Like sinews, so blush returned to the waters.

A pulse of scales and fins flickering red and tender in the waterways. Aback the shoal was a fever, pregnant and brutal in its abundance, that had melted snowpack and called the August rain down in long cathartic gasps upon the highland forests and sent forth a deluge like capillaries to tap the sea.

Salmon hovered at the culvert's mouth. She knew it should not be here for it was not here in the remembered smells of her childhood. 

Out in the open ocean, where her provenance was as far removed as her fate, the dream of her birthplace had been interred something deep within her bones, but now from the spasm of these ancestral waters, memories had threshed anew. Memories so fragrant, it was like she had lighted upon a map to her beginnings, the beginnings of all the sea.

Something true was calling her home.

But as she swam, she remembered the others with whom she'd talked on the long journey back. "You'll die," old Sturgeon had muttered at the confluence of their migratory routes where the sea's slow and ancient churning conspired them to meet. He whispered it low and toothless into the grit, silt dancing at his whiskers. 

Salmon studied Sturgeon, measuring him by the eon. His spine resembled the crest of a mountain massif and in those scutes she read the fossil geometry of some prehistorical sierra drained of its water by the locking and grinding of the world and shored up far inland past all estimation of living sealife except the sturgeon's own.

But in those eons Salmon glimpsed no wisdom she had a use for. His eyes wore a dulled and glassy pallor and when he looked away she lost sight of her own reflection. "Why would I want to live forever," she said, "if this is what immortality brings?" There was a doggedness in her voice, but she remembered what she'd heard. That her skin would thicken and warp; that the vigor would be blanched from her muscles, belly distended with so many eggs fought over by the males with their hooked and hawking faces. 

"What if you lose your beauty?" Cod had said before they bid farewell—the only one she'd called friend. In the shadowed lee of a floe where stark glens hewed ice from ice they looked like twin commas glowing at the margins by lurid gusts of light that sheared into the frigids above them, one comma flashing silver and ebullient and the other imprinted with clay archipelagos. In that configuration they'd travelled far together, two motes punctuating an endless gulf. "You'll look like mud, just like me," she sighed. She had always envied Salmon's sheen. Salmon wriggled forward, nudging Cod admonishingly. "Mud is the first thing I saw when I was born," she said. "And now I want nothing more than to see that same mud again." 

"But do you think we'll see each other again?" At those words Salmon felt a pang. She pushed it back down. "If I make it, I'll look for you. I promise." Then came a silence. She knew no one before her had ever returned from the journey. A few more minutes passed with only whispers between them before Salmon peeled away from the floe and became another face in the featureless caucus of the other salmon.

"Ingrate," Rainbow Trout had called her. The knurls of vomerine teeth flashed as he said it. Salmon had begun to flush now, and with pink streaking across their sides they looked almost alike. They'd swum abreast the other against the flow of a brackish estuary fed by the watershed through to the sea. Every now and again the wind stooped the thicket down and fingerlike brambles dimpled the face of the eddying shallows. With the ocean in his eyes he looked back towards the tributaries that fell away behind them and then farther still to the irrecoverable blue where he could never go. "You salmon and steelheads are the same. Why come back here? I know these streams well, it's scarce space to hide now. Of your thousands of eggs maybe two will survive and you'll never meet them. A waste of freedom." Salmon had stared back without reply. It had been days without food and many days more to go and Trout's cruel words wicked away her strength. She longed for the balmy abundance of the sea but kept swimming forward, thinking of Basking Shark's words.

"Up there is nothing but starvation," he'd said, a rumble from deep inside a mouth of vaulted arches. "Nourishment comes from the depths." His gills billowed and bloomed out dross from their harbour. He bore within him a stolid leather soul that ferried a vast and voucherless bounty of many more, amassed by traversing swarms of smaller souls that lived in the darker places unaccounted for.

But already Salmon could feel the tug of the chemical command deep within her. 

She'd followed a dead reckoning with only the Earth's poles and its gentle spin as her bearings. And so propelled by the humming of the songful sea behind her, she swam through worlds and worlds till it dimmed into the creeks and murmurs of the Alderwood country. The country that would soon set her young shimmering back seaward in orphan droves, she thought. As it had for her, and the parents she'd never met, and those before them.

And now Salmon hovered at the culvert's mouth, the first in her bloodline to smell the rancid strangeness that poured freely from this cold, metal throat. It was the smell of overripe fruit bursting open in the sun, of the alkaline rank of crushed ants, of indiscriminate deepsea pipes, slick with grease.

She'd cleared rapids and cascades, but the torrent flowing out of it was almost too much to bear. Just beyond was a landscape matching the image she had been bearing within her that had grown stronger as she fought against the surge. Now all the world was at her back and the taste of the fertile waters just up ahead, layered over the chemical reek, burned a ravenous hole in her memory.

She was at the very front of the throng, girdled on all sides by the others, restlessness in their loins. She felt scales and fins jostling her forward, pressing her towards the sill of the strange portal.  She knew that before her birth, the creek ahead had waited for her, and now it awaited her again. She knew it was a promise that could not be reneged. She knew that now was the moment to act.

But she could not know of the wastes poisoning the turbid waters in which she swam, or the calculus of industry that the culvert had come from, or the dead end to which it would lead. Filled with the unheeded counsels of Sturgeon, Cod, Rainbow Trout, and Basking Shark, she could only level an untrammeled gaze at the unknown.

Salmon leaped.