Another time, during the salting of fish in autumn, my comrade P— — i and I encountered penal laborers doing a different job.

When the Sakhalin salmon— keta— begin making their seasonal journey from the sea to fresh water, all the island's residents— Giliaks, exile-settlers, Japanese arrivals, even bears— gather on riverbanks and catch them using various means, starting with the primitive bearish method of simply grabbing a fish with a paw and ending with a seine. The most common method there of catching keta was with a hook. For this, you make an overhang on the riverbank, i.e., you perch on top of a small wooden dais overlooking the river. The fisherman sits down and extends over the water a very long, thin pole with an iron hook on the end. As soon as he feels it touch a fish, he quickly impales and tosses it ashore. So as to more easily manage the strong and struggling fish and to maintain the sharpness of the iron hook, he attaches a thin strap to the pole, and just as the hook penetrates the fish, he releases it from the pole and snaps the strap.

In such way, a fisherman can catch a hundred fish a night during a good keta run. But each fish will be covered with wounds, and until it's put in a salt barrel, these wounded areas can somewhat rot and attract flies. Very rarely was an exile-settler's salted fish found to be lacking a rotten odor.

Wealthier people use seines to catch the keta. The prison, having chosen the best area, where there were permanent fish sheds, owned its own sheds. It occasionally managed to salt the fish, and didn't begrudge on the salt.

That autumn when I visited the government fishing operation, I did so with my aforementioned comrade P— — i. He was there on account of the fish not being salted well, and, as an extreme measure, he was to conscientiously seize the misappropriated government salt, which sometimes was more valuable than flour there.