His Own Country
Squitty Island lies in the Gulf of Georgia midway between a mainland
made of mountains like the Alps, the Andes, and the Himalayas all
jumbled together and all rising sheer from the sea, and the low
delta-like shore of Vancouver Island. Southward from Squitty the Gulf
runs in a thirty-mile width for nearly a hundred miles to the San Juan
islands in American waters, beyond which opens the sheltered beauty of
Puget Sound. Squitty is six miles wide and ten miles long, a blob of
granite covered with fir and cedar forest, with certain parklike patches
of open grassland on the southern end, and a hump of a mountain lifting
two thousand feet in its middle.
The southeastern end of Squitty--barring the tide rips off Cape
Mudge--is the dirtiest place in the Gulf for small craft in blowy
weather. The surges that heave up off a hundred miles of sea tortured by
a southeast gale break thunderously against Squitty's low cliffs. These
walls face the marching breakers with a grim, unchanging front. There is
nothing hospitable in this aspect of Squitty. It is an ugly shore to
have on the lee in a blow.
Yet it is not so forbidding as it seems. The prevailing summer winds on
the Gulf are westerly. Gales of uncommon fierceness roar out of the
northwest in fall and early winter. At such times the storms split on
Squitty Island, leaving a restful calm under those brown, kelp-fringed
cliffs. Many a small coaster has crept thankfully into that lee out of
the whitecapped turmoil on either side, to lie there through a night
that was wild outside, watching the Ballenas light twenty miles away on
a pile of bare rocks winking and blinking its warning to less fortunate
craft. Tugs, fishing boats, salmon trollers, beach-combing launches, all
that mosquito fleet which gets its bread upon the waters and learns bar,
shoal, reef, and anchorage thoroughly in the getting,--these knew that
besides the half-moon bight called Cradle Bay, upon which fronted Horace
Gower's summer home, there opened also a secure, bottle-necked cove less
than a mile northward from Point Old.
By day a stranger could only mark the entrance by eagle watch from a
course close inshore. By night even those who knew the place as they
knew the palm of their hand had to feel their way in. But once inside, a
man could lie down in his bunk and sleep soundly, though a southeaster
whistled and moaned, and the seas roared smoking into the narrow mouth.
No ripple of that troubled the inside of Squitty Cove. It was a finger
of the sea thrust straight into the land, a finger three hundred yards
long, forty yards wide, with an entrance so narrow that a man could
heave a sounding lead across it, and that entrance so masked by a rock
about the bigness of a six-room house that one holding the channel could
touch the rock with a pike pole as he passed in. There was a mud bottom,
twenty-foot depth at low tide, and a little stream of cold fresh water
brawling in at the head. A cliff walled it on the south. A low, grassy
hill dotted with solitary firs, red-barked arbutus, and clumps of wild
cherry formed its northern boundary. And all around the mouth, in every
nook and crevice, driftwood of every size and shape lay in great heaps,
cast high above tidewater by the big storms.
So Squitty had the three prime requisites for a harbor,--secure
anchorage, fresh water, and firewood. There was good fertile land, too,
behind the Cove,--low valleys that ran the length of the island. There
were settlers here and there, but these settlers were not the folk who
intermittently frequented Squitty Cove. The settlers stayed on their
land, battling with stumps, clearing away the ancient forest, tilling
the soil. Those to whom Squitty Cove gave soundest sleep and keenest joy
were tillers of the sea. Off Point Old a rock brown with seaweed, ringed
with a bed of kelp, lifted its ugly head now to the one good, blue-gray
eye of Jack MacRae, the same rock upon which Donald MacRae's sloop broke
her back before Jack MacRae was born. It was a sunken menace at any
stage of water, heartily cursed by the fishermen. In the years between,
the rock had acquired a name not written on the Admiralty charts. The
hydrographers would look puzzled and shake their heads if one asked
where in the Gulf waters lay Poor Man's Rock.
But Poor Man's Rock it is. Greek and Japanese, Spaniard and Italian,
American and Canadian--and there are many of each--who follow the
silver-sided salmon when they run in the Gulf of Georgia, these know
that Poor Man's Rock lies half a cable south southwest of Point Old on
Squitty Island. Most of them know, too, why it is called Poor Man's
Rock.
