Poor Man's Rock

by Bertrand W. Sinclair

  CHAPTER XI

  Peril of the Sea

  The last of August set the Red Flower of the Jungle books blooming alongthe British Columbia coast. The seeds of it were scattered on hot, dry,still days by pipe and cigarette, by sparks from donkey engines, byuntended camp fires, wherever the careless white man went in the greatcoastwise forests. The woods were like a tinder box. One unguardedmoment, and the ancient firs were wrapped in sheets of flame. Smoke layon the Gulf like a pall of pungent fog, through which vessels ran bychart and compass, blind between ports, at imminent risk of collision.

  Through this, well on into September, MacRae and Vincent Ferraragathered cargoes of salmon and ran them down the Gulf to Bellingham,making their trips with the regularity of the tides, despite the murkthat hid landmarks by day and obscured the guiding lighthouse flasheswhen dark closed in. They took their chances in the path of coastwisetraffic, straining their eyes for vessels to leap suddenly out of thethickness that shut them in, their ears for fog signals that blaredwarning. There were close shaves, but they escaped disaster. They gotthe salmon and they delivered them, and Folly Bay still ran a bad secondwherever the _Bird_ boats served the trolling fleet. Even when Gower atlast met MacRae's price, his collectors got few fish. The fishermen tookno chances. They were convinced that if MacRae abandoned buying forlack of salmon Folly Bay would cut the price in two. It had been donebefore. So they held their fish for the _Bird_ boats. MacRae got themall. Even when American buyers trailed MacRae to the source of hissupply their competition hurt Gower instead of MacRae. The trollerssupplied MacRae with all the salmon he could carry. It was still freshin their minds that he had come into the field that season as theirspecial Providence.

  But the blueback run tapered off at Squitty. September ushered in theannual coho run on its way to the spawning grounds. And the coho did notschool along island shores, feeding upon tiny herring. Stray squadronsof coho might pass Squitty, but they did not linger in thousands as theblueback did. The coho swept into the Gulf from mysterious haunts inblue water far offshore, myriads of silver fish seeking the streamswhere they were spawned, and to which as mature fish they now returnedto reproduce themselves. They came in great schools. They would loafawhile in some bay at a stream mouth, until some irresistible urge drovethem into fresh water, up rivers and creeks, over shoal and rapid,through pool and canyon, until the stream ran out to a whimperingtrickle and the backs of the salmon stuck out of the water. Up there, inthe 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 thedog salmon, which comes last of all--but each to function in the samemanner and sequence--laid in the salt-water bays, resting, it wouldseem, before the last and most terrible struggle of their briefexistence, the gill-net fishermen and the cannery purse-seine boats tooktoll of them. The trollers harried them from the moment they showed inthe Gulf, because the coho will strike at a glittering spoon anywhere insalt water. But the net boats take them in hundreds at one drift, andthe purse seiners gather thousands at a time in a single sweep of thegreat bag-like seine.

  When September days brought the cohoes in full force along with coolernights and a great burst of rain that drowned the forest fires andcleared away the enshrouding smoke, leaving only the pleasant haze ofautumn, the Folly Bay purse-seine boats went out to work. The trollingfleet scattered from Squitty Island. Some steamed north to the troubledwaters of Salmon River and Blackfish Sound, some to the Redondas wherespring salmon could be taken. Many put by their trolling gear and hungtheir gill nets. A few gas boats and a few rowboat men held to theIsland, depending upon stray schools and the spring salmon that hauntedcertain reefs and points and beds of kelp. But the main fleet scatteredover two hundred miles of sea.

  MacRae could have called it a season and quit with honor and muchprofit. Or he might have gone north and bought salmon here and there,free-lancing. He did neither. There were enough gill-netters operatingon Gower's territory to give him fair cargoes. Every salmon he coulddivert from the cans at Folly Bay meant,--well, he did not often stop toask precisely what that did mean to him. But he never passed Poor Man'sRock, bleak and brown at low tide, or with seas hissing over it when thetide was at flood, without thinking of his father, of the days andmonths and years old Donald MacRae had lived and worked in sight of theRock,--a life at the last lonely and cheerless and embittered by thesight of his ancient enemy preening his feathers in Cradle Bay. OldDonald had lived for thirty years unable to return a blow which hadscarred his face and his heart in the same instant. But his son feltthat he was making better headway. It is unlikely that Donald MacRaeever looked at Gower's cottage nestling like a snowflake in the greenlee of Point Old, or cast his eyes over that lost estate of his, withmore unchristian feelings than did his son. In Jack MacRae's mind theGolden Rule did not apply to Horace Gower, nor to aught in which Gowerwas concerned.

