Poor Man's Rock Part 16

A gill net goes out over a boat's stern. When it is strung it stands in the sea like a tennis net across a court, a web nine hundred feet long, twenty feet deep, its upper edge held afloat by corks, its lower sunk by lead weights s.p.a.ced close together. The outer end is buoyed to a float which carries a flag and a lantern; the inner is fast to the bitts of the launch. Thus set, and set in the evening, since salmon can only be taken by the gills in the dark, fisherman, launch, and net drift with the changing tides till dawn. Then he hauls. He may have ten salmon, or a hundred, or treble that. He may have none, and the web be torn by sharks and fouled heavy with worthless dogfish.

The purse seiner works in daylight, off a powerfully engined sixty-foot, thirty-ton craft. He pays the seine out over a roller on a revolving platform aft. His vessel moves slowly in a sweeping circle as the net goes out,--a circle perhaps a thousand feet in diameter. When the circle is complete the two ends of the net meet at the seiner's stern. A power winch hauls on ropes and the net closes. Nothing escapes. It draws together until it is a bag, a "purse" drawn up under the vessel's counter, full of glistening fish.

The salmon is a surface fish, his average depth seldom below four fathoms. He breaks water when he feeds, when he plays, when he runs in schools. The purse seiner watches the signs. When the salmon rise in numbers he makes a set. To shoot the gear and purse the seine is a matter of minutes. A thousand salmon at a haul is nothing. Three thousand is common. Five thousand is far below the record. Purse seines have been burst by the dead weight of fish against the pull of the winch.

The purse seine is a deadly trap for schooling salmon. And because the salmon schools in ma.s.s formation, crowding nose to tail and side to side, in the entrance to a fresh-water stream, the Fisheries Department having granted a monopoly of seining rights to a packer has also benevolently decreed that no purse seine or other net shall operate within a given distance of a stream mouth,--that the salmon, having won to fresh water, shall go free and his kind be saved from utter extinction.

These regulations are not drawn for sentimental reasons, only to preserve the salmon industry. The farmer saves wheat for his next year's seeding, instead of selling the last bushel to the millers. No man willfully kills the goose that lays him golden eggs. But the salmon hunter, eagerly pursuing the nimble dollar, sometimes grows rapacious in the chase and breaks laws of his own devising,--if a big haul promises and no Fisheries Inspector is by to restrain him. The cannery purse seiners are the most frequent offenders. They can make their haul quickly in forbidden waters and get away. Folly Bay, shrewdly paying its seine crews a bonus per fish on top of wages, had always been notorious for crowding the law.

Solomon River takes its rise in the mountainous backbone of Vancouver Island. It is a wide, placid stream on its lower reaches, flowing through low, timbered regions, emptying into the Gulf in a half-moon bay called the Jew's Mouth, which is a perfect shelter from the Gulf storms and the only such shelter in thirty miles of bouldery sh.o.r.e line. The beach runs northwest and southeast, bleak and open, undented. In all that stretch there is no point from behind which a Fisheries Patrol launch could steal unexpectedly into the Jew's Mouth.

Upon a certain afternoon the _Blackbird_ lay therein. At her stern, fast by light lines to her after bitts, clung half a dozen fish boats, blue wisps of smoke drifting from the galley stovepipes, the fishermen variously occupied. The _Blackbird's_ hold was empty except for ice. She was waiting for fish, and the _Bluebird_ was due on the same errand the following day.

Nearer sh.o.r.e another cl.u.s.ter of gill-netters was anch.o.r.ed, a j.a.p or two, and a Siwash Indian with his hull painted a gaudy blue. And in the middle of the Jew's Mouth, which was a scant six hundred yards across at its widest, the _Folly Bay No. 5_ swung on her anchor chain. A tubby cannery tender lay alongside. The crews were busy with picaroons forking salmon out of the seiner into the tender's hold. The flip-flop of the fish sounded distinctly in that quiet place. Their silver bodies flashed in the sun as they were thrown across the decks.

When the tender drew clear and pa.s.sed out of the bay she rode deep with the weight of salmon aboard. Without the Jew's Mouth, around the _Blackbird_ and the fish boats and the _No. 5_ the salmon were thres.h.i.+ng water. _Klop._ A flash of silver. Bubbles. A series of concentric rings that ran away in ripples, till they merged into other widening rings.

