Russian Mission is pretty a pretty big village but still has a small town feel like you could walk anywhere you needed to get to. The folks up at the ITC office were really nice and let me log on to the internet and hang out for half an hour, I stopped by the Native Store and walked through the aisles and bought a Coca Cola. People were busy in town, dogs were barking, it was sunny and calm so we rolled out after an hour or so and headed another 45 miles away to the village of Marshall.
In the stretches closer to the villages you see fish camps along the river, some abandoned and some occupied and actively fishing, drying, and smoking salmon.
We passed slowly by four kids swimming and playing on the beach. Just down a ways their parents were in a canoe pushing driftwood firewood up to the camp. Another camp we passed had kids waving from shore, with a wave from the adults up tending the smokehouse we pulled ashore to visit for a while. Soon all the kids were on board and five minutes later their parents, when we offered candy to the kids they offered a king salmon to us. In a moment a young girl arrived with a 35 pound salmon, holding it behind the gill plate she passed it to me. We ended up only taking a small portion, enough for dinner and left after multiple handshakes, it was about nine at night and we wanted to stop by Marshall still.
The river here starts to look flatter and the spruce trees thin out, the now distant mountains have a low treeline and seem to have grassy slopes. Still along the bank are thousands of driftwood logs piled up along the shore. Now and then you can see where people have cut firewood from the trees washed ashore, they stack them on the bank and use them for winter firewood. Almost nobody passes us on a boat all day, the views are still stunningly beautiful, we are generally following alongside the edge of the mountains riding up the right bank of the river to stay out of the wind. The river takes large bends here with plenty of sandbars, we are noticing that the maps we have of this area do not always match up with islands and sandbars in the river.
By eleven or so we stop in the lee of a small outcrop of rock, the shore is muddy but not too soft, I could still go ashore in my hiking shoes. Jeff eases to shore and I tie up to the root of a driftwood tree and walk up the hill to where the tall grass and the cemetery and the mosquitoes are. The charcoal has been started and we cook up our first king salmon feast on the river. All three of us eat until we can't eat anthing else. It is a cold night and I am wearing an extra layer to bed. We are only about two days from arriving at the sea.
These guys offered us a king salmon