  So he stayed on Folly Bay territory with a dual purpose: to make moneyfor himself, and to deprive Gower of profit where he could. He was wiseenough to know that was the only way he could hurt a man like Gower. Andhe wanted to hurt Gower. The intensity of that desire grew. It was apoint of honor, the old inborn clan pride that never compromised aninjury or an insult or an injustice, which neither forgave nor forgot.

  For weeks MacRae in the _Blackbird_ and Vin Ferrara in her sister shipflitted 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 thecarriers and buyers sought the fishermen wherever they went, to buy andcarry away their catch.

  Folly Bay suffered bad luck from the beginning. Gower had fourpurse-seine boats in commission. Within a week one broke a crankshaft inhalf a gale off Sangster Island. The wind put her ashore under the noseof the sandstone Elephant and the seas destroyed her.

  Fire gutted a second not long after, so that for weeks she was laid upfor repairs. That left him but two efficient craft. One operated on hisconcessions along the mainland shore. The other worked three streammouths on Vancouver Island, straight across from Folly Bay.

  Still, Gower's cannery was getting salmon. In those three bays no otherpurse seiner could shoot his gear. Folly Bay held them under exclusivelicense. Gill nets could be drifted there, but the purse seiner wasking.

  A gill net goes out over a boat's stern. When it is strung it stands inthe 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 bylead weights spaced close together. The outer end is buoyed to a floatwhich carries a flag and a lantern; the inner is fast to the bitts ofthe launch. Thus set, and set in the evening, since salmon can only betaken by the gills in the dark, fisherman, launch, and net drift withthe changing tides till dawn. Then he hauls. He may have ten salmon, ora hundred, or treble that. He may have none, and the web be torn bysharks 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 revolvingplatform aft. His vessel moves slowly in a sweeping circle as the netgoes out,--a circle perhaps a thousand feet in diameter. When the circleis complete the two ends of the net meet at the seiner's stern. A powerwinch hauls on ropes and the net closes. Nothing escapes. It drawstogether until it is a bag, a "purse" drawn up under the vessel'scounter, full of glistening fish.

  The salmon is a surface fish, his average depth seldom below fourfathoms. He breaks water when he feeds, when he plays, when he runs inschools. The purse seiner watches the signs. When the salmon rise innumbers he makes a set. To shoot the gear and purse the seine is amatter of minutes. A thousand salmon at a haul is nothing. Threethousand is common. Five thousand is far below the record. Purse seineshave been burst by the dead weight of fish against the pull of thewinch.

  The purse seine is a deadly trap for schooling sa
lmon. And because thesalmon schools in mass formation, crowding nose to tail and side toside, in the entrance to a fresh-water stream, the Fisheries Departmenthaving granted a monopoly of seining rights to a packer has alsobenevolently decreed that no purse seine or other net shall operatewithin a given distance of a stream mouth,--that the salmon, having wonto fresh water, shall go free and his kind be saved from utterextinction.

  These regulations are not drawn for sentimental reasons, only topreserve the salmon industry. The farmer saves wheat for his next year'sseeding, instead of selling the last bushel to the millers. No manwillfully kills the goose that lays him golden eggs. But the salmonhunter, eagerly pursuing the nimble dollar, sometimes grows rapacious inthe chase and breaks laws of his own devising,--if a big haul promisesand no Fisheries Inspector is by to restrain him. The cannery purseseiners are the most frequent offenders. They can make their haulquickly in forbidden waters and get away. Folly Bay, shrewdly paying itsseine crews a bonus per fish on top of wages, had always been notoriousfor crowding the law.

  Solomon River takes its rise in the mountainous backbone of VancouverIsland. It is a wide, placid stream on its lower reaches, flowingthrough low, timbered regions, emptying into the Gulf in a half-moon baycalled the Jew's Mouth, which is a perfect shelter from the Gulf stormsand the only such shelter in thirty miles of bouldery shore line. Thebeach runs northwest and southeast, bleak and open, undented. In allthat stretch there is no point from behind which a Fisheries Patrollaunch could steal unexpectedly into the Jew's Mouth.