They were everywhere. The river was full of them. The bay was alive with them.

A boat put off from the seiner. The man rowed out of the Jew's Mouth and stopped, resting on his oars. He remained there, in approximately the same position. A sentry.

The _No. 5_ heaved anchor, the chain clanking and chattering in a hawsepipe. Her exhaust spat smoky, gaseous fumes. A bell clanged. She moved slowly ahead, toward the river's mouth, a hundred yards to one side of it. Then the brown web of the seine began to spin out over the stern. She crossed the mouth of the Solomon, holding as close in as her draft permitted, and kept on straight till her seine was paid out to the end. Then she stopped, lying still in dead water with her engine idling.

The tide was on the flood. Salmon run streams on a rising tide. And the seine stood like a wall across the river's mouth.

Every man watching knew what the seiner was about, in defiance of the law. The salmon, nosing into the stream, driven by that imperative urge which is the law of their being, struck the net, turned aside, swam in a slow circle and tried again and again, seeking free pa.s.sage, until thousands of them were ma.s.sed behind the barrier of the net. Then the _No. 5_ would close the net, tauten the ropes which made it a purse, and haul out into deep water.

It was the equivalent of piracy on the high seas. To be taken in the act meant fines, imprisonment, confiscation of boat and gear. But the _No.

5_ would not be caught. She had a guard posted. Cannery seiners were never caught. When they were they got off with a warning and a reprimand. Only gill-netters, the small fry of the salmon industry, ever paid the utmost penalty for raids like that. So the fishermen said, with a cynical twist of their lips.

"Look at 'em," one said to MacRae. "They make laws and break 'em themselves. They been doin' that every day for a week. If one of us set a piece of net in the river and took three hundred salmon the canners would holler their heads off. There'd be a patrol boat on our heels all the time if they thought we'd take a chance."

"Well, I'm about ready to take a chance," another man growled. "They clear the bay in daylight and all we get is their leavings at night."

The _No. 5_ pursed her seine and hauled out until she was abreast of the _Blackbird_. She drew close up to her ma.s.sive hull a great heap of salmon, struggling, twisting, squirming within the net. The loading began. Her men laughed and shouted as they worked. The gill-net fishermen watched silently, scowling. It was like taking bread out of their mouths. It was like an honest man restrained by a policeman's club from taking food when he is hungry, and seeing a thief fill his pockets and walk off unmolested.

"Four thousand salmon that shot," Dave Mullen said, the same Mullen who had talked to MacRae in Squitty one night. "Say, why should we stand for that? We can get salmon that way too."

He spoke directly to MacRae.

"What's sauce for the goose ought to be sauce for the gander," MacRae replied. "I'll take the fish if you get them."

"You aren't afraid of getting in wrong yourself?" the man asked him.

MacRae shook his head. He did not lean to lawlessness. But the cannery men had framed this law. They cried loudly and continually for its strict enforcement. And they violated it flagrantly themselves, or winked at its violation when that meant an added number of cases to their pack. Not alone in the Jew's Mouth; all along the British Columbia coast the purse seiners forgot the law when the salmon swarmed in a stream mouth and they could make a killing. Only canneries could hold a purse-seine license. If the big men would not honor their own law, why should the lesser? So MacRae felt and said.

The men in the half-dozen boats about his stern had dealt all the season with MacRae. They trusted him. They neither liked nor trusted Folly Bay.

Folly Bay was not only breaking the law in the Jew's Mouth, but in breaking the law they were making it hard for these men to earn a dollar legitimately. Superior equipment, special privilege, cold-blooded violation of law because it was safe and profitable, gave the purse seiner an unfair advantage. The men gathered in a little knot on the deck of one boat. They put their heads together and lowered their voices. MacRae knew they were angry, that they had reached the point of fighting fire with fire. And he smiled to himself. He did not know what they were planning, but he could guess. It would not be the first time the individual fishermen had kicked over the traces and beaten the purse seiners at their own game. They did not include him in their council. He was a buyer. It was not his function to inquire how they took their fish. If they could take salmon which otherwise the _No. 5_ would take, so much the worse for Folly Bay,--and so much the better for the fishermen, who earned their living precariously at best.

It was dusk when the purse seiner finished loading her catch and stowed the great net in a dripping heap on the turntable aft. At daylight or before, a cannery tender would empty her, and she would sweep the Jew's Mouth bare of salmon again.

