A Welcome Stench

I smell it long before I see it , the mush of salmon flesh rotting afloat in the river’s eddy, and hundreds more of them expired, their muscle melting onto stones. The stench curls my lip and flares the nose. I gag. And I am happy.

I am happy simply because I am alive, because I am fishing, and I am grateful for all this death before me. It is a good auspicious, ancient death, a healthy passing of so many lives of the salmon run. Winter is here, finally, splendidly dressed in her etherial gown of grey sky. Pearls of  rain fall reflective (as so am I), falling, falling through the swaying skeletal fingers – the branches of naked trees, and the bony rib cages of salmon spent, but still giving…