  Upon a certain afternoon the _Blackbird_ lay therein. At her stern, fastby light lines to her after bitts, clung half a dozen fish boats, bluewisps of smoke drifting from the galley stovepipes, the fishermenvariously occupied. The _Blackbird's_ hold was empty except for ice. Shewas waiting for fish, and the _Bluebird_ was due on the same errand thefollowing 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 themiddle of the Jew's Mouth, which was a scant six hundred yards across atits widest, the _Folly Bay No. 5_ swung on her anchor chain. A tubbycannery tender lay alongside. The crews were busy with picaroons forkingsalmon out of the seiner into the tender's hold. The flip-flop of thefish sounded distinctly in that quiet place. Their silver bodies flashedin the sun as they were thrown across the decks.

  When the tender drew clear and passed out of the bay she rode deep withthe weight of salmon aboard. Without the Jew's Mouth, around the_Blackbird_ and the fish boats and the _No. 5_ the salmon were threshingwater. _Klop._ A flash of silver. Bubbles. A series of concentric ringsthat ran away in ripples, till they merged into other widening rings.They were everywhere. The river was full of them. The bay was alive withthem.

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

  The _No. 5_ heaved anchor, the chain clanking and chattering in ahawsepipe. Her exhaust spat smoky, gaseous fumes. A bell clanged. Shemoved slowly ahead, toward the river's mouth, a hundred yards to oneside of it. Then the brown web of the seine began to spin out over thestern. She crossed the mouth of the Solomon, holding as close in as herdraft permitted, and kept on straight till her seine was paid out to theend. 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 theseine stood like a wall across the river's mouth.

  Every man watching knew what the seiner was about, in defiance of thelaw. The salmon, nosing into the stream, driven by that imperative urgewhich is the law of their being, struck the net, turned aside, swam in aslow circle and tried again and again, seeking free passage, untilthousands 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, andhaul out into deep water.

  It was the equivalent of piracy on the high seas. To be taken in the actmeant fines, imprisonment, confiscation of boat and gear. But the _No.5_ would not be caught. She had a guard posted. Cannery seiners werenever caught. When they were they got off with a warning and areprimand. Only gill-netters, the small fry of the salmon industry, everpaid the utmost penalty for raids like that. So the fishermen said, witha cynical twist of their lips.

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

  "Well, I'm about ready to take a chance," another man growled. "Theyclear 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 ofsalmon, struggling, twisting, squirming within the net. The loadingbegan. Her men laughed and shouted as they worked. The gill-netfishermen watched silently, scowling. It was like taking bread out oftheir mouths. It was like an honest man restrained by a policeman's clubfrom taking food when he is hungry, and seeing a thief fill his pocketsand walk off unmolested.

  "Four thousand salmon that shot," Dave Mullen said, the same Mullen whohad talked to MacRae in Squitty one night. "Say, why should we stand forthat? 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," MacRaereplied. "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 cannerymen had framed this law. They cried loudly and continually for itsstrict enforcement. And they violated it flagrantly themselves, orwinked at its violation when that meant an added number of cases totheir pack. Not alone in the Jew's Mouth; all along the British Columbiacoast the purse seiners forgot the law when the salmon swarmed in astream mouth and they could make a killing. Only canneries could hold apurse-seine license. If the big men would not honor their own law, whyshould the lesser? So MacRae felt and said.

  The men in the half-dozen boats about his stern had dealt all the seasonwith 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 inbreaking the law they were making it hard for these men to earn a dollarlegitimately. Superior equipment, special privilege, cold-bloodedviolation of law because it was safe and profitable, gave the purseseiner an unfair advantage. The men gathered in a little knot on thedeck of one boat. They put their heads together and lowered theirvoices. MacRae knew they were angry, that they had reached the point offighting fire with fire. And he smiled to himself. He did not know whatthey were planning, but he could guess. It would not be the first timethe individual fishermen had kicked over the traces and beaten the purseseiners at their own game. They did not include him in their council. Hewas a buyer. It was not his function to inquire how they took theirfish. 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 thefishermen, who earned their living precariously at best.