Spring Tide (17 page)

“Fish and Game emergency!” she hollered. “Get in.”

“What?” asked Jackie. “What’s going on?”

“Sturgeon rescue operation,” the warden explained. “Come on. We need you.”  She turned to Stef. “You too. It’s Stef, right? Get in!”

Stef’s mouth fell open, but the warden wasn’t waiting for objections. She was already back in the van. Jackie shrugged and flashed a darling smile at Stef, then got in the backseat. Stef got in the other side behind the driver, a plump Asian woman about thirty years old wearing shorts and a T-shirt and a baseball cap over fine black hair. Jackie introduced her as Pat. The warden’s name was Gail. They were a couple. As soon as the doors were shut, the van was in motion and back on the road.

“Now that you’ve got us captured,” Jackie said, “how about details?”

Gail turned around in the passenger seat to face them. “Lots of overflow this spring on the Sacramento River. Which means a lot of fish went over the weirs into the overflow areas. Not a problem for most of them because they can get back using the fish ladders. But the sturgeon are too big. The water’s gone down now and we’ve found a bunch of those suckers trapped in a shallow channel that’s getting shallower every day. Another few days of warm weather and they’ll die in there.”

“Sturgeon?” Stef asked, recalling a photo from Rudy’s Bait Shop of an old man beside a fish larger than he was. “Sorry, I don’t know much about fish. Those are big, right?”

“They’re big,” Gail confirmed. “The largest freshwater fish in North America. You get caviar from sturgeon, so they’re a highly prized game fish. We’ve got green and white sturgeon here. The green ones are a threatened species. We’ve got to get them out of the overflow pond and back in the river before it dries up.”

“How big are we talking about?” Stef asked warily, hoping the monster in the photo was a rarity.

“Six, seven feet long,” Gail said. “They can live hundreds of years. Really cool fish. You’re lucky. A lot of people will never see one in the wild. Today, you’re going to see plenty of ’em. Up close.”

Stef turned to Jackie and whispered, “Lucky?” Then she turned back to Gail and asked, “Do they have teeth, like sharks?”

“They won’t hurt you,” Gail assured her. “Unless they knock you out slapping you with their tails. We’re going to take ’em out, tag ’em, put in transmitters, then put ’em in the river. Jacks, you’ll be on the tagging and transmitter crew. Pat and Stef, you’ll be helping to catch ’em.”

“I have to tell you,” Stef admitted, “I’ve never used a fishing pole. I’m willing, but I’ll need some help.”

“Fishing pole?” Pat laughed, displaying a row of brilliant white teeth. “This operation’s more low tech than that!  You put a fishing pole in there and you could wait hours to catch one of those monsters. Even days. They probably aren’t even feeding under these conditions.”

“She’s right,” Gail said over her shoulder. “You don’t need any special skills for this. Just physical strength.” She lifted her sunglasses and peered intently at Stef, her expression full of flirtatiousness. “You look like you qualify.” Gail glanced at Jackie and grinned.

She knows my name
, Stef thought,
so Jackie’s been talking
. No telling what she’d been saying.

“I don’t understand,” Stef said.

“We get ’em with our hands,” Gail explained, then put her glasses back on and faced forward.

Stef widened her eyes in disbelief at Jackie, who smiled and said quietly, “Don’t worry. It’ll be fun.”

“Have you done this before?” Stef asked.

“Once. A few years ago. It happens when we have higher than normal rainfall and the river overflows like it did this spring. Sorry about the crawdads. Some other time.”

“Crawdads?” Gail asked.

“I was going to show her how to set out traps,” Jackie explained.

Gail waved her hand dismissively. “You can do that anytime. Today we’ve got bigger fish to fry.” She laughed. “Well, no frying going on today. We’re gonna take ’em alive.”

When they arrived at the river, they met up with other volunteers and game wardens and got their assignments. Jackie helped set up a tagging station on the concrete weir that formed one side of the shallow waterway where the sturgeon were trapped. The pond was about thirty feet wide and three feet deep. Watching the water, Jackie could see the bony ridges of some of the fish cutting the surface. As Stef followed her team leader into the pond, she looked positively terrified. Jackie tried not to laugh. This wasn’t the day she had planned at all, but it should prove to be interesting.

The procedure for catching the fish was for the volunteers to line up in two lines facing one another a hundred feet apart, then walk slowly toward each other holding a wide net, urging the fish ahead of them, like a cattle roundup, until they had corralled them into a smaller area. Then, when one of the fish went into the net, they would manhandle it to get it into a cloth sling and carry it to the operating area. After that, Jackie or the Fish and Game vet would cut a tiny incision in the fish, slip in the transmitter, sew it up and hand it over to a couple of strong volunteers who would carry it in the sling across the muddy terrain to the main channel of the river and let it loose. All of this had to be done as quickly as possible to minimize trauma to the fish. Fortunately, it was a warm day. Like the other volunteers, Jackie would be standing in water most of the time so the fish’s gills could stay submerged during the operation.

Waiting for her first patient, she sat in a lawn chair on the road, watching the two rows of volunteers start toward one another with their nets. Stef was in the line to the right, walking in the thigh-high water. She looked serious and composed. Jackie was anxious to see how she’d act when confronted by one of those huge fish. Stef had been told how big they were, but until you actually saw one up close, you just didn’t get it. As Stef’s head jerked to the left, then to the right, Jackie figured she was getting a glimpse. The water was murky, so it was hard to see much more than the spines of the fish. The two lines of rescuers came gradually closer together. When they were forty feet apart, somebody yelled, “Got one!”

