Today, while fishing a small stream, my partner and I noticed something upstream that took us awhile to figure out what we were seeing. It was a salmon, partly swimming, partly struggling, half floating, downstream that appeared to be attached to a branch. As it got closer we could see that the branch appeared to be through the fish’s gills and mouth.
The fish and branch got hung up on the far side of the stream so I waded over to see if I could free it.
The branch was smooth with no bark, 1-2 inches in diameter, 3-4 ft long, and curved. The chum salmon was hung up in the middle of the branch, with it branch running through the gills and mouth of the fish.
I pulled the long stick out, revived the fish for a bit, and remarkably it swam away.
A short distance upstream was a beaver dam. We figure that the chum tried to make the leap, didn’t quite make it, slid backwards, an upstream pointing stick slid into the gill and out the mouth and the thrashing fish dislodged the stick from the dam where it drifted down to where we saw it.
It was the strangest thing…