It is Halloween and the river is freezing. Cakes of ice are flowing. The ice shelf is growing out from the edge and getting thicker each day. The nights have been down in the teens and single digits and the mighty Yukon is slowing down for the winter.
The salmon are done running, but there are still whitefish and others in the river. But right now it’s time for the great eel migration. They enter the Yukon from the Bering Sea. After living their life attached to salmon, sucking the life blood out of them until they are fat enough to detach, they make their migration up river to spawn in the silty Yukon River.
Lamprey eels are a delicacy here on the Yukon. They are raked up from long narrow holes chopped in the ice, using a long board with sharp headless nails up and down the sides. The eel stick is raked through the water back and forth until an eel is impaled on the nails much like a hotdog on a stick. They wrap there slithering bodies around the stick and are raked up and out from under the water and thrown on top of the ice. They act and look very much like a snakes slithering around your feet until the cold overcomes them and they quickly freeze.
When they are running thick dip nets are used and great quantities can be harvested. We even have a commercial fishery here on the Yukon and we will get a $1 a pound for them at the local salmon buying office. There is a market for them in Asia and they are also an important food source here.
The first eels of the season are brought home and shared for everyone to get a taste of the rich oily flavor. They remind me of canned sardines and are very good baked or fried.
Some years we miss them and they pass, so we try to check the river daily starting before Halloween and into mid-November until they arrive. Each day someone from the village will chop a slot in the ice to see if they have arrived.
We are still waiting patiently ....this all hallows eve.
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