Fishering

Fishering 1 Brian Doyle In the woods here in Oregon there is a creature that eats squirrels like candy, can kill a pursuing dog in less than a second, and is in the habit of deftly flipping over a porcupine and scooping out the meat as if the prickle-pig were a huge and startled breakfast melon. This riveting creature is the fisher, a member of the mustelid family that includes weasels, otter, mink, badgers, ferrets, marten, and (at the biggest and most ferocious end of the family) wolverine. Sometimes called the pekan or fisher-cat, the fisher can be three feet long (with tail) and can weigh as much as twelve pounds. Despite its stunning speed and agility , it is best known not as an extraordinary athlete of the thick woods and snowfields, but as the bearer of a coat so dense and lustrous that it has been sought eagerly by trappers for thousands of years; this is one reason the fisher is so scarce pretty much everywhere it used to live. Biologist friends of mine tell me there are only two “significant” populations of fisher in Oregon—one in the Siskiyou Mountains in the southwest, called the Klamath population, and the other in the Cascade Mountains south of Crater Lake, called the Cascade population. All of the rare sightings of fisher in Oregon in recent years have been in these two areas. In the northwest coastal woods where I occasionally wander, biologists tell me firmly, there are no fishers and there have been none for more than fifty years. I am a guy who wanders around looking for nothing in particular, which is to say everything; in this frame of mind I have seen many things, in many venues urban and suburban and rural, and while ambling in the woods I have seen marten kits and three-legged elk and secret beds of watercress and the subtle dens of foxes. I have found thickets of wild grapevines, and secret jungles of salmonberries, and stands of huckleberries so remote and delicious that it is a moral dilemma as to whether or not I should leave a map behind for my children when the time comes for me to add to the compost of the world. Ecotone: reimagining place 2 Suffice it to say that I have been much graced in these woods, but to see a fisher was not a gift I expected. Yet recently I found loose quills on the path and then the late owner of the quills, with his or her conqueror atop the carcass staring at me. I do not know if the fisher had ever seen a human being before; it evinced none of the usual sensible caution of the wild creature confronted with homo violencia, and it showed no inclination whatsoever to retreat from its prize. We stared at each other for a long moment and then I sat down, thinking that a reduction of my height and a gesture of repose might send the signal that I was not dangerous and had no particular interest in porcupine meat. Plus, I remembered that a fisher can slash a throat in less than a second. Long minutes passed. The fisher fed, cautiously. I heard thrushes and wrens. There were no photographs or recordings, and when the fisher decided to evanesce, I did not make casts of its tracks or claim the former porcupine as evidence of fisherness. I just watched and listened and now I tell you. I don’t have any heavy message to share. I was only a witness: where there are no fishers there was a fisher. It was a stunning creature—alert, attentive, accomplished, unafraid. I think maybe there is much where we think there is nothing. Where there are no fishers there was a fisher. Remember that. ...