We named the company after this fish

The eulachon is a small smelt that runs up British Columbia rivers each spring. The Nisga'a people of the Nass call it halimotkw — "salvation fish" — because for thousands of years it arrived at the end of winter when the food was running out. They ate it, traded it, rendered the oil. And because the flesh is denser with fat than almost anything that swims, a dried fish will light at one end and burn down like a candle.

Three inches long. Easy to overlook. Lights the room.

That's the picture we keep in mind when we walk into a cabinet manufacturer or a building materials distributor. The company already has everything it needs. The pricing logic, the scheduling instinct, the thirty years of institutional memory about why the plant runs the way it does — all of it is in there. It's just stored in a form you can't burn.

Our job is the drying and the wick. A diagnostic memo, an executor agent, a workflow module. Small artifacts, dense enough to throw light.

The runs collapsed in the 90s. They came back.