Under certain conditions of sea and sky the Rock is as lonely and
forbidding a spot as ever a ship's timbers were broken upon. Point Old
thrusts out like the stubby thumb on a clenched first. The Rock and the
outer nib of the Point are haunted by quarreling flocks of gulls and
coots and the black Siwash duck with his stumpy wings and brilliant
yellow bill. The southeaster sends endless battalions of waves rolling
up there when it blows. These rear white heads over the Rock and burst
on the Point with shuddering impact and showers of spray. When the sky
is dull and gray, and the wind whips the stunted trees on the
Point--trees that lean inland with branches all twisted to the landward
side from pressure of many gales in their growing years--and the surf is
booming out its basso harmonies, the Rock is no place for a fisherman.
Even the gulls desert it then.
But in good weather, in the season, the blueback and spring salmon swim
in vast schools across the end of Squitty. They feed upon small fish,
baby herring, tiny darting atoms of finny life that swarm in countless
numbers. What these inch-long fishes feed upon no man knows, but they
begin to show in the Gulf early in spring. The water is alive with
them,--minute, darting streaks of silver. The salmon follow these
schools, pursuing, swallowing, eating to live. Seal and dogfish follow
the salmon. Shark and the giant blackfish follow dogfish and seal. And
man follows them all, pursuing and killing that he himself may live.
Around Poor Man's Rock the tide sets strongly at certain stages of ebb
and flood. The cliffs north of Point Old and the area immediately
surrounding the Rock are thick strewn with kelp. In these brown patches
of seaweed the tiny fish, the schools of baby herring, take refuge from
their restless enemy, the swift and voracious salmon.
For years Pacific Coast salmon have been taken by net and trap, to the
profit of the salmon packers and the satisfaction of those who cannot
get fish save out of tin cans. The salmon swarmed in millions on their
way to spawn in fresh-water streams. They were plentiful and cheap. But
even before the war came to send the price of linen-mesh net beyond most
fishermen's pocketbooks, men had discovered that salmon could be taken
commercially by trolling lines. The lordly spring, which attains to
seventy pounds, the small, swift blueback, and the fighting coho could
all be lured to a hook on a wobbling bit of silver or brass at the end
of a long line weighted with lead to keep it at a certain depth behind a
moving boat. From a single line over the stern it was but a logical step
to two, four, even six lines spaced on slender poles boomed out on each
side of a power launch,--once the fisherman learned that with this gear
he could take salmon in open water. So trolling was launched. Odd
trollers grew to trolling fleets. A new method became established in the
salmon industry.
But there are places where the salmon run and a gasboat trolling her
battery of lines cannot go without loss of gear. The power boats cannot
troll in shallows. They cannot operate in kelp without fouling. So they
hold to deep open water and leave the kelp and shoals to the rowboats.
And that is how Poor Man's Rock got its name. In the kelp that
surrounded it and the greater beds that fringed Point Old, the small
feed sought refuge from the salmon and the salmon pursued them there
among the weedy granite and the boulders, even into shallows where their
back fins cleft the surface as they dashed after the little herring. The
foul ground and the tidal currents that swept by the Rock held no danger
to the gear of a rowboat troller. He fished a single short line with a
pound or so of lead. He could stop dead in a boat length if his line
fouled. So he pursued the salmon as the salmon pursued the little fish
among the kelp and boulders.
Only a poor man trolled in a rowboat, tugging at the oars hour after
hour without cabin shelter from wind and sun and rain, unable to face
even such weather as a thirty by eight-foot gasboat could easily fish
in, unable to follow the salmon run when it shifted from one point to
another on the Gulf. The rowboat trollers must pick a camp ashore by a
likely ground and stay there. If the salmon left they could only wait
till another run began. Whereas the power boat could hear of schooling
salmon forty miles away and be on the spot in seven hours' steaming.
Poor Man's Rock had given many a man his chance. Nearly always salmon
could be taken there by a rowboat. And because for many years old men,
men with lean purses, men with a rowboat, a few dollars, and a hunger
for independence, had camped in Squitty Cove and fished the Squitty
headlands and seldom failed to take salmon around the Rock, the name had
clung to that brown hummock of granite lifting out of the sea at half
tide. From April to November, any day a rowboat could live outside the
Cove, there would be half a dozen, eight, ten, more or less, of these
solitary rowers bending to their oars, circling the Rock.
