Poor Man's Rock

by Bertrand W. Sinclair

  CHAPTER II

  His Own Country

  Squitty Island lies in the Gulf of Georgia midway between a mainlandmade of mountains like the Alps, the Andes, and the Himalayas alljumbled together and all rising sheer from the sea, and the lowdelta-like shore of Vancouver Island. Southward from Squitty the Gulfruns in a thirty-mile width for nearly a hundred miles to the San Juanislands in American waters, beyond which opens the sheltered beauty ofPuget Sound. Squitty is six miles wide and ten miles long, a blob ofgranite covered with fir and cedar forest, with certain parklike patchesof open grassland on the southern end, and a hump of a mountain liftingtwo thousand feet in its middle.

  The southeastern end of Squitty--barring the tide rips off CapeMudge--is the dirtiest place in the Gulf for small craft in blowyweather. The surges that heave up off a hundred miles of sea tortured bya southeast gale break thunderously against Squitty's low cliffs. Thesewalls face the marching breakers with a grim, unchanging front. There isnothing hospitable in this aspect of Squitty. It is an ugly shore tohave on the lee in a blow.

  Yet it is not so forbidding as it seems. The prevailing summer winds onthe Gulf are westerly. Gales of uncommon fierceness roar out of thenorthwest in fall and early winter. At such times the storms split onSquitty Island, leaving a restful calm under those brown, kelp-fringedcliffs. Many a small coaster has crept thankfully into that lee out ofthe whitecapped turmoil on either side, to lie there through a nightthat was wild outside, watching the Ballenas light twenty miles away ona pile of bare rocks winking and blinking its warning to less fortunatecraft. Tugs, fishing boats, salmon trollers, beach-combing launches, allthat mosquito fleet which gets its bread upon the waters and learns bar,shoal, reef, and anchorage thoroughly in the getting,--these knew thatbesides the half-moon bight called Cradle Bay, upon which fronted HoraceGower's summer home, there opened also a secure, bottle-necked cove lessthan a mile northward from Point Old.

  By day a stranger could only mark the entrance by eagle watch from acourse close inshore. By night even those who knew the place as theyknew the palm of their hand had to feel their way in. But once inside, aman could lie down in his bunk and sleep soundly, though a southeasterwhistled and moaned, and the seas roared smoking into the narrow mouth.No ripple of that troubled the inside of Squitty Cove. It was a fingerof the sea thrust straight into the land, a finger three hundred yardslong, forty yards wide, with an entrance so narrow that a man couldheave a sounding lead across it, and that entrance so masked by a rockabout the bigness of a six-room house that one holding the channel couldtouch 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 waterbrawling in at the head. A cliff walled it on the south. A low, grassyhill dotted with solitary firs, red-barked arbutus, and clumps of wildcherry formed its northern boundary. And all around the mouth, in everynook 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,--secureanchorage, fresh water, and firewood. There was good fertile land, too,behind the Cove,--low valleys that ran the length of the island. Therewere settlers here and there, but these settlers were not the folk whointermittently frequented Squitty Cove. The settlers stayed on theirland, battling with stumps, clearing away the ancient forest, tillingthe soil. Those to whom Squitty Cove gave soundest sleep and keenest joywere tillers of the sea. Off Point Old a rock brown with seaweed, ringedwith a bed of kelp, lifted its ugly head now to the one good, blue-grayeye of Jack MacRae, the same rock upon which Donald MacRae's sloop brokeher back before Jack MacRae was born. It was a sunken menace at anystage of water, heartily cursed by the fishermen. In the years between,the rock had acquired a name not written on the Admiralty charts. Thehydrographers would look puzzled and shake their heads if one askedwhere 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 thesilver-sided salmon when they run in the Gulf of Georgia, these knowthat Poor Man's Rock lies half a cable south southwest of Point Old onSquitty Island. Most of them know, too, why it is called Poor Man'sRock.

  Under certain conditions of sea and sky the Rock is as lonely andforbidding a spot as ever a ship's timbers were broken upon. Point Oldthrusts out like the stubby thumb on a clenched first. The Rock and theouter nib of the Point are haunted by quarreling flocks of gulls andcoots and the black Siwash duck with his stumpy wings and brilliantyellow bill. The southeaster sends endless battalions of waves rollingup there when it blows. These rear white heads over the Rock and burston the Point with shuddering impact and showers of spray. When the skyis dull and gray, and the wind whips the stunted trees on thePoint--trees that lean inland with branches all twisted to the landwardside from pressure of many gales in their growing years--and the surf isbooming 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 swimin vast schools across the end of Squitty. They feed upon small fish,baby herring, tiny darting atoms of finny life that swarm in countlessnumbers. What these inch-long fishes feed upon no man knows, but theybegin to show in the Gulf early in spring. The water is alive withthem,--minute, darting streaks of silver. The salmon follow theseschools, pursuing, swallowing, eating to live. Seal and dogfish followthe salmon. Shark and the giant blackfish follow dogfish and seal. Andman follows them all, pursuing and killing that he himself may live.

  Around Poor Man's Rock the tide sets strongly at certain stages of ebband flood. The cliffs north of Point Old and the area immediatelysurrounding the Rock are thick strewn with kelp. In these brown patchesof seaweed the tiny fish, the schools of baby herring, take refuge fromtheir restless enemy, the swift and voracious salmon.

