By David Quammen


      Rumor had it they were gone, or nearly gone, killed off in large numbers by dewatering and high temperatures during the bad drought of 1977. The last sizable population of Tbymallus arcticus-Arctic grayling---indigenous to a river in the lower fortyeight states: ppfft. George Liknes, a graduate student in fisheries at Montana State University, was trying to do his master's degree on these besieged grayling of the upper Big Hole River in western Montana, and word passed that his collecting nets, in late summer of 1978, were coming up empty. The grayling were not where they had been, or if they were, Liknes for some reason wasn't finding them. None at all? "Well," said one worried state wildlife biologist, "precious few."
      Grayling are not set up for solitude. Like the late lamented passenger pigeon, grayling are by nature and necessity gregarious, thriving best in rather crowded communities of their own kind. When the size of a population sinks below a certain unpredictable threshold, grayling are liable to disappear altogether, poof, evidently incapable of successful pairing and reproduction without the circumstantial advantage of teeming fellowship. This may have been what happened in Michigan. Native grayling were extinguished there, rather abruptly, during the 1930s.
      The Michigan grayling and the Montana strain had been from time beyond memory the unique and isolated representatives of the species in temperate North America. They were glacial relicts, meaning they had gradually fled southward into open water during the last great freeze-up of the Pleistocene epoch; then, when the mile-thick flow of ice stopped just this side of the Canadian border and began melting back northward, they were left behind in Michigan and Montana as two separate pockets of grayling. These were trapped, as it turned out, cut off by hundreds of miles from what became the primary range of the species, across northern Canada and Alaska. They were stuck in warmish Southern habitats overlapping the future range of dominance of Homo sapiens; their own future, consequently, insecure. The Michigan grayling went first. They had been abundant in the upper part of Michigan's Lower Peninsula and in the Otter River of the Upper Peninsula. One report tells of four people catching 3,000 grayling in fourteen days from the Manistee River and hauling most of that catch off to Chicago. By 1935, not surprisingly, the Manistee was barren of grayling. Before long, so was the rest of the state. Sawlogs had been floated down rivers at spawning time, stream banks had been stripped of vegetation (causing water temperatures to rise), exotic competing fish had been introduced, and greedy pressure like that on the Manistee had continued. By 1940, the people of Michigan had just the grayling they were asking for: none.
        In Montana, where things tend to happen more slowly, some remnant of the original grayling has endured-against similar adversities in less intense form-a bit longer. Even while disappearing during the past eighty years from parts of their Montana range, grayling have expanded into other new habitat. More accurately, they have been introduced to new habitat, in the zoological equivalent of forced school-busing: hatchery rearing and planting. As early as 1903, soon after the founding of the Fish Cultural Development Station in Bozeman, the state of Montana got into the business of manufacturing grayling; and for almost sixty years thereafter the planting of hatchery grayling was in great vogue.
      The indigenous range of the Montana grayling was in the headwaters of the Missouri River above the Great Falls; they were well established in the Smith River, in the Sun River, and in the Madison, the Gallatin, and the Jefferson and their tributaries, notably, the Big Hole River. They had evolved as mainly a stream dwelling species and existed in only a very few Montana lakes. However, they happened to be rather tolerant of low dissolved oxygen levels, when those levels occurred in cold winter conditions (but not when the oxygen was driven out of solution by summer warming). This made them suitable for stocking in high lakes, where they could get through the winter on what minimal oxygen remained under the ice. In 1909, 50,000 grayling from the Bozeman hatchery were planted in Georgetown Lake. just a dozen years later, 28 million grayling eggs were collected from Georgetown, to supply hatchery brood for planting elsewhere. And the planting continued: Ennis Lake, Rogers Lake, Mussigbrod Lake, Grebe Lake in Yellowstone National Park. Between 1928 and 1977, millions more grayling were dumped into Georgetown Lake.