With dusk also the fishermen were busy over their nets, still riding to the _Blackbird's_ stern. Then they moved off in the dark. MacRae could hear nets paying out. He saw lanterns set to mark the outer end of each net. Silence fell on the bay. A single riding light glowed at the _No.

5's_ masthead. Her cabin lights blinked out. Her crew sprawled in their bunks, sound asleep.

Under cover of the night the fishermen took pattern from the seiner's example. A gill net is nine hundred feet long, approximately twenty feet deep. They stripped the cork floats off one and hung it to the lead-line of another. Thus with a web forty feet deep they went stealthily up to the mouth of the Solomon. With a four-oared skiff manning each end of the nine hundred-foot length they swept their net around the Jew's Mouth, closed it like a purse seine, and hauled it out into the shallows of a small beach. They stood in the shallow water with sea boots on and forked the salmon into their rowboats and laid the rowboats alongside the _Blackbird_ to deliver,--all in the dark without a lantern flicker, with m.u.f.fled oarlocks and hushed voices. Three times they swept the bay.

At five in the morning, before it was lightening in the east, the _Blackbird_ rode four inches below her load water line with a mixed cargo of coho and dog salmon, the heaviest cargo ever stowed under her hatches,--and eight fishermen divided two thousand dollars share and share alike for their night's work.

MacRae battened his hatch covers, started his engine, heaved up the hook, and hauled out of the bay.

In the Gulf the obscuring clouds parted to lay a shaft of silver on smooth, windless sea. The _Blackbird_ wallowed down the moon-trail.

MacRae stood at the steering wheel. Beside him Steve Ferrara leaned on the low cabin.

"She's getting day," Steve said, after a long silence. He chuckled.

"Some raid. If they can keep that lick up those boys will all have new boats for next season. You'll break old Gower if you keep on, Jack."

The thought warmed MacRae. To break Gower, to pull him down to where he must struggle for a living like other common men, to deprive him of the power he had abused, to make him suffer as such a man would suffer under that turn of fortune,--that would help to square accounts. It would be only a measure of justice. To be dealt with as he had dealt with others,--MacRae asked no more than that for himself.

But it was not likely, he reflected. One bad season would not seriously involve a wary old bird like Horace Gower. He was too secure behind manifold bulwarks. Still in the end,--more spectacular things had come to pa.s.s in the affairs of men on this kaleidoscopic coast. MacRae's face was hard in the moonlight. His eyes were somber. It was an ugly feeling to nurse. For thirty years that sort of impotent bitterness must have rankled in his father's breast--with just cause, MacRae told himself moodily. No wonder old Donald had been a grave and silent man; a just, kindly, generous man, too. Other men had liked him, respected him. Gower alone had been implacable.

Well into the red and yellow dawn MacRae stood at the wheel, thinking of this, an absent look in eyes which still kept keen watch ahead. He was glad when it came time for Steve's watch on deck, and he could lie down and let sleep drive it out of his mind. He did not live solely to revenge himself upon Horace Gower. He had his own way to make and his own plans--even if they were still a bit nebulous--to fulfill. It was only now and then that the past saddened him and made him bitter.

The week following brought great runs of salmon to the Jew's Mouth. Of these the _Folly Bay No. 5_ somehow failed to get the lion's share. The gill-net men laughed in their soiled sleeves and furtively swept the bay clear each night and all night, and the daytime haul of the seine fell far below the average. The _Blackbird_ and the _Bluebird_ waddled down a placid Gulf with all they could carry.

And although there was big money-making in this short stretch, and the secret satisfaction of helping put another spoke in Gower's wheel, MacRae did not neglect the rest of his territory nor the few trollers that still worked Squitty Island. He ran long hours to get their few fish. It was their living, and MacRae would not pa.s.s them up because their catch meant no profit compared to the time he spent and the fuel he burned making this round. He would drive straight up the Gulf from Bellingham to Squitty, circle the Island and then across to the mouth of the Solomon. The weather was growing cool now. Salmon would keep unspoiled a long time in a trailer's hold. It did not matter to him whether it was day or night around Squitty. He drove his carrier into any nook or hole where a troller might lie waiting with a few salmon.

