Ray Whitfield has counted salmon on this stretch of the river for nineteen seasons. He does it on foot, in the rain, with a mechanical tally counter that clicks like a bicycle freewheel. “People assume there is a machine for this,” he says. “There is. It is me.”
The count begins in the first week of October and runs until the water gets too high to read. Ray records his numbers in pencil in a series of notebooks he keeps in a plastic bin at home. There are nineteen of them now. He has never lost one.
If you only look at a river in the summer, you have not met it.
Ray Whitfield
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