You drive for an hour, the water on your right, rocks on the left, a single track of tarmac with holes in it. Then at a bend, a pole with fish. Then another. By the third bend you are already hungry.
Kanykei, 47, sells at the sixth stall from the dam. She started at sixteen, after her father's boat sank in the spring of 1986 and her mother needed someone to sell what he had caught the week before. The business since then is the same: the men go out at night, the fish come to the shore at dawn, the women clean them by six, salt them, hang them in the smokehouse behind the stall with alder wood and a handful of juniper, and by ten the first strings are on the poles.
"Smoked fish is not a food. It is a way of telling the road you are here."
Three fish are 21 som, six are 38 if you smile, eleven if you want a story. She knows the lorry drivers by their cough and the Talas taxi drivers by their silence. In July she sells forty strings a day; in November six. In winter the smokehouse is closed and she goes to her sister in Aulie-Ata.
I ask how she measures a good day. She says: "When nobody stops, I smoke the fish for myself and the children. When everybody stops, I smoke twice and nobody has time to talk. The best day is when ten people stop and one of them listens."
Before I leave she gives me a fish for the road, wrapped in a newspaper from last week. "For the driver," she says. I eat it myself, standing at the roadside, the lake behind me, with my fingers. It is the best meal of the summer, and I wrote nothing about it for a month, because I was afraid of writing it wrong.
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