Paul Pavlik, 19, hunts silver salmon in the tricky waters around his home village of Yakutat, a Tlingit community of some 600 souls that clings to the middle of Alaska’s long, wild, roadless, and stormy Outer Coast.
“Rain brings in the fish,” Pavlik explains, bent in the bow of his skiff, plucking his catch from a weedy net, and hurling the salmon with a thump into a bin of flapping protein. “Rain adds fresh water to the rivers and the fish smell it. The fish return to their river after three years in the ocean. They spawn and then they die. They become food for their kids, I guess.”
Stalking salmon—and prehistory—with Tlingit fishers in Alaska.
Out of Eden Walk
This unromantic, matter-of-factness about quarry is typical of most hunters at sea and on land. It speaks to something resembling a working relationship between humans and their prey. It is very old. Just as the gestures of Pavlik’s calloused hands, as he expertly horses in his set nets onboard, is ancient too. Perhaps primordial.
Classic depictions of the first discoverers of the Americas typically feature a band of Stone Age hunters stalking a peeved mammoth across the interior steppes of Beringia, the chilly land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska. For an added bit of drama, artists often throw in a fur-clad hunter coiled aloft within the trunk of the enraged beast. Nobody ever said that migration was easy.
“Low tides, you fish outside the river. At the high tide, you fish at the mouth,” says Paul Pavlik (right), accompanied by fellow Tlingit Dylan Peterson.
Photograph by Paul Salopek
But what if the first humans to explore the American continent stepped instead onto a cobbled beach? The pioneer would have been alighting from the bobbing hull of a small, frail boat, a delicate kayak framed with driftwood and sheathed in the waterproof skin of a seal. This ancestor would have been gripping not a long hunting spear but a bone hook or a wicker trap to catch salmon. In this scenario, a vast new continent would have been revealed one fishing hole at a time.
“Low tides, you fish outside the river. At the high tide, you fish at the mouth,” says Paul Pavlik (right), accompanied by fellow Tlingit Dylan Peterson.
Photograph by Paul Salopek
But what if the first humans to explore the American continent stepped instead onto a cobbled beach? The pioneer would have been alighting from the bobbing hull of a small, frail boat, a delicate kayak framed with driftwood and sheathed in the waterproof skin of a seal. This ancestor would have been gripping not a long hunting spear but a bone hook or a wicker trap to catch salmon. In this scenario, a vast new continent would have been revealed one fishing hole at a time.
Evidence of an early maritime settling of the Americas—an intertidal route that leapfrogged ahead of slower land-based migrations—has been mounting for years, as archaeologists roll back the age of early human occupation sites in distant South America. According to the old hypothesis, footsore colonizers from northeast Asia cooled their heels for millennia in the Alaskan hinterlands, waiting for an ice cap spanning the continent to finally melt around 13,000 years ago. But experts now suspect that an intrepid seaborne people likely paddled around that frozen obstacle, beach-hopping down the seafood-teeming shorelines of Alaska into British Columbia and beyond.
Mark Q. Sutton, an emeritus professor of anthropology at California State University, in Bakersfield, even posits that abundant and predictable salmon runs—not terrestrial herds of mammals—were the key resource that lured restless Homo sapiensonward to warmer horizons in the Americas. Sutton calls his theory the fishing link. Paddling skin boats like those once used by the Inuit, and perhaps later migrating aboard dugout canoes, groups of these explorer-fishers inched south, moving from river to river, spreading inland up major waterways such as the Yukon and Columbia.
The lure of early migrations? Silver salmon in Tlingit fisher Paul Pavlik’s skiff in
Yakutat, Alaska.
Photograph by Paul Salopek
Pavlik doesn’t waste time on such debates. He knows already the draw of wild salmon. “Big tides usually push fish in,” says Pavlik, a friendly young man who is both quiet-spoken and self-assured. “Low tides, you fish outside the river. At the high tide, you fish at the mouth.”
How old are these instructions? Fifteen thousand years? Twenty thousand?
Accompanied by a fellow Tlingit named Dylan Peterson, Pavlik motors up and down the choppy Situk River near Yakutat in his battered slicker, eyeing the greenish currents, shaking seaweed from his nets, and throttling back to ask the luck of his colleagues in other boats. Crews swap jokes that mock each other’s catches. Yet there is a hardness beneath it. From time immemorial, hunting wild food has always been like this: serious play. Pavlik barely notices the out-of-state sport fishers, city folk in expensive outdoor kit, angling in rubber waders at riverside. His skiff’s wake sometimes sends them scrambling up the banks. This is very old too.
