SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - A once-abundant fish species all but absent from Yellowknife Bay nets for decades appears to be making a triumphant return.

"It's a real mystery," said Paul Vecsei, a biologist with Golder Associates, who has been contracted by the Yellowknives Dene First Nation to conduct a study into the inconnu's resurgence, known locally as coney and in Alaska as Sheefish. The fish have been turning up in nets in and around Yellowknife Bay the last ten years when for most of Yellowknife's existence they had been scarce.

Vecsei said it's easy in most great lakes to determine where the blame lies when fish species disappear - industry, commercial fishing, habitat loss, dam construction - but in the case of Great Slave Lake circa the 1940s and 1950s when Dene elders say the inconnu population dropped off drastically, commercial fishing was only just beginning, and the sole industry that may have affected the fish was gold mining, which was mostly underground.

"Here we have a basically pristine environment and the coney disappeared," said Vecsei.

He said what makes their disappearance all the more peculiar is that by all accounts the inconnu in Great Slave Lake, particularly in their old fall spawning grounds on the Yellowknife River, were said to be incredibly numerous before vanishing.

At one time, before the mines and before Yellowknife, "there were so many coneys on the river it was unbelievable," according to former Yellowknives Dene First Nation Chief Fred Sangris.

The Yellowknife River is referred to in the Tlicho language as "weledeh," which translates directly into "river of inconnu."

"My grandfather who lived to be over 107 years-old recalled his time on the river when he was a young man," said Sangris. "There were so many coneys on the river during the fall that the fish were basically climbing on top of each other to get moving up the river," said Sangris.

"On both sides of the river, the Yellowknives Dene had their camps where they would harvest fish for the fall - dry them, preserve them for the long winter, and used them to feed the sled dogs as well."

The Dene could fish for as many inconnu as they liked without making a dent in the population, he said.

According to Sangris, Dene elders point to the period of time between the 1940s and 1950s to when the inconnu stopped swarming up the Yellowknife River, and when the catch in fishing nets generally dropped off around Great Slave Lake.

He said in his opinion, which is shared by many Dene, it was the underground blasting at the Giant and Con mines, which only began shutting down in the last decade, that scared the fish off.

"The suckers, the pike, the whitefish, the other little fish - they could withstand all this. But the most sensitive fish are the coneys ... and there were so many activities with the mine the fish decided to leave," said Sangris.

But now that the mines are closed the inconnu are starting to reappear. Sangris said he's caught a few in his nets over the last ten years, but it's been the last two or three years that the numbers of inconnu in Yellowknife Bay have really climbed.

"Something exciting is happening in Yellowknife Bay," he said.

But with the return of the inconnu comes a new mystery - where are they coming from?

"We don't know if they're native to the river here," said Sangris. "They could be coneys from another area making their way into Yellowknife Bay."

Vecsei's team hasn't found any inconnu in Yellowknife River - just in the bay - since embarking on the study in February.

"While all (the population rebound) sounds good, it has yet to be seen if these are the same coney," said Vecsei.

"What would be really great is if this resurgence in numbers would indicate that, 'oh yeah, the Yellowknife River coney is coming back' - I have yet to see any sign of that and the science does not show that."

Vecsei said he's heard of anglers catching inconnu in the Cameron River, and there are many other rivers flowing into Great Slave Lake where the inconnu may be migrating from to get to Yellowknife Bay.

Biologists and the Dene First Nation will be monitoring the Yellowknife River until the end of October, so there is still time to see if the inconnu are using the river to spawn. Sangris said he is excited at the possibility that they are.

"If the coney makes the (spawning) run on this river here, it would be the first time in 70 years they've done it - and if they do it successfully, and if they spawn on the river, wow, they're back," he said.

The next step after that, said Sangris, is to monitor and manage the fish to make sure they don't disappear again, a task he said he hopes the Department of Fisheries and Oceans will see worthwhile when and if the time comes.

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