Stronghold by Tucker Malarkey

Author:Tucker Malarkey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2019-07-22T16:00:00+00:00

DESPITE THE RELATIVE SAFETY and comfort at base camp, things were not going well. The fishing was mediocre, or worse. The steelhead were small and few. Some thought the run hadn’t started yet. Others thought it was due to intense and illegal net fishing by poachers down by the river’s mouth. Pete’s anglers were frustrated. They had paid a considerable sum and traveled far to catch Russian steelhead. The salmon and char were plentiful, but Pete and his buddies had come for steelhead.

Pete tried the radio again. He had still heard nothing from Guido. As the days passed, he considered the possible scenarios. The expedition could be in trouble; someone might be injured; they could have lost a raft, or equipment. They could have had a bear incident. They had first aid kits, but a serious mauling would be more than bandages could treat.

If Guido’s trip was going as badly as his, they would have to worry about future funding. Without good science or fishing, the Krutogorova might prove a total bust.

On the tenth day, the exploratory rafts rounded the last bend before base camp and Pete exhaled. He and Guido shook hands and exchanged brief reports. The research outcome of the float trip had been even better than expected. Stanford was nothing short of triumphant with the confirmation that an untamed salmon river was a bastion for all riparian life-forms. Guido was thinking they’d been lucky. Extremely lucky. He let himself feel the relief of having reached base camp with all his team members safe.

That night Stanford joined Savvaitova and Pavlov in their research tent to compare notes. While there was a dearth of steelhead at base camp, they found much to be excited about, and stayed up late into the night talking and drinking vodka while Savvaitova demonstrated splitting fish heads like a samurai and surgically removing the two tiny otolith bones that fit on the tip of her pinky finger. Stanford quickly learned that his Russian colleagues were at least as smart as he was—if not smarter in some areas. But, like their countries, they had a fundamental difference in orientation. The Russians had been focused mostly on the fish and Stanford mostly on the rivers. It was clear to both parties that they had something to teach each other.

Encouraged by Stanford’s interest, Savvaitova recounted how her paper “The Noble Trouts of Kamchatka” had detailed her discovery of an unknown diversity within Kamchatka’s rainbow trout and steelhead populations. She explained to Stanford that the fish she studied didn’t conform to the two accepted life histories for the species. The story was hidden in the scales and otoliths of the fish, which she had learned to read like an oracle, accurately divining from microscopic markings, among other things, both the age of the fish and if the fish’s parent was oceangoing. What the otolith bones of Kamchatka’s steelhead told her was that they had at least six or seven variations on a life history. These steelhead didn’t just go to the sea, return, spawn, and die.

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.