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July, 2007
Carnage: Dead River Caviar
By Erika Hoddinott
River stories, like fish stories, often stem from one true occurrence and slowly evolve with each telling until they represent some sort of amalgamation of truth and "elaboration." This isn’t one of those stories. This one’s true. I swear. I’m so convinced it’s true, I thought it deserved to be canonized within the annals of N.U. river literature.
So there they were: 10,000 CFS on the Dead River, a three boat trip with a bunch of high school seniors. Everything’s going fine until the video boater has a nasty swim at Satan’s Hole. In order to allow the boater some time to recover, the trip decides to pull over and wait it out for a few. Enter the hero of our story: Guide Rob. Rob whips the boat into this tiny little eddy that probably wouldn’t be there had it been lower water, and immediately slams his boat into a dead moose. And it’s ripe. He pretty much parks on it. All the kids in the boat start poking it with their paddles, so Rob backs the boat up just out of poking distance.
So this is a good situation. The video boater is out there swimming around with some pretty expensive camera equipment, it’s raining, and they’re sharing an eddy with a decomposing moose carcass. But it gets better.
Rob is looking around, waiting for Mr. Video Boater to puke up the rest of Satan’s Hole, when suddenly he hears a commotion in the front of the boat. When he turns around he finds the kid in the front corner shouting and brandishing a humongous salmon over his head. The fish is flopping all over in the kid’s hand and the kid is all pumped up so he drops it into the boat. Rob finally catches it and throws it back out.
Now the kid is on guard, hovering over the side of the boat looking for the salmon. And the video boater has yet to collect his cohones from the side of the river. And the dead moose smells bad. And Guide Rob just wants out of this eddy.
So this fish has been swimming upstream at 10,000 cfs for who knows how long and it finds this dead moose with all of these delicious maggots falling off of it, so it’s pretty tired and fat and slow at this point. And it allows itself to be caught yet again by the same kid. This time though, the kid isn’t letting him go, he’s taking this fish home, throwing some lemon on him and frying that bad boy up. The kid holds the fish in the air over his head and he’s looking up at it and screaming YEAHHHHHH!!! With his mouth wide open and then he squeezes the fish a little too hard. Eggs. Salmon eggs squirt out of one of the fish’s orifices and land directly in the kids mouth, all over his face, the person next to him, everywhere. And they keep coming. The kid throws the fish and lunges for the water gagging and sucking handfuls of water into his mouth. "Dude!" Rob yells from the back of the boat. "We’re four feet downstream from a dead moose, you probably shouldn’t be doing that." The kid immediately pales and then pukes all over the side of the boat.
After a little bit of online research, we figure that the kid could quite possibly have had about forty dollars worth of salmon roe in his mouth and all over his face before his moose induced purge. And that’s the real story. No embellishments. (As far as I know.)
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