Creatures of the Kingdom: Stories of Animals and Nature [N.F. - Zoology, Nature] by Michener James A

Author:Michener, James A. [Michener, James A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Zoology, Biology, History, Nature
ISBN: 9780804151375
Publisher: Dial Press / Random House LLC
Published: 1993-01-14T02:00:00+00:00

NERKA THE SALMON

East of Juneau, Alaska, was Taku Inlet, a splendid body of water that in Scandinavia would be called a fjord; it wound and twisted its way far inland, alternately passing bleak headlands and low hills covered with trees. One all sides mountains with snow-covered peaks rose in the background, some soaring more than seven or eight thousand feet.

A notable feature of Taku was the family of powerful glaciers that pushed their snouts right to the water’s edge, where from time to time they calved off huge icebergs that came thundering into the cold waters with echoes reverberating in the hills and mountains. It was a wild, lonely, majestic body of narrow water, and it drained a vast area reaching into Canada almost to the lakes that the Chilkoot miners traversed in 1897 and ’98. To travel upstream in the Taku was to probe into the heart of the continent, with the visible glaciers edging down from much more extensive fields inland, where the ice cover had existed for thousands upon thousands of years.

Taku Inlet ran mainly north and south, with the glaciers crawling down to the western shore, but on the eastern bank, directly opposite the snout of a beautiful emerald glacier, a small but lively river with many waterfalls debouched, and nine miles up its course a lake of heavenly grace opened up, not large in comparison with many of Alaska’s lakes, but incomparable, with its ring of six, or from some vantage points, seven mountains that formed a near-circle to protect it.

This remote spot, which not many visitors, or natives either, ever saw, had been named Lake Pleiades by the Russian explorer Arkady Voronov. As his journal explained:

On this day we camped opposite the beautiful green glacier which noses into the inlet on the west. A river scintillating in the sunlight attracted my attention, and with two sailors from the Romanov, I explored it for a distance of nine miles. It would be quite unnavigable for even a canoe, because it came tumbling down over rocks, even forming at times small waterfalls eight and ten feet high.

Since it was obvious to us that we were not going to find a better waterway on this course, and since grizzly bears started at us twice, to be deflected by shots over their heads, we had decided to return to our ship with nothing but a fine walk for our labors when one of the sailors, who was breaking the path upstream, shouted back: ‘Captain Voronov! Hurry! Something remarkable!’

When we overtook him we saw that his cry was not misleading, for ahead of us, rimmed by six beautiful mountains, lay one of the clearest small lakes I have ever seen. It lay at an elevation, I should guess from the nature of our climb, of about nine hundred feet, not much higher, and it was marred by nothing. Only the bears and whatever fish were in the lake inhabited this magnificent refuge, and we decided on the moment, all three of us, to camp here for the night, for we were loath to depart from such an idyllic place.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.