The _Blackbird_ came pitching and diving into a heavy southeast swell up along the western side of Squitty at ten o'clock in the black of an early October night. There was a storm brewing, a wicked one, reckoned by the headlong drop of the aneroid. MacRae had a hundred or so salmon aboard for all his Squitty round, and he had yet to pick up those on the boats in the Cove. He c.o.c.ked his eye at a cloud-wrack streaking above, driving before a wind which had not yet dropped to the level of the Gulf, and he said to himself that it would be wise to stay in the Cove that night. A southeast gale, a beam sea, and the tiny opening of the Jew's Mouth was a bad combination to face in a black night. As he stood up along Squitty he could hear the swells break along the sh.o.r.e. Now and then a cold puff of air, the forerunner of the big wind, struck him.

Driving full speed the _Blackbird_ dipped her bow deep in each sea and rose dripping to the next. He pa.s.sed Cradle Bay at last, almost under the steep cliffs, holding in to round Poor Man's Rock and lay a compa.s.s course to the mouth of Squitty Cove.

And as he put his wheel over and swept around the Rock and came clear of Point Old a shadowy thing topped by three lights in a red and green and white triangle seemed to leap at him out of the darkness. The lights showed, and under the lights white water hissing. MacRae threw his weight on the wheel. He shouted to Steve Ferrara, lying on his bunk in the little cabin aft.

He knew the boat instantly,--the _Arrow_ shooting through the night at twenty miles an hour, scurrying to shelter under the full thrust of her tremendous power. For an appreciable instant her high bow loomed over him, while his hands twisted the wheel. But the _Blackbird_ was heavy, sluggish on her helm. She swung a little, from square across the rus.h.i.+ng _Arrow_, to a slight angle. Two seconds would have cleared him. By the rules of the road at sea the _Blackbird_ had the right of way. If MacRae had held by the book this speeding ma.s.s of mahogany and bra.s.s and steel would have cut him in two amids.h.i.+ps. As it was, her high bow, the stem shod with a cast bronze cut.w.a.ter edged like a knife, struck him on the port quarter, sheared through guard, planking, cabin.

There was a crash of riven timbers, the crunching ring of metal, quick oaths, a cry. The _Arrow_ scarcely hesitated. She had cut away nearly the entire stern works of the _Blackbird_. But such was her momentum that the shock barely slowed her up. Her hull b.u.mped the _Blackbird_ aside. She pa.s.sed on. She did not even stand by to see what she had done. There was a sound of shouting on her decks, but she kept on.

MacRae could have stepped aboard her as she brushed by. Her rail was within reach of his hand. But that did not occur to him. Steve Ferrara was asleep in the cabin, in the path of that destroying stem. For a stunned moment MacRae stood as the _Arrow_ drew clear. The _Blackbird_ began to settle under his feet.

MacRae dived down the after companion. He went into water to his waist.

His hands, groping blindly, laid hold of clothing, a limp body. He struggled back, up, gained the deck, dragging Steve after him. The _Blackbird_ was deep by the holed stern now, awash to her after fish hatch. She rose slowly, like a log, on each swell. Only the buoyancy of her tanks and timbers kept her from the last plunge. There was a light skiff bottom up across her hatches by the steering wheel. MacRae moved warily toward that, holding to the bulwark with one hand, dragging Steve with the other lest a sea sweep them both away.

He noticed, with his brain functioning unruffled, that the _Arrow_ drove headlong into Cradle Bay. He could hear her exhaust roaring. He could still hear shouting. And he could see also that the wind and the tide and the roll of the swells carried the water-logged hulk of the _Blackbird_ in the opposite direction. She was past the Rock, but she was edging sh.o.r.eward, in under the granite walls that ran between Point Old and the Cove. He steadied himself, keeping his hold on Steve, and reached for the skiff. As his fingers touched it a comber flung itself up out of the black and shot two feet of foam and green water across the swamped hull. It picked up the light cedar skiff like a chip and cast it beyond his reach and beyond his sight. And as he clung to the cabin pipe-rail, drenched with the cold sea, he heard that big roller burst against the sh.o.r.e very near at hand. He saw the white spray lift ghostly in the black.

MacRae held his hand over Steve's heart, over his mouth to feel if he breathed. Then he got Steve's body between his legs to hold him from slipping away, and bracing himself against the sodden lurch of the wreck, began to take off his clothes.

CHAPTER XII