A flurry of activity followed that announcement on the side opposite Stef. The net was wrapped around the thrashing fish to hold it in place while two men tried to get a good grip on it, one up close to the head and one near the middle. They wrapped their arms around it as two other men held the ends of the narrow stretcher, waiting to receive it.

Jackie felt her pulse racing. She pulled on a pair of gloves to prepare and waded into the water. The team wrestled the fish for a couple minutes before they could get it into the stretcher, but once it was in and out of the water, it was immobilized. The men with the stretcher slogged through the water to bring the fish to Jackie. It was a medium-sized white sturgeon. The species was ancient, one of the oldest fishes in the world. They were covered with bony plates and looked prehistoric. She tried to imagine what they would look like to a first-timer like Stef. They might scare some people, but she didn’t think Stef scared too easily.

She made a quick incision, then inserted a small transmitter under the skin while Gail attached a tag to the fish’s fin. Jackie sewed it up, then off went the fish across a grassy flood plain in its green stretcher, on its way to the river and freedom.

“Good job,” Gail boomed. “One down!”

Jackie turned back to watch the teams in the water. There were two struggles ongoing now between man and fish. In one case, woman and fish. Stef had her arms around a big one. It was thrashing hard. The strength of the fish’s writhing efforts knocked her down. She was briefly underwater, and then she was back on her feet and trying again. Jackie could hear her laughing as she and one of the men finally managed to shove that fish into a sling. Jackie was overjoyed to hear that laugh. She had never heard a real laugh from Stef before.

Stef glanced over to Jackie, smiling widely. Jackie gave her a thumbs-up.

The process continued as stretcher after stretcher came Jackie’s way. Some of the fish were unbelievably huge. She knew they could be a hundred years old or more. She had one of the green ones under her scalpel this time, larger than most. Its gills opened and closed rhythmically as she worked as quickly as she could.

Though she had fished these rivers thousands of times, she had never caught or seen a sturgeon in the river before the first rescue operation she’d participated in. But she’d seen them brought in by other fishermen. She’d always thought it must be quite a thrill to hook a powerful fish like this. But wrestling them with nothing but your body, as the crew down below was doing, had to be even more exciting.

Just as she finished, another fish came over, Gail carrying the back end of the sling.

“Jacks,” she said, “we’ve got a situation with this one.”

They lowered the sling near her so she could look at the fish. Another green one. There was something protruding from its head. She touched it, feeling sharp metal.

“What the hell?” she said.

“Poachers,” Gail explained. “These fish are sitting ducks in this shallow water.”

Jackie balked at that metaphor, but let it slide. This wasn’t the time for humor. “This looks like a metal file,” she observed.

“They shove makeshift spears through their heads to kill them. This one must have broken off and got away.”

Jackie shook her head at the brutality of the deed. “We’ll have to take it out. Anybody got a pair of pliers? Meanwhile, keep her in the water.”

While pliers were being located, Gail had one of her colleagues photograph the unfortunate fish. This was a crime and the photos were evidence. Pliers in hand, Jackie got a firm grip on the top of the metal shaft. She pulled on it, gently at first, but it didn’t budge. She pulled harder until it started to move, straight up, steadily and smoothly. A four-inch shaft of metal, also evidence, gradually emerged. The fish jerked as it left its body.

“Damn!” Gail said, holding a plastic bag open to receive the file. “Will it live?”

“No way to know,” Jackie said. “Since it survived till now, it may. Let’s skip the transmitter on this one. She’s been through enough. Take her to the river.”

They whisked the fish away.

“Bastards!” Gail exclaimed, zipping the plastic bag shut.

When the drama over the injured fish had passed, Gail grabbed a bottle of water from the ice chest. “We’re going to be here awhile,” she said, unscrewing the cap. “We’ll need to get some food out here.”

“Let me call my mom,” Jackie offered. “I’ll bet she can get somebody in town to donate lunch.”

Gail nodded. “I’ll bet she can.”

Between patients, Jackie made the call. Less than an hour later Ida Townsend arrived carrying a box of sandwiches to the staging area. She wore a floral print sleeveless blouse over the same pair of black and white striped shorts Jackie had seen her in the other day. Apparently, they were becoming a favorite and, unfortunately, not just to be worn in the privacy of her own home.

Adam followed behind her hugging a brown paper grocery sack that completely hid him from the knees up. Jackie took the bag from him and peered inside. It was full of snack bags of chips.

“Your father donated those,” Ida said, letting the box drop on the table. “The sandwiches came from the Sunflower Café.”

“Thanks, Mom. Everybody’s working up a big appetite. But maybe not the best place for children. This is serious business.”

“He wouldn’t stop crying until I said he could come,” Ida explained. “Adam, honey, run get that bag of jerky.”

Adam ran back to the car while Jackie opened a bag of barbecued potato chips.

“You brought jerky?” she asked.

“Brought my new flavor.” She lowered her voice to a near whisper. “It’s got a cola-papaya marinade.”

“Cola-papaya?”

“Among other things,” Ida explained matter-of-factly. “Papaya has a natural enzyme that tenderizes meat.”

“Tenderizes? I don’t get it. You dry it so it’s as tough as leather, so why tenderize it?”

“Jackie, you may know a lot about mange and hairballs, but who’s the expert here on jerky?”

“You,” Jackie conceded.

“That’s right. Besides, Ida’s World-Famous Beef Jerky is not as tough as leather. It’s meaty and moist. You watch, this one’s going to be a hit.”

“Seems like the flavor you have already is a hit.”

“Oh, sure, Ida’s
original
flavor, but I’m expanding. You gotta be flexible and nimble in the business world. You can’t rest on your laurels. My business plan calls for innovation.”