A fight for your life might just about be the fiercest you can fight. Holding on to where you are, thrashing, running, using everything power you have to pull away. Sometimes you can snap the line, hook still in your mouth, but make your daring escape. Other times unknown hands pull you into a foreign world.

Every year, as the blueberries ripen, eagles, bears, and wolves pick up their lives to move to the river's edge. Staking out a spot, with time turning the yellowing grasses red. Feel the chill of the first frost. Time to pick up your work. Fight for your own life, for the sustenance to last you through the winter.

At this time too, humans begin to perk up. Change is coming. You can see the splashes of creatures returning from years abroad, adventuring, to come home one last time. To give their life for that of their children.

Hatched in these same rivers, years ago, the young alvin flit around their small safe havens, not yet the silver beasts, instead just food for a dolly varden. In the murky water marred by the branches of towering spruce that beavers have toppled into the stream, they grow. Alvin. Smolt. Fry. One year after their hatching, and finally big enough for their lives to begin. For possibly the biggest adventure of their lives. So downstream they go. Flow with the current, through the rapids, over the boulders. A wild ride of exhilaration and fear, they are spit out into a body of water far more vast than they have ever seen before. Staying in groups of the thousands of them left, they look for cover. It's not uncommon to see groups of thousands of little silver flashes churning the water by a dock-a feast for many. By now, only a fraction of those initial eggs have survived. Give them another month of growing in the cove, feeding on bigger and bigger plankton, and it'll reduce to one half. Now. Ready. To move out into the ocean. To travel, hundreds, thousands of miles. Out to the Gulf of Alaska. Up to Anchorage. Out to the Aleutians. Down the coast to as far as Canada. Growing, changing. They are now food for the pigeon guillemots, the penguins of the north. Bright red feet and bright red beak, filled to the top with salmon. Now for the sea lions, giant lumbering creatures on land, but in water, sleek as the seals they are, they jet through to catch their food. Now they can sustain killer whales. The top predator. They join birds, seals, and sea lions in feeding the pods of a dozen or so. Led by their matriarchs, these pods travel far, searching for salmon or seals. I've seen them when they find their prey. Unable to chew, they tear, tossing their prey far up in the air, again and again, catching the mutilated flesh that flies down, bit by little bit.

The number of eggs has been cut in half again, one, maybe two times. Four more years pass. Then they all receive a signal, programmed into them by something scientists have no explanation for. It's time. Time to return to the place of their birth, time to make it there alive to give to the next generation. From across the state, they come. Flooding the bays, the coves where they flitted under docks as scared children. Now they are powerful, feet long, dozens of pounds of muscle won from their fights and escapes, some left with scars and lacerations of former encounters they escaped. All to return here. To the exact river of their birth. It is incredible, how many of the salmon return to the precise stream that they were born into. Somehow - their ability to recognize the water flow? the scent of the stream? - they return. To sacrifice their lives. To survive one more journey. Then to lay their eggs and die.

Time to go. Refresh our minds. Fill our bellies. Follow the instinct. Go to the torrents of water and catch your dreams.

The first time I caught a salmon I was 10 years old. Over twice their average life span. The salmon I caught, however, was probably born the year I first went fishing. 5 years old, alongside my father. Down to the river, to perform our own special sort of sacrifice. Pass Changing-Waders-Rock. Head upstream. There, across the river. Where the bear challenged my father for the salmon he had caught, following him downstream, growling and huffing all the way. Walk up a tributary a ways, hop over at the rock to avoid the mud, although your boots are already covered from the path right down by the river, shaded under branching alder that always fills at high tide. Sit down for a bit, cast our rods by the Big Rock. Not that long ago, a mother bear with her cub charged us here, forcing her way through, forcing us across the river. Where we now go. The water pressure on your legs grows and grows, the piercing cold water on the outside of your waders compressing, like you were suddenly walking on Jupiter. Providing a quick relief to the rising sun overhead, peeking through the treetops in which an eagle perches.

I step over a half-decayed salmon in my path, top of the head mostly missing, bottom jaw hooked and skin peeling away, missing chunks from its body. The brain has the most nutrients, which is why the bears go for it first. Is it a waste? You would hardly think so. In two months, the smell coating the entire river will have dissipated, just like the salmon itself, living now in the roots of the trees, 100 feet tall that shade reds where the next generation's eggs are laid.

In fourth grade, my class read a book about the salmon in the trees. The natural processes of decomposition and the food chain meant that everything that was in the environment came back around full circle. The life cycle of salmon undoubtedly left an impact on so many creatures, big and small, giving life to killer whales, sea lions, bears, and people. But they also helped the ecosystem in which they were first laid. The rotting salmon carcasses, the nutrients of the streams, rivers, and oceans, the accumulated power of a life fully lived, seeps into the soil and gives life in a new way too. The lush Southeast Alaska temperate rainforest, a haven of green, is fed by the death of these salmon. On the river banks, rotting, heads torn off, or falling from the talons of bald eagles perched on the tops of the trees. These spruce, hemlock, and cedar, some of whom have been around since Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas, are nourished by the fish that they, in turn, nourish back, falling into the river, creating a safe haven for the next generation.

How young should someone be when they take their first life? I never cried when the salmon died when I was younger. As I grew into my middle school years, I loved telling other kids about the feeling of the blood on your hands, or the opportunity to hold a still beating heart. Now when I go down to the river, I pray. For the salmon, for myself. For this whole system of predator and prey, of sustenance, of death giving itself over to life. It's not like any type of prayer I've seen before. But when I pull a flashing body out of the water, silver scales flickering and thrashing, splashing the water over the river bank, I know it is being heard loud and clear. Thank you. I cut the gills. Thank you for feeding my family. I slice up the belly. I don't really know where you came from out there. Open the organ cavity. But I know you were born in this river. Cut the throat. Your blood will feed the trees. Pull out the stomach. And your meat will feed me. Take out the egg sacks. Walk over to the river. Let them go. Down the stream. To feed another.