The Agreement

The lake did not know.

That was the first thing Leon thought when he read it, standing in the fisheries office at Sutcliffe with the printout in one hand and his coffee in the other and the window full of water. The agreement was in effect. Twenty-six years of it, the meetings in Reno and Carson City and Sacramento, the lawyers, the studies, the drafts that went back and forth with the tribe’s name on one line and the federal government’s on another and the two states’ and the water authority’s, the whole enormous paper river of it, had finally reached the sea, and it was the first of December, and the lake out the window was doing what it had done on the last day of November, which was lie there gray and flat and thirty miles long under a sky that promised weather and would not deliver.

He had been counting fish for the tribe for fifteen years, since he was nineteen. He put the printout down on the desk face up so the others would see it when they came in and went out to the truck.

The road south along the shore was the road he drove every morning, and he drove it the way he drove it every morning, slow, with the window down in the cold because he liked the smell, and he found that he was looking at the shoreline differently and could not at first say how. Then he could. He was looking at the old lines. You could see them, if you knew, on the tufa and the rock above the water: the bands where the lake had stood, and stood, and then not. His grandfather had shown him from this road when he was a boy. Here, the old man had said, pointing at a line on the rock high above their heads, was where the water was when his own grandfather was young, before the dam. And here, lower, when I was born. And here, lower again, in the bad year, when the fish could not get up the river at all. Eighty feet. The old man had held his hand flat at the height of the truck window and then had pointed at the sky.

The dam was 1905. Leon did not need the printout to tell him that. Every child on the reservation knew it the way children elsewhere knew their own birthdays. The government had built it across the river forty miles upstream, at Derby, and had turned half the Truckee out of its bed and sent it east across the desert to make farms, and the lake, which had no other river, had begun that year to fall. It fell for sixty years. It fell past the docks and the old landing and the mouth of the river itself, until the river came out onto a delta of its own dried mud and spread and sank and could not reach the water, and the fish that had come up it every spring since before there were people here to eat them, the cui-ui, the ones the tribe was named for, the Kooyooe Tukadu, the cui-ui eaters, stopped at the mud and turned back and did not spawn. Nineteen sixty-seven. The bad year. His grandfather’s flat hand.

He pulled off at the mouth.

There was nothing to see there in December, which was the point. The run was in spring. In April and May, if the water was right, the cui-ui came in from the lake in their thousands, gray-brown, heavy, ugly, a fish nobody outside this valley had ever heard of, and pushed up through the fishway the tribe had built at Marble Bluff and on up the river to spawn, and Leon and the others stood on the platforms and counted them going by and wrote the numbers on clipboards and the numbers were what the tribe took into the rooms in Reno and Carson City and Sacramento. That is how many. That is what you are deciding about. Some years the number was good. Some years it was so low that the men on the platforms did not talk on the drive home.

He got out and walked down to where the river met the lake. It met it, now. That was the thing. Thirty years of fighting had gotten the water up enough that the river came all the way in, and the agreement was supposed to keep it there, to say in writing what the river owed the lake and when, so that the next dry year, and the one after, would be argued out of a document and not out of a mud flat with the fish dying in it.

He stood on the gravel with his hands in his jacket and looked at the place where the fresh water went into the salt. You could see it, a line, a color change, the river’s green going into the lake’s gray and losing itself. He thought about what he would tell his grandfather, who had died two years short of this morning and who had sat in the back of more of those meetings than anyone still living, in a folding chair, in his hat, saying nothing, and who had told Leon once on this road that he did not expect to see it, and that this was all right, that a thing the lake had waited a hundred years for could wait a little for an old man to catch up.

He would tell him it was in effect. He would tell him the lake did not know, and that this was fine, that the lake had never known any of it, not the dam and not the drafts, and had simply gone on being a lake as far as it was allowed to, and that the whole of the tribe’s work for a hundred years had come down to widening that allowance, an inch of paper at a time.

The wind came up off the water. Somewhere out in the gray a pelican was working the surface. He looked at the mouth of the river a while longer and then went back up to the truck, because there were nets to check at the hatchery and the cutthroat did not care what day it was either, and because in April the cui-ui would come in whether or not anyone had signed anything, and he wanted, this year, to be standing on the platform when the first one went by.

---