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Alison
Beamer displays a sheefish Jason Clark helped her land on
the Zitziana River, which she paddled up on a Tanana River
trip. (photo by Ned Rozell)
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ZITZIANA RIVER, ALASKA Fishing at the spot where this
long, squiggly stream mixes with a floury channel of the Tanana
River, Alison Beamer feels a thump.
Line squeals from her spinning reel as a creature as long as
her arm flashes beneath the surface. After a few runs east and west,
the fish tires, becoming still beneath the clear surface. Beamer's
canoe-mate Jason Clark nets and dispatches the fish. He then threads
it on a stringer.
Beamer holds the sheefish up in the sunlight. It's a stunning
fish none of us has seen before, though the the lobster of the north
is common enough in northern Alaska rivers. Its long, polished silver
body gleams purplish in the sun. Its mouth is U-shaped and seems
big as a bucket.
This giant member of the whitefish family is found only in a
few dozen river systems of North America and Asia. North of the
Arctic Circle, in the Selawik and Kobuk rivers, elder sheefish can
get to 60 pounds. Beamer's fish is maybe five pounds, but it seems
too large to live in a river narrow enough to throw a rock across.
Sheefish sometimes migrate, but not like salmon. This fish,
from the Minto Flats population of sheefish, probably spent the
winter in the Zitziana or another river close by. Other populations
of sheefish, like those on the Selawik and Kobuk rivers, winter
in the brackish waters of Hotham Inlet and Selawik Lake, according
to Kenneth Alt of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
Sheefish can live to be 30 years old, about as long as a fortunate
raven or walrus. With their sheer size, they seem out of place in
this world of northern pike and grayling, as early explorers of
northern Canada noted when they called sheefish poissons inconnus,
unknown fish.
Sheefish are an important food for villagers. People in Selawik,
for example, eat them all year long by netting them in summer and
jigging for them beneath the ice.
And what a fantastic food they are.
We filet Beamer's fish and set the two pieces on a grill over
the fire, skin-side down. When the flesh cooks a bit and separates
from the skin, Clark flips it over with a spoon, the skin acting
as foil.
With a little butter, lemon and garlic powder, the meat is heavenly.
A texture like halibut and a taste reminiscent of both crab and
lobster. The northern pike we have been eating have dropped a notch,
behind this beautiful creature hidden within a few moving waters
of the far north.
A few notes on past columns:
Richard Flanders of Fairbanks wrote in response to a video of
many animals visiting a seismic station in Minto Flats. "Animals
eat the insulation off wiring these day because much of it is made
from a soy product," he said.
And my friend Walkie Charles, a linguistics professor at UAF
who grew up on the lower Yukon River, told me the Yup'ik word for
the mysterious foam that piles up on river water.
"Qapneq," he said, his word sounding light and ephemeral like
the foam itself. "When my father saw qapneq he said it meant the
fish were coming."
Since the late 1970s, the University
of Alaska Fairbanks' Geophysical Institute has provided this
column free in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned
Rozell is a science writer for the Geophysical Institute.
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