Peril of the Sea
The last of August set the Red Flower of the Jungle books blooming along
the British Columbia coast. The seeds of it were scattered on hot, dry,
still days by pipe and cigarette, by sparks from donkey engines, by
untended camp fires, wherever the careless white man went in the great
coastwise forests. The woods were like a tinder box. One unguarded
moment, and the ancient firs were wrapped in sheets of flame. Smoke lay
on the Gulf like a pall of pungent fog, through which vessels ran by
chart and compass, blind between ports, at imminent risk of collision.
Through this, well on into September, MacRae and Vincent Ferrara
gathered cargoes of salmon and ran them down the Gulf to Bellingham,
making their trips with the regularity of the tides, despite the murk
that hid landmarks by day and obscured the guiding lighthouse flashes
when dark closed in. They took their chances in the path of coastwise
traffic, straining their eyes for vessels to leap suddenly out of the
thickness that shut them in, their ears for fog signals that blared
warning. There were close shaves, but they escaped disaster. They got
the salmon and they delivered them, and Folly Bay still ran a bad second
wherever the _Bird_ boats served the trolling fleet. Even when Gower at
last met MacRae's price, his collectors got few fish. The fishermen took
no chances. They were convinced that if MacRae abandoned buying for
lack of salmon Folly Bay would cut the price in two. It had been done
before. So they held their fish for the _Bird_ boats. MacRae got them
all. Even when American buyers trailed MacRae to the source of his
supply their competition hurt Gower instead of MacRae. The trollers
supplied MacRae with all the salmon he could carry. It was still fresh
in their minds that he had come into the field that season as their
special Providence.
But the blueback run tapered off at Squitty. September ushered in the
annual coho run on its way to the spawning grounds. And the coho did not
school along island shores, feeding upon tiny herring. Stray squadrons
of coho might pass Squitty, but they did not linger in thousands as the
blueback did. The coho swept into the Gulf from mysterious haunts in
blue water far offshore, myriads of silver fish seeking the streams
where they were spawned, and to which as mature fish they now returned
to reproduce themselves. They came in great schools. They would loaf
awhile in some bay at a stream mouth, until some irresistible urge drove
them into fresh water, up rivers and creeks, over shoal and rapid,
through pool and canyon, until the stream ran out to a whimpering
trickle and the backs of the salmon stuck out of the water. Up there, in
the shadow of great mountains, in the hidden places of the Coast range,
those that escaped their natural enemies would spawn and die.
While the coho and the humpback, which came about the same time, and the
dog salmon, which comes last of all--but each to function in the same
manner and sequence--laid in the salt-water bays, resting, it would
seem, before the last and most terrible struggle of their brief
existence, the gill-net fishermen and the cannery purse-seine boats took
toll of them. The trollers harried them from the moment they showed in
the Gulf, because the coho will strike at a glittering spoon anywhere in
salt water. But the net boats take them in hundreds at one drift, and
the purse seiners gather thousands at a time in a single sweep of the
great bag-like seine.
When September days brought the cohoes in full force along with cooler
nights and a great burst of rain that drowned the forest fires and
cleared away the enshrouding smoke, leaving only the pleasant haze of
autumn, the Folly Bay purse-seine boats went out to work. The trolling
fleet scattered from Squitty Island. Some steamed north to the troubled
waters of Salmon River and Blackfish Sound, some to the Redondas where
spring salmon could be taken. Many put by their trolling gear and hung
their gill nets. A few gas boats and a few rowboat men held to the
Island, depending upon stray schools and the spring salmon that haunted
certain reefs and points and beds of kelp. But the main fleet scattered
over two hundred miles of sea.
MacRae could have called it a season and quit with honor and much
profit. Or he might have gone north and bought salmon here and there,
free-lancing. He did neither. There were enough gill-netters operating
on Gower's territory to give him fair cargoes. Every salmon he could
divert from the cans at Folly Bay meant,--well, he did not often stop to
ask precisely what that did mean to him. But he never passed Poor Man's
Rock, bleak and brown at low tide, or with seas hissing over it when the
tide was at flood, without thinking of his father, of the days and
months and years old Donald MacRae had lived and worked in sight of the
Rock,--a life at the last lonely and cheerless and embittered by the
sight of his ancient enemy preening his feathers in Cradle Bay. Old
Donald had lived for thirty years unable to return a blow which had
scarred his face and his heart in the same instant. But his son felt
that he was making better headway. It is unlikely that Donald MacRae
ever looked at Gower's cottage nestling like a snowflake in the green
lee of Point Old, or cast his eyes over that lost estate of his, with
more unchristian feelings than did his son. In Jack MacRae's mind the
Golden Rule did not apply to Horace Gower, nor to aught in which Gower
was concerned.
So he stayed on Folly Bay territory with a dual purpose: to make money
for himself, and to deprive Gower of profit where he could. He was wise
enough to know that was the only way he could hurt a man like Gower. And
he wanted to hurt Gower. The intensity of that desire grew. It was a
point of honor, the old inborn clan pride that never compromised an
injury or an insult or an injustice, which neither forgave nor forgot.
For weeks MacRae in the _Blackbird_ and Vin Ferrara in her sister ship
flitted here and there. The purse seiners hunted the schooling salmon,
the cohoes and humps. The gill-netters hung on the seiner's heels,
because where the purse seine could get a haul so could they. And the
carriers and buyers sought the fishermen wherever they went, to buy and
carry away their catch.
Folly Bay suffered bad luck from the beginning. Gower had four
purse-seine boats in commission. Within a week one broke a crankshaft in
half a gale off Sangster Island. The wind put her ashore under the nose
of the sandstone Elephant and the seas destroyed her.
Fire gutted a second not long after, so that for weeks she was laid up
for repairs. That left him but two efficient craft. One operated on his
concessions along the mainland shore. The other worked three stream
mouths on Vancouver Island, straight across from Folly Bay.
Still, Gower's cannery was getting salmon. In those three bays no other
purse seiner could shoot his gear. Folly Bay held them under exclusive
license. Gill nets could be drifted there, but the purse seiner was
king.
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 spaced 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 mass 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 shore 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 shore another cluster of gill-netters was anchored, a Jap 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 passed 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 threshing
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 passage, until
thousands of them were massed 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 massive 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 muffled 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 pass 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 pass 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 cocked 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 shore. 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 passed Cradle Bay at last, almost under
the steep cliffs, holding in to round Poor Man's Rock and lay a compass
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 rushing
_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 mass of mahogany and brass and steel
would have cut him in two amidships. As it was, her high bow, the stem
shod with a cast bronze cutwater 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 bumped the _Blackbird_
aside. She passed 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 shoreward, 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 shore 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.