Sea Boots and Salmon
From November to April the British Columbian coast is a region of
weeping skies, of intermittent frosts and fog, and bursts of sleety
snow. The frosts, fogs, and snow squalls are the punctuation points, so
to speak, of the eternal rain. Murky vapors eddy and swirl along the
coast. The sun hides behind gray banks of cloud, the shining face of him
a rare miracle bestowed upon the sight of men as a promise that bright
days and blossoming flowers will come again. When they do come the coast
is a pleasant country. The mountains reveal themselves, duskily green
upon the lower slopes, their sky-piercing summits crowned with snow caps
which endure until the sun comes to his full strength in July. The Gulf
is a vista of purple-distant shore and island, of shimmering sea. And
the fishermen come out of winter quarters to overhaul boats and gear
against the first salmon run.
The blueback, a lively and toothsome fish, about which rages an
ichthyological argument as to whether he is a distant species of the
salmon tribe or merely a half-grown coho, is the first to show in great
schools. The spring salmon is always in the Gulf, but the spring is a
finny mystery with no known rule for his comings and goings, nor his
numbers. All the others, the blueback, the sockeye, the hump, the coho,
and the dog salmon, run in the order named. They can be reckoned on as
a man reckons on changes of the moon. These are the mainstay of the
salmon canners. Upon their taking fortunes have been built--and
squandered--men have lived and died, loved and hated, gone hungry and
dressed their women in silks and furs. The can of pink meat some inland
chef dresses meticulously with parsley and sauces may have cost some
fisherman his life; a multiplicity of cases of salmon may have produced
a divorce in the packer's household. We eat this fine red fish and heave
its container into the garbage tin, with no care for the tragedy or
humors that have attended its getting for us.
In the spring, when life takes on a new prompting, the blueback salmon
shows first in the Gulf. He cannot be taken by net or bait,--unless the
bait be a small live herring. He may only be taken in commercial
quantities by a spinner or a wobbling spoon hook of silver or brass or
copper drawn through the water at slow speed. The dainty gear of the
trout spinner gave birth to the trolling fleets of the Pacific Coast.
At first the schools pass into the Straits of San Juan. Here the joint
fleets of British Columbia and of Puget Sound begin to harry them. A
week or ten days later the vanguard will be off Nanaimo. And in another
week they will be breaking water like trout in a still pool around the
rocky base of the Ballenas Light and the kelp beds and reefs of Squitty
Island.
By the time they were there, in late April, there were twenty local
power boats to begin taking them, for Jack MacRae made the rounds of
Squitty to tell the fishermen that he was putting on a carrier to take
the first run of blueback to Vancouver markets.
They were a trifle pessimistic. Other buyers had tried it, men gambling
on a shoestring for a stake in the fish trade, buyers unable to make
regular trips, whereby there was a tale of many salmon rotted in waiting
fish holds, through depending on a carrier that did not come. What was
the use of burning fuel, of tearing their fingers with the gear, of
catching fish to rot? Better to let them swim.
But since the Folly Bay cannery never opened until the fish ran to
greater size and number, the fishermen, chafing against inaction after
an idle winter, took a chance and trolled for Jack MacRae.
To the trailers' surprise they found themselves dealing with a new type
of independent buyer,--a man who could and did make his market trips
with clocklike precision. If MacRae left Squitty with a load on Monday,
saying that he would be at Squitty Cove or Jenkins Island or Scottish
Bay by Tuesday evening, he was there.
He managed it by grace of an able sea boat, engined to drive through sea
and wind, and by the nerve and endurance to drive her in any weather.
There were times when the Gulf spread placid as a mill pond. There were
trips when he drove through with three thousand salmon under battened
hatches, his decks awash from boarding seas, ten and twelve and fourteen
hours of rough-and-tumble work that brought him into the Narrows and the
docks inside with smarting eyes and tired muscles, his head splitting
from the pound and clank of the engine and the fumes of gas and burned
oil.
It was work, strain of mind and body, long hours filled with discomfort.
But MacRae had never shrunk from things like that. He was aware that few
things worth while come easy. The world, so far as he knew, seldom
handed a man a fortune done up in tissue paper merely because he
happened to crave its possession. He was young and eager to do. There
was a reasonable satisfaction in the doing, even of the disagreeable,
dirty tasks necessary, in beating the risks he sometimes had to run.
