It was a fisherman’s paradise. I brought a new spinning rod equipped with a Mitchell 300 reel and fifteen pound test line. I was ready for a summer of fishing, and I never looked upon the sport quite the same after that. Red, Chums, Silvers and King salmon spawned in the river. The Reds came in first and then Chums. Silvers were the last to run the river starting in September. I was interested in the Kings. These were the big ones, the tackle breakers, the trophies.
The Kings started showing up not long after the Reds, but they did not appear in large schools - usually only a few crossed the panels at a time. One day, while I was on the tower counting, a loner crossed close by my shore. I was truly stunned. It was the largest fish I’d ever seen in the water. It was at least six feet long, like a submarine.
I hooked into Kings nearly every day, and landed many that ranged fifteen to twenty-five pounds - the biggest was maybe forty to fifty, but I wanted a really big one.
I had lots of fun for a while, but soon realized that my reel had a flaw I sat the drag so a fish had to work to take line, but after I hooked one and it made several runs, the line became frayed. On the third or forth run it would break, and I’d loose a spoon and thirty or more feet of line.
Little by little my tackle box emptied of lures and my spool dwindled to almost nothing. I was down to my last lure, a little red “Dare Devil” spoon, an inch long. I replaced its small treble-hook with a larger one, added some weights, and went out one more time. Yes! You guessed it. I hooked into the Submarine King. It didn‘t jump, but made a ran for the far shore. Its back, a foot wide, raised out of the water as it headed downstream. I never turned it. It kept going…with my last lure and all my line.
THE END
There was a small ground squirrel living under the cabin that we fed leftover-pancakes each morning. It became grossly overweight, waddled when it ran, and went missing by summer’s end. I guess we did it a disservice. 
One day the hum of an airplane roused me from my revelry. I turned to see Ken’ Super Cub (photo above). Instead of coming in low, on final approach, he was adding throttle and banking to the right. The plane swooped over head and made a shallow dive toward a clump of willow thirty yards from me.
A brown bear shot from the thicket and started running up the hill. It was large and seemed to have an unusually long body. Ken (photo above) buzzed it, circled, and buzzed it again. I can still see that bear looking over its shoulder at the Super Cub as the plane’s wheels passed just above its head. The bear disappeared over the hill with Ken in hot pursuit.
Each morning one of us climbed the steps of the tower and looked down upon the white panels shimmering through a rippling current. We used a counter that nested in the palm of our hand. It had a thumb operated button that advanced by one number each time we pressed it. The session might pass without a single fish crossing, or they would transit in numbers beyond our thumb’s capacity to keep up.
The skiff was tethered to an up-current cable that spanned the river’s width, hanging several feet above its surface. Arnie, manning the boat, sidled it across with its stern at the panels edge. George and I donned chest-waders, and held on to the gunwales as Arnie dropped sand bags onto the panels. We weighed down the panels and maneuvered bags into position with our feet. The river was about five feet deep in the middle, so it was a bit hairy at midstream when the water came close to the top of our waders. It took a hundred bags to sink the panels. Some were used to plug holes, preventing fish from swimming under.
There are those who might describe me as somewhat reserved, not much inclined for talk, but compared to George Carnes I was a motor-mouth. This taciturn man, a recent veteran of Vietnam, had almost nothing to say. He was friendly, and we got along, but he seldom communicated, and we parted, two months later, as near strangers. It might have been that he was still coming to terms with his war experience. I don’t know. We never discussed that. Most exchanges that summer were to the point, usually dealing with the business at hand, and except for the Fourth of July we never got into any deep philosophical discussions.
Ken directed the plane toward a short runway, one so narrow that the wingspan exceeded its width. Its length seemed to shrink on approach. We crossed the Sapsuk River, touched down on the end , and quickly ran the runway’s meager span. The plane passed the far limit and bumped over rough terrain before coming to a “complete stop”. I think we landed with a slight tailwind, but there was a low hill at the other end, and Ken would have had to fly just above it and then quickly drop to make an even more perilous landing. The runway needed lengthening.
A man left the cabin and walked the fifty yards separating us. George Carnes got to the plane as we finished setting my gear and supplies to the side. The three of us lifted the tail, spun it around, and shoved the Super Cub back onto the runway. Ken took off in the direction from which he had come. We stood watching as the plane climbed into the gray canopy. Its size soon dwindled to a speck, and its barely audible hum diminished to silence. George reached for a box of supplies; I grabbed my gear and we started for the cabin.