      Unfortunately, that wasn't all. Back in 1909, hatchery grayling were also planted in the Bitterroot and Flathead rivers, on the west side of the Continental Divide, in stream waters they had never colonized during their ancestral migration. An innocent experiment, and without large consequences, since the grayling introduced there evidently did not take hold. But then, in what may have seemed a logical extension of all this hatchery rearing and planting, the Big Hole River was planted with grayling. The Big Hole already had a healthy reproducing population of wild grayling, but that was not judged to be reason against adding more. From 1937 until 1962, according to the records of the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks (FWP), more than five million grayling from the Anaconda hatchery were poured into the Big Hole, from the town of Divide upstream to the headwaters: hothouse grayling raining down on wild grayling.      This was before FWP biologists had come upon the belated realization that massive planting of hatchery fish in a habitat where the same species exists as a reproducing population is the best of all ways to make life miserable for the wild fish. Things are done differently these days, but the mistake was irreversible. The ambitious sequence of plantings was very likely the most disastrous single thing that ever happened to the indigenous grayling of the Big Hole.
      At best, each planting instantaneously created tenement conditions of habitat and famine conditions of food supply. In each place where the hatchery truck stopped, the river became a grayling ghetto. At worst, if any of the planted fish survived long enough to breed with each other and interbreed with the wild fish, the whole planting program served to degrade the gene pool of the Big Hole grayling, making them less capable of surviving the natural adversities--drought, flood, temperature fluctuation, predation--of their natural habitat. 
      But here's the good news: Very few of those planted grayling would have survived long enough to breed. The mortality rate on hatchery grayling planted in rivers is close to 100 percent during the first year, and most don't last even three months, whether or not they are caught by a fisherman. These planted grayling come, after all, from a small sample of lake-dwelling parents, with little genetic variety or inherited capacity for coping with moving water. Reared in the Orwellian circumstances of the hatchery, cooped in concrete troughs, without a beaver or a merganser to harry them, eating Purina trout chow from the hand of man, what chance have they finally in the most challenging of habitats, a mountain river? The term "fish planting" itself is a gross misnomer, when applied to dropping grayling or trout into rivers; there is no delusion, even among the hatchery people, that these plants will ever take root. More realistically, it's like providing an Easter egg hunt for tourists with fishing rods.
      In 1962 the Big Hole planting ceased, and the remaining wild grayling, those that hadn't died during the famine and tenement periods, were left to get on as best they could. Then came the 1977 drought and, the following year, the George Liknes study. One of Liknes's study sections on the Big Hole was a two-mile stretch downstream from the town of Wisdom to just above the Squaw Creek bridge. On a certain remote part of the stretch a rancher had sunk a string of old car bodies to hold his hayfield in place. From that two-mile stretch, using electroshocking collection equipment that is generally reliable, Liknes did not take a single grayling. This came as worrisome news to me because, on a morning in late summer of 1975, standing waist deep within sight of the same string of car bodies and offering no great demonstration of angling skill, I had caught and released thirty one grayling in four hours. Now they were either gone or in hiding.      
      Grayling belong to the salmonid family, as cousins of trout and whitefish. In many ways they seem a -form intermediate between those two genera; in other ways, they depart uniquely from the salmonid pattern.
      The first thing usually noted about them, their distinguishing character, is the large and beautiful dorsal fin. It sweeps backward twice the length of a trout's, fanning out finally into a trailing lobe, and it is, under certain specific conditions, the most exquisitely colorful bit of living matter to be found in the state of Montana; spackled with rows of bright turquoise spots that blend variously to aquamarine and reddish-orange toward the front of the fin, a deep hazy shading of iridescent mauve overall, and along the upper edge,, in some individuals, a streak of shocking rose. That's in the wild, or even stuck on a hook several inches underwater. Lift the fish into air, and it all disappears. The bright spots and iridescence drain away instantaneously, the dorsal folds down to nothing, and you are holding a drab gun-metal creature that looks very much like a whitefish. The grayling magic vanishes, like a dreamed sibyl, when you pull it to you.
