“Really,” he fumed, “we should have the whole salmon.” His fury was justified. For thousands of years Krise’s Squaxin Island ancestors, the People of the Water, had plied the southern end of Puget Sound, the glacier-chiseled arm of the Pacific that elbows into western Washington. Theirs was a world of tidal flats and brackish rivers, one that collapsed the line between land and sea. They hunted elk and gathered clams, but salmon were their staple, a food as sacred as it was nourishing. The People of the Water harpooned salmon with obsidian points, endured winter on their dried flesh, honored
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