There was a secret triumph in overcoming difficulties as they arose. And
he had an object, which, if it did not always lie in the foreground of
his mind, he was nevertheless keen on attaining.
The risks and work and strain, perhaps because he put so much of himself
into the thing, paid from the beginning more than he had dared hope. He
made a hundred dollars his first trip, paid the trollers five cents a
fish more on the second trip and cleared a hundred and fifty. In the
second week of his venture he struck a market almost bare of fresh
salmon with thirty-seven hundred shining bluebacks in his hold. He made
seven hundred dollars on that single cargo.
A Greek buyer followed the _Blackbird_ out through the Narrows that
trip. MacRae beat him two hours to the trolling fleet at Squitty, a
fleet that was growing in numbers.
"Bluebacks are thirty-five cents," he said to the first man who ranged
alongside to deliver. "And I want to tell you something that you can
talk over with the rest of the crowd. I have a market for every fish
this bunch can catch. If I can't handle them with the _Blackbird_, I'll
put on another boat. I'm not here to buy fish just till the Folly Bay
cannery opens. I'll be making regular trips to the end of the salmon
season. My price will be as good as anybody's, better than some. If
Gower gets your bluebacks this season for twenty-five cents, it will be
because you want to make him a present. Meantime, there's another buyer
an hour behind me. I don't know what he'll pay. But whatever he pays
there aren't enough salmon being caught here yet to keep two carriers
running. You can figure it out for yourself."
MacRae thought he knew his men. Nor was his judgment in error. The Greek
hung around. In twenty-four hours he got three hundred salmon. MacRae
loaded nearly three thousand.
Once or twice after that he had competitive buyers in Squitty Cove and
the various rendezvous of the trolling fleet. But the fishermen had a
loyalty born of shrewd reckoning. They knew from experience the way of
the itinerant buyer. They knew MacRae. Many of them had known his
father. If Jack MacRae had a market for all the salmon he could buy on
the Gower grounds all season, they saw where Folly Bay would buy no fish
in the old take-it-or-leave it fashion. They were keenly alive to the
fact that they were getting mid-July prices in June, that Jack MacRae
was the first buyer who had not tried to hold down prices by pulling a
poor mouth and telling fairy tales of poor markets in town. He had
jumped prices before there was any competitive spur. They admired young
MacRae. He had nerve; he kept his word.
Wherefore it did not take them long to decide that he was a good man to
keep going. As a result of this decision other casual buyers got few
fish even when they met MacRae's price.
When he had run a little over a month MacRae took stock. He paid the
Crow Harbor Canning Company, which was Stubby Abbott's trading name, two
hundred and fifty a month for charter of the _Blackbird_. He had
operating outlay for gas, oil, crushed ice, and wages for Vincent
Ferrara, whom he took on when he reached the limit of single-handed
endurance. Over and above these expenses he had cleared twenty-six
hundred dollars.
That was only a beginning he knew,--only a beginning of profits and of
work. He purposely thrust the taking of salmon on young Ferrara, let him
handle the cash, tally in the fish, watched Vincent nonchalantly chuck
out overripe salmon that careless trollers would as nonchalantly heave
in for fresh ones if they could get away with it. For Jack MacRae had it
in his mind to go as far and as fast as he could while the going was
good. That meant a second carrier on the run as soon as the Folly Bay
cannery opened, and it meant that he must have in charge of the second
boat an able man whom he could trust. There was no question about
trusting Vincent Ferrara. It was only a matter of his ability to handle
the job, and that he demonstrated to MacRae's complete satisfaction.
Early in June MacRae went to Stubby Abbott.
"Have you sold the _Bluebird_ yet?" he asked.
"I want to let three of those _Bird_ boats go," Stubby told him. "I
don't need 'em. They're dead capital. But I haven't made a sale yet."
"Charter me the _Bluebird_ on the same terms," Jack proposed.
"You're on. Things must be going good."
"Not too bad," MacRae admitted.
"Folly Bay opens the twentieth. We open July first," Stubby said
abruptly. "How many bluebacks are you going to get for us?"
"Just about all that are caught around Squitty Island," MacRae said
quietly. "That's why I want another carrier."
