Sockeye Salmon

Once upon a time I was camping near Pacific Rim National Park on Vancouver Island. One morning as I hunched over a tidal rock pool to observe a starfish lazily lunching on a hapless mollusc, an elderly gentleman (whom I seem to encounter in every natural setting) approached. Let's just call him the World's Foremost Living Expert—on pretty well every topic known to human conversation. We exchanged a bit of amiable lip-flap, and in the course of his jawin', the grizzled old salt asked me if I knew that the sockeye salmon received its name when hearty fishermen of olden days waded into the water and took the fish by socking it in the eye. "It's an urge that could overtake any of us," I said, eyeing him, adding that I didn't see how the SPCA could permit such enormities.

Then, humbly and with contrition that might have made Mother Teresa envious, I suggested there might be another explanation, having to do with a local aboriginal language; but by then the World's Foremost Living Expert was a hundred feet up the beach where I perceived that he had waylaid another innocent and was busily explaining The Origin Of The Universe As Revealed To Pat Robertson.

 

 

 

Sockeye salmon makes one of the best eating fishes in the world, but it is often served quite hideously tarted up by an intrusive chef who has applied scales made of paste. Why not put a dead raven in the jaws as well?

The Salish are a people who live, among other places, on the southern part of Vancouver Island and some surrounding islets. Sockeye is the English version of the Coast Salish suk-kegh, red fish, an apt name for this frisky Pacific salmon.