      Except for this dorsal fin, the grayling does resemble that most maligned and misunderstood of Montana fish, its near relative, the mountain whitefish. Both are upholstered-unlike the trout- with large stiff scales, scales you wouldn't want to eat. Both have dull-colored bodies, grayish-silver in the grayling, brownish-silver in the whitefish-though the grayling is marked along its forward flank with another smattering of spots, these purplish-black, play-ing dimly off the themes in the dorsal. They are also distinguish-able (from each other and from their common salmonid relatives) by the shape of the mouth. A trout has a wide, sweeping, toothy grin; a whitefish's mouth is narrow and toothless-worse, it is set in a snout that is pointed and cartilaginous, like a rat's, probably the main single cause of the whitefish's image problem. The gray-ling, as you can see if you look closely, has been burdened with a mouth that is an uneasy compromise between the two: The narrow mouth is set with numerous tiny teeth and fendered with large cartilaginous maxillaries, but its shortened nose couldn't fairly be called a snout. The point is this: The grayling is one of America's most beautiful fish, but only a few subtle anatomical strokes distinguish it from one of the most ugly. A lesson in hubris.
      But a superfluous lesson, since the grayling by character is anything but overweening. It is dainty and fragile and relatively submissive. With tiny teeth and little moxie, it fails in all territorial competition against trout-and this is another reason for its de-cline in the Big Hole, where rainbow and brown and brook trout that have been moved into the neighborhood now bully it mer-cilessly. Like many beautiful creatures that have known fleeting success, it is dumb. It seeks security in gregariousness and these days is liable to find, instead, carnage. When insect food is on the water, and the fish are attuned to that fact, a fisherman can stand in one spot, literally without moving his feet, and catch a dozen grayling. Trout are not so foolish: Drag one from a hole and the word will be out to the others. The grayling cannot take such a hint. In the matter of food it is an unshakable optimist; the distinction between a mayfly on the water's surface and a 3 hook decorated with feathers and floss is lost on it. But this rashness, in the Big Hole for example, might again be partly a consequence (as well as a cause) of its beleaguered circumstances. The exotic trouts, being dominant, seize the choice territorial positions of habitat, and the grayling, pushed off into marginal water where a fish can only with difficulty make a living, may be forced to feed much more recklessly than it otherwise would.
      At certain moments the grayling seems even a bit stoic, as though it had seen its own future and made adjustments. This is noticeable from the point of view of the fisherman. A rainbow trout with a hook jerked snug in its mouth will leap as though it were angry, furious-leap maybe five or six times, thrashing the air convulsively each time. If large, it will run upstream, finally to go to the bottom and begin scrabbling its head in the rubble to scrape out the hook. A whitefish, unimaginative and implacable, will usually not jump, will never run, will stay near the bottom and resist with pure loutish muscle. A grayling will jump once if at all and remain limp in the air, leaping the way a Victorian matron would faint into someone's arms-with demure, trusting abdication. Then, possibly after a polite tussle, the grayling will let its head be pulled above the water's surface, turn passively onto its side, and allow itself to be hauled in. Once beaten, a rainbow can be coaxed with certain tricks of handling to give you three seconds of docility while you get the hook out to release it. A whitefish will struggle like a hysterical pig no matter what. A grayling will simply lie in your hand, pliant and fatalistic, beautiful, placing itself at your mercy.
      So no one has much use for the grayling, not even fishermen. It grows slowly, never as large as a trout, and gives unsatisfactory battle. It is scaly, bony, and not especially good to eat. Montana's fish and game laws will allow you to kill five of them from the Big Hole River in a day,* and five more every day all summer but what will you do with them? Last year a Butte man returned from a weekend on the river and offered a friend of mine ten grayling to feed his cat. The man had killed them because he caught them, very simple logic, but then realized he had no use for them. This year my friend's cat is dead, through no fault of the grayling, so even that constituency is gone. A grayling does not cook up well, it does not fight well. It happens to have an extravagant dorsal fin, but no one knows why. If you kill one to hang on your wall, its colors will wilt away heart-breakingly, and the taxidermist will hand you back a whitefish in rouge and eye shadow. The grayling, face it, is useless. Like the auk, like the zebra swallowtail, like Angkor Wat.

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