"Huh!" Stubby grunted. His tone was slightly incredulous. "You'll have
to go some. Wish you luck though. More you get the better for me."
"I expect to deliver sixty thousand bluebacks to Crow Harbor in July,"
MacRae said.
Stubby stared at him. His eyes twinkled.
"If you can do that in July, and in August too," he said, "I'll _give_
you the _Bluebird_."
"No," MacRae smiled. "I'll buy her."
"Where will Folly Bay get off if you take that many fish away?" Stubby
reflected.
"Don't know. And I don't care a hoot." MacRae shrugged his shoulders.
"I'm fairly sure I can do it. You don't care?"
"Do I? I'll shout to the world I don't," Stubby replied. "It's
self-preservation with me. Let old Horace look out for himself. He had
his fingers in the pie while we were in France. I don't have to have
four hundred per cent profit to do business. Get the fish if you can,
Jack, old boy, even if it busts old Horace. Which it won't--and, as I
told you, lack of them may bust me."
"By the way," Stubby said as MacRae rose to go, "don't you ever have an
hour to spare in town? You haven't been out at the house for six weeks."
MacRae held out his hands. They were red and cut and scarred, roughened,
and sore from salt water and ice-handling and fish slime.
"Wouldn't they look well clasping a wafer and a teacup," he laughed.
"I'm working, Stub. When I have an hour to spare I lie down and sleep.
If I stopped to play every time I came to town--do you think you'd get
your sixty thousand bluebacks in July?"
Stubby looked at MacRae a second, at his work-torn hands and weary eyes.
"I guess you're right," he said slowly. "But the old stone house will
still be up on the corner when the salmon run is over. Don't forget
that."
MacRae went off to Coal Harbor to take over the second carrier. And he
wondered as he went if it would all be such clear sailing, if it were
possible that at the first thrust he had found an open crack in Gower's
armor through which he could prick the man and make him squirm.
He looked at his hands. When they fingered death as a daily task they
had been soft, white, delicate,--dainty instruments equally fit for the
manipulation of aerial controls, machine guns or teacups. Why should
honest work prevent a man from meeting pleasant people amid pleasant
surroundings? Well, it was not the work itself, it was simply the
effects of that gross labor. On the American continent, at least, a man
did not lose caste by following any honest occupation,--only he could
not work with the workers and flutter with the butterflies. MacRae,
walking down the street, communing with himself, knew that he must pay a
penalty for working with his hands. If he were a drone in
uniform--necessarily a drone since the end of war--he could dance and
play, flirt with pretty girls, be a welcome guest in great houses, make
the heroic past pay social dividends.
It took nearly as much courage and endurance to work as it had taken to
fight; indeed it took rather more, at times, to keep on working.
Theoretically he should not lose caste. Yet MacRae knew he
would,--unless he made a barrel of money. There had been stray straws in
the past month. There were, it seemed, very nice people who could not
quite understand why an officer and a gentleman should do work that
wasn't,--well, not even clean. Not clean in the purely objective,
physical sense, like banking or brokerage, or teaching, or any of those
semi-genteel occupations which permit people to make a living without
straining their backs or soiling their hands. He wasn't even sure that
Stubby Abbott--MacRae was ashamed of his cynicism when he got that far.
Stubby was a real man. Even if he needed a man or a man's activities in
his business Stubby wouldn't cultivate that man socially merely because
he needed his producing capacity.
The solace for long hours and aching flesh and sleep-weary eyes was a
glimpse of concrete reward,--money which meant power, power to repay a
debt, opportunity to repay an ancient score. It seemed to Jack MacRae
that his personal honor was involved in getting back all that broad
sweep of land which his father had claimed from the wilderness, that he
must exact an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. That was the why
of his unceasing energy, his uncomplaining endurance of long hours in
sea boots, the impatient facing of storms that threatened to delay. Man
strives under the spur of a vision, a deep longing, an imperative
squaring of needs with desires. MacRae moved under the whip of all
three.
He was quite sanguine that he would succeed in this undertaking. But he
had not looked much beyond the first line of trenches which he planned
to storm. They did not seem to him particularly formidable. The Scotch
had been credited with uncanny knowledge of the future. Jack MacRae,
however, though his Highland blood ran undiluted, had no such gift of
prescience. He did not know that the highway of modern industry is
strewn with the casualties of commercial warfare.