer that the maintenance guy nicely loaned me for the evening so…

Ultimately another pretty short day but it was fun! It was great to get out on the river again and hang out, and fun to learn and try new things. So that’s it for today, still working on preparing for whenever I meet with the elders again and just hanging out and making friends.

Piuraa!