When Karuk tribal member and cultural biologist Ron Reed was just a toddler in the early 1960s, he liked to crouch on a rounded rock poking out of the rushing water of California’s Klamath River, watching his family fish for the Chinook salmon that arrived in late spring. The fish crowded so thickly in the water that they looked nearly solid enough to walk across.

His family had waited through the long winter for these fish. They would fill sacks full of salmon, enough to feed them several times a day for months.

Those days of extreme abundance are decades gone. For the past few years Reed, fishing now with his own children, has taken only a few spring-run fish from the