riparian+zone


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Watch Out! A bear swiped its claw through the now-fresh water, missing Sylvie by inches but getting another unlucky fish. Sylvie was in the riparian zone with lots to pay attention to. There were lots of trees, overhanging banks and vegetation around her. Sylvie kept swimming through the riparian zone but what used to be easy for her--even swimming--began to be a struggle. At one point her tail got caght on a piece of vegetation. She struggled and got free. No longer was she interested in food. She was preoccupied with swimming against the current, feeling her belly swell, and her scales cling to her skin. Strangely, she seemed to lose her love of strong flowing water and the exciting bouldery rapids she soared through just days ago. She had an eye now for gravel, fine gravel that she could arrange as she wanted to in the slow current, Lucy found a nice place and -- without really knowing why -- began to make a little hole with her tail as she swished against the endless current. She made a redd.

Not long after the redd was finished, she became aware of other fish shadowing her. There was X, and old friend from her ocean feading ground who hovered uncomfortably close. And always, Dolly Varden and Cuthroat, who used to fear her, lurking close behind her. But she could pay attention to none of them as her stomach began to swell. Suddenly, whe she felt it could get no fuller, that she might explode, she began to feel relief. She realized, as she saw the trout disappear while gulping orange berries, that she had laid her egges. After she laid her eggs she stayed for four days to hover over them and protect them from those nasty little trout.

After a while, though, she began to wander, to tire, and sometimes to forget what she was doing. Sylvie moved to some slow moving water with fine silt, to just wait. She found it hard to breathe in the slow water. After a couple of days, she thought she could smell her own skin eroding away down stream and it smelled somehow like new life, like tiredness and hope all at once. That night, she had a feeling she hadn't had she she first learned to swim in this very stream as a little fry. She let the current sweep her, and overpower her, smelling all of the rich soil and silt and feeling the exhilration of not knowing where she was headed. The next day as she was being washed up on a beach and sea gulls were landing to pick at her, one sea gull violoently picked at her eye. "Fine," she thought, "I have seen it all now." And when another violently pecked her out of her senses, covered her with sand, and began to fly away with her, her last feeling was of her flesh falling apart out of the gull's mouth and back to the river. She was air and sky and dirt. And the water that would give her eggs life.

To do: Interview or invite someone from Trout Unlimited to comment on the purpose and intent of their [|Montana Creek work].