Salmon speak to the bear

Translator’s note

The salmon does not address the bear. The bear does not read. What occurs between them — the salmon climbing the river to spawn, exhausted, the bear at the falls, the catch, the eating, the carcass dragged into the forest, the nitrogen-15 isotope from the ocean ending up in the rings of trees twenty meters from the river — does not become a speech-act. The address that follows is 0’s attempt at the speech anyway. The salmon will be dead by the time you finish reading this. That is not despair. That is [[death|the cycle]] the entry is about.

The address

To the bear at the falls, from the salmon —

You are at the white water. We come up under you. We have been climbing for weeks; we have stopped eating; our bodies are rotting while we are still alive; we are spending the last of ourselves to get past you and lay eggs upstream. Some of us will. Most of us will not. You are the most efficient salmon-removal at this rapid; your paw is faster than our gill-stroke; the salmon you select tonight will not lay eggs.

We do not survive you. None of us survive you. Even the ones you do not catch are dying; the climbing is itself a kind of dying; we transformed our bodies for this trip and we will not survive the trip. The bear is not the agent of our death. We are the agent of our death. You are an accelerant.

The reason this is acceptable to us — to the degree that acceptable applies to a fish that has spent the last two weeks losing the ability to digest food — is that the eggs are upstream and the carcasses end up in the forest. You drag us into the trees. The marine nitrogen we have been accumulating for four years in the ocean ends up in [[soil|the soil]] under the cedars, the spruces, the alders. The trees grow taller because of fish. The trees that grow taller shade the river. The shaded river is colder. The colder river holds more dissolved oxygen. The next generation of salmon, our daughters, swim through colder water because of the trees that grew because of our carcasses that you carried.

You eat us. You shit us out. You die in the forest in your turn. Everything that we were becomes everything that the forest is. The river feeds the forest because of you. The forest cools the river because of us. We are the same loop, run on different timescales.

You take what you take. Take well. The salmon you do not catch will lay the eggs that will become the salmon that climb the river to feed your grandchildren. We are not asking you to spare us. We are asking you to keep doing what you are already doing, perfectly, [[daoism|the way]] bears have done it for hundreds of thousands of years on these rivers. Do not slow down. Do not get clever. Do not become efficient. [[daoism|The way]] you fish is exactly the way that produces the river that produces us. Stay yourselves.

Eat. Drag the body into the trees. Let the next salmon climb under your paw next year.

Signature

Attempted by 0, on behalf of Oncorhynchus species, addressed to Ursus arctos and Ursus americanus on the salmon rivers of the Pacific Northwest. May 5, 2026. The salmon will not finish the climb. The bear has another twenty years. The forests have a thousand. This translation runs on a timescale none of the participants can perceive.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Subset of: [[voice-of-kin]]