Captured by Alaska

Signs that Cody McCanna is living his dream are scattered all around his home in Koliganek, a tiny village on one of Alaska’s most productive salmon rivers.

Walking around his house, one must navigate past ATVs, john boats, dog sleds, snowmobiles, fishing rods, bear skulls, caribou antlers and huge moose racks.

It’s what you might expect from a Chewelah native who grew up loving the outdoors but never quite getting enough of it.

McCanna played football for the Whitworth Pirates, earned an education certificate and landed a job in the Alaska native village, where he planned to teach, hunt and fish for a few years before coming back to the Lower 48.

That as 11 years ago, a period that’s been graced by 90 sled dogs, countless fish, a native bride and two children.

“I’m not leaving anytime soon,” he said as we began casting lines for our first drift on the Nushagak River.

Last year at the Big Horn Outdoor Adventure Show in Spokane, my buddy, Dick Rivers, put his name in a can and won the drawing for a two-for-one king salmon fishing trip with McCanna, who guides hunters and anglers when he’s not teaching.

That’s how Rivers and I came to meet McCanna, and get a good taste of what’s keeping him in Alaska.

In the first 24 hours of our weeklong visit last July, we saw a grizzly bear and thousands of caribou in a herd that looked like smoke spreading across the tundra. We ate ground salmon for lunch and moose tenderloins for dinner. We saw bald eagles around every bend, plus two calves and eight adult Alaska moose, which, incidentally, are 7 feet high at the shoulder.

An Idaho moose would fit inside an Alaska moose with enough room to rattle around.

Then there was the fishing.

McCanna apologized that the catching was slow the first day as I hooked into my third king salmon in three consecutive drifts through a 300-yard run.

“Last week we were getting double hook-ups,” he said, slipping the outboard in gear and running the johnboat upstream for the next try.

Then the luck kicked in for Rivers, who landed three bright kings in the 30-pound range in the next four drifts as we bounced salmon eggs on the river bottom below a slip bobber.

We continued to catch more kings, some jacks, chum salmon and a huge rainbow, until Rivers and I had to ask McCanna to stop for the day.

“I’m going to be here a week,” I said, rubbing my aching wrists. “I’ve got to pace myself.”

“Let’s go take care of our fish,” Rivers said.

We toasted our luck back at the three-bedroom lodge next to McCanna’s house with a couple bottles of Alaska Amber, which I’d bought for $20 a six-pack in Dillingham.

Rivers and I planned to sip and savor every ounce of that beer, and every minute of our Alaska experience.

Day No. 2 showed us another side of Alaska. The big kings were suddenly scarce although the Nush, one of Alaska’s top three salmon streams, was anything but empty.

We started casting fly rods from an island in the early morning fog. A parade of sockeyes and chums was marching upstream as close as inches from my waders. The number of fish was staggering. A hand clicker recording every fish going past would have sounded like the snare drum in “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover.”

The sockeyes and chums were having nothing to do with our offerings. They might flinch if you bonked them on the nose with a weighted fly, but they wouldn’t open their mouths. Ditto for the king salmon scattered among them. They were moving; on a mission.

I looked at the native nets along the river upstream. The floats were bobbing with dozens of entangled fish.

We hooked salmon that day, including Rivers’ first king on a fly rod.

But it was different. We hadn’t seen a moose until after 6 p.m. The bigger kings never showed.

The eagles were getting old. While boating upstream, Rivers and I didn’t even poke each other to point them out.

My mind started drifting to the Alaska lifestyle that had hooked McCanna.

We saw a dozen village kids swimming in the very cold river. Most of them were girls and a few little boys.

“All the older boys are fishing,” McCanna said, referring to commercial or subsistence work. “This is their time for harvest.”

The village was quiet, save for the occasional barking dog or ATV ripping down the gravel roads, often packing two or more teenage girls.

No one talked unless they were spoken to. Even then, they are sparing with words.

McCanna’s wife, Sarah, is a native of Koliganek with full rights for subsistence fishing.

“I can catch only a limit of salmon with a rod and reel just like every one else,” McCanna said, “but we catch a few dozen kings and 40 or 50 sockeyes with nets and dry and smoke them for the rest of the year.”

Everything is shared with Sarah’s family down the road. Sarah and Cody each shoot a moose each year to round out their protein needs.

We helped McCanna put out a gillnet one day before we started sport fishing and helped haul in the bounty a few hours later. The harvest of chums would go to feed the dogs while Sarah and her mother came out to the weathered fish cleaning table with traditional ulu knives (a knife with a quarter-moon shaped blade edge) and made quick work of the fish, cutting them into blanket fillets that could be draped over poles to dry in the sun.

We fished hard the rest of the week, and McCanna poured his soul into finding us fish that would bite. We never got skunked, but we weren’t matching that first day regardless of whether we used flies or bait.

Rivers was getting so desperate, I saw him soaking his salmon-roe fly patterns in the real egg slime of McCanna’s bait box.

As we cruised up the river one day, I saw grayling rising along shore and talked Rivers and McCanna into letting me switch gears to a 5-weight fly rod. Grayling are the most agreeable fish in Alaska. They are like comfort food to get a sportsman through hard times.

I paused briefly to observe the way one larger grayling slipped up through the surface as though it’s head were lubricated, leaving a tennis-ball size bulge in the river to mark its rise.

The fish took the first Black Gnat I drifted into his space. Ditto for the fish behind it and the ones feeding to each side.

With my ego boosted, we got back in the boat and continued hunting for hogs.

The magic returned along with the fish during the last of our seven days on the Nushagak. One after another, we hooked big kings.

I’d landed a 20-pounder, several jacks and two 30-pounders before hooking what might have been the biggest fish of the trip. It made a powerful run before sulking on the bottom and, like all the other fish, it finally seemed to relent in inches to my reel.

McCanna turned his attention to Rivers, who was still trying to hook his first fish of the day. “We’re in the fish,” he said. “Keep your bait down.”

That’s when the submarine at the end of my line made a nuclear second surge that caught us all sleeping.

Cody popped the outboard into gear, but before he could throttle up, and give chase up the river, the line had evaporated from my reel, leaving a glaze of burned skin on my thumb before snapping the line off the arbor with a sickening “ping.”

Soon the catching cooled and we were once again reminded that the land of plenty can quickly become the land of tears.

A friend from Spokane fished the same waters with McCanna the following week and caught only one king in five days.

“Timing is everything here,” McCanna said. “I’m thankful for everyday the fish are in the river. It’s what gets us through the long winter.”