Now and again one of these would hastily drop his oars, stand up, and
haul in his line hand over hand. There would be a splashing and
splattering on the surface, a bright silver fish leaping and threshing
the water, to land at last with a plop! in the boat. Whereupon the
fisherman would hurriedly strike this dynamic, glistening fish over the
head with a short, thick club, lest his struggles snarl the line, after
which he would put out his spoon and bend to the oars again. It was a
daylight and dusk job, a matter of infinite patience and hard work, cold
and wet at times, and in midsummer the blaze of a scorching sun and the
eye-dazzling glitter of reflected light.
But a man must live. Some who came to the Cove trolled long and
skillfully, and were lucky enough to gain a power troller in the end, to
live on beans and fish, and keep a strangle hold on every dollar that
came in until with a cabin boat powered with gas they joined the
trolling fleet and became nomads. They fared well enough then. Their
taking at once grew beyond a rowboat's scope. They could see new
country, hearken to the lure of distant fishing grounds. There was the
sport of gambling on wind and weather, on the price of fish or the
number of the catch. If one locality displeased them they could shift to
another, while the rowboat men were chained perforce to the monotony of
the same camp, the same cliffs, the same old weary round.
Sometimes Squitty Cove harbored thirty or forty of these power trollers.
They would make their night anchorage there while the trolling held
good, filling the Cove with talk and laughter and a fine sprinkle of
lights when dark closed in. With failing catches, or the first breath of
a southeaster that would lock them in the Cove while it blew, they would
be up and away,--to the top end of Squitty, to Yellow Rock, to Cape
Lazo, anywhere that salmon might be found.
And the rowboat men would lie in their tents and split-cedar lean-tos,
cursing the weather, the salmon that would not bite, grumbling at their
lot.
There were two or three rowboat men who had fished the Cove almost since
Jack MacRae could remember,--old men, fishermen who had shot their
bolt, who dwelt in small cabins by the Cove, living somehow from salmon
run to salmon run, content if the season's catch netted three hundred
dollars. All they could hope for was a living. They had become fixtures
there.
Jack MacRae looked down from the bald tip of Point Old with an eager
gleam in his uncovered eye. There was the Rock with a slow swell lapping
over it. There was an old withered Portuguese he knew in a green dugout,
Long Tom Spence rowing behind the Portuguese, and they carrying on a
shouted conversation. He picked out Doug Sproul among three others he
did not know,--and there was not a man under fifty among them.
Three hundred yards offshore half a dozen power trollers wheeled and
counterwheeled, working an eddy. He could see them haul the lines hand
over hand, casting the hooked fish up into the hold with an easy swing.
The salmon were biting.
It was all familiar to Jack MacRae. He knew every nook and cranny on
Squitty Island, every phase and mood and color of the sea. It is a grim
birthplace that leaves a man without some sentiment for the place where
he was born. Point Old, Squitty Cove, Poor Man's Rock had been the
boundaries of his world for a long time. In so far as he had ever
played, he had played there.
He looked for another familiar figure or two, without noting them.
"The fish are biting fast for this time of year," he reflected. "It's a
wonder dad and Peter Ferrara aren't out. And I never knew Bill Munro to
miss anything like this."
He looked a little longer, over across the tip of Sangster Island two
miles westward, with its Elephant's Head,--the extended trunk of which
was a treacherous reef bared only at low tide. He looked at the
Elephant's unwinking eye, which was a twenty-foot hole through a hump of
sandstone, and smiled. He had fished for salmon along the kelp beds
there and dug clams under the eye of the Elephant long, long ago. It did
seem a long time ago that he had been a youngster in overalls,
adventuring alone in a dugout about these bold headlands.
He rose at last. The November wind chilled him through the heavy
mackinaw. He looked back at the Gower cottage, like a snowflake in a
setting of emerald; he looked at the Gower yacht; and the puzzled frown
returned to his face.
Then he picked up his bag and walked rapidly along the brow of the
cliffs toward Squitty Cove.