  For years Pacific Coast salmon have been taken by net and trap, to theprofit of the salmon packers and the satisfaction of those who cannotget fish save out of tin cans. The salmon swarmed in millions on theirway to spawn in fresh-water streams. They were plentiful and cheap. Buteven before the war came to send the price of linen-mesh net beyond mostfishermen's pocketbooks, men had discovered that salmon could be takencommercially by trolling lines. The lordly spring, which attains toseventy pounds, the small, swift blueback, and the fighting coho couldall be lured to a hook on a wobbling bit of silver or brass at the endof a long line weighted with lead to keep it at a certain depth behind amoving boat. From a single line over the stern it was but a logical stepto two, four, even six lines spaced on slender poles boomed out on eachside of a power launch,--once the fisherman learned that with this gearhe could take salmon in open water. So trolling was launched. Oddtrollers grew to trolling fleets. A new method became established in thesalmon industry.

  But there are places where the salmon run and a gasboat trolling herbattery of lines cannot go without loss of gear. The power boats cannottroll in shallows. They cannot operate in kelp without fouling. So theyhold 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 thatsurrounded it and the greater beds that fringed Point Old, the smallfeed sought refuge from the salmon and the salmon pursued them thereamong the weedy granite and the boulders, even into shallows where theirback fins cleft the surface as they dashed after the little herring. Thefoul ground and the tidal currents that swept by the Rock held no dangerto the gear of a rowboat troller. He fished a single short line with apound or so of lead. He could stop dead in a boat length if his linefouled. So he pursued the salmon as the salmon pursued the little fishamong the kelp and boulders.

  Only a poor man trolled in a rowboat, tugging at the oars hour afterhour without cabin shelter from wind and sun and rain, unable to faceeven such weather as a thirty by eight-foot gasboat could easily fishin, unable to follow the salmon run when it shifted from one point toanother on the Gulf. The rowboat tro
llers must pick a camp ashore by alikely ground and stay there. If the salmon left they could only waittill another run began. Whereas the power boat could hear of schoolingsalmon 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 salmoncould 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 hungerfor independence, had camped in Squitty Cove and fished the Squittyheadlands and seldom failed to take salmon around the Rock, the name hadclung to that brown hummock of granite lifting out of the sea at halftide. From April to November, any day a rowboat could live outside theCove, there would be half a dozen, eight, ten, more or less, of thesesolitary rowers bending to their oars, circling the Rock.

  Now and again one of these would hastily drop his oars, stand up, andhaul in his line hand over hand. There would be a splashing andsplattering on the surface, a bright silver fish leaping and threshingthe water, to land at last with a plop! in the boat. Whereupon thefisherman would hurriedly strike this dynamic, glistening fish over thehead with a short, thick club, lest his struggles snarl the line, afterwhich he would put out his spoon and bend to the oars again. It was adaylight and dusk job, a matter of infinite patience and hard work, coldand wet at times, and in midsummer the blaze of a scorching sun and theeye-dazzling glitter of reflected light.

  But a man must live. Some who came to the Cove trolled long andskillfully, and were lucky enough to gain a power troller in the end, tolive on beans and fish, and keep a strangle hold on every dollar thatcame in until with a cabin boat powered with gas they joined thetrolling fleet and became nomads. They fared well enough then. Theirtaking at once grew beyond a rowboat's scope. They could see newcountry, hearken to the lure of distant fishing grounds. There was thesport of gambling on wind and weather, on the price of fish or thenumber of the catch. If one locality displeased them they could shift toanother, while the rowboat men were chained perforce to the monotony ofthe 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 heldgood, filling the Cove with talk and laughter and a fine sprinkle oflights when dark closed in. With failing catches, or the first breath ofa southeaster that would lock them in the Cove while it blew, they wouldbe up and away,--to the top end of Squitty, to Yellow Rock, to CapeLazo, 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 theirlot.

  There were two or three rowboat men who had fished the Cove almost sinceJack MacRae could remember,--old men, fishermen who had shot theirbolt, who dwelt in small cabins by the Cove, living somehow from salmonrun to salmon run, content if the season's catch netted three hundreddollars. All they could hope for was a living. They had become fixturesthere.

  Jack MacRae looked down from the bald tip of Point Old with an eagergleam in his uncovered eye. There was the Rock with a slow swell lappingover it. There was an old withered Portuguese he knew in a green dugout,Long Tom Spence rowing behind the Portuguese, and they carrying on ashouted conversation. He picked out Doug Sproul among three others hedid not know,--and there was not a man under fifty among them.

  Three hundred yards offshore half a dozen power trollers wheeled andcounterwheeled, working an eddy. He could see them haul the lines handover 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 onSquitty Island, every phase and mood and color of the sea. It is a grimbirthplace that leaves a man without some sentiment for the place wherehe was born. Point Old, Squitty Cove, Poor Man's Rock had been theboundaries of his world for a long time. In so far as he had everplayed, 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 awonder dad and Peter Ferrara aren't out. And I never knew Bill Munro tomiss anything like this."

  He looked a little longer, over across the tip of Sangster Island twomiles westward, with its Elephant's Head,--the extended trunk of whichwas a treacherous reef bared only at low tide. He looked at theElephant's unwinking eye, which was a twenty-foot hole through a hump ofsandstone, and smiled. He had fished for salmon along the kelp bedsthere and dug clams under the eye of the Elephant long, long ago. It didseem 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 heavymackinaw. He looked back at the Gower cottage, like a snowflake in asetting of emerald; he looked at the Gower yacht; and the puzzled frownreturned to his face.

  Then he picked up his bag and walked rapidly along the brow of thecliffs toward Squitty Cove.