My first real exposure to Inconnu, which translates as “unknown” in French, was when I went to the field to visit one of my graduate students, Theresa Tanner, at her research site on the Selawik River in northwest Alaska at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Selawik National Wildlife Refuge. Tanner, T2 to those who know her, was trying to determine the characteristics of Inconnu spawning habitat and model it on a drainage-wide basis. Her job for the Fish and Wildlife Service was also to get an estimate of the population size of Inconnu in the Selawik. To do this, she had to tag as many fish as she could while they were concentrated on their spawning run. Alas, the fish were not cooperating, and T2 and the crew had only been able to capture a few to tag. One morning while I was there in early September 2004, we went out as a crew of six in hopes of tagging a few more fish. We motored down to a bend in the river that purportedly would hold a lot of fish staging for their spawning foray at night. To catch them, we had tried large beach seines and even angling with large silver spoons outfitted with a single hook and pinched barb to prevent damage to the fish when (if) caught. That morning we tried angling. We broke into two teams of three people, one would keep their hands dry and take notes, one would net, hold the meter-long measuring board and the tagging equipment, and one would do the angling. As an elder in the group, I started as an angler. Beginning at about 9:00 AM, on the first cast we had an Inconnu; the second cast we had one; the third, etc. By about 10:30, I gladly gave up my fishing rod, so tired that I could hardly hold it anymore. At about 12:30, T2 said to stop; we all thought it was to take a lunch break; however, we had to stop because we had used all of the 100 tags that she had brought from camp that morning. In other words, we had captured, measured, weighed, tagged, and released 100 Inconnu in about 31⁄2 hours. That’s with only two of us casting at any one time. Remember that these fish average about a meter and 10 kilograms each! Now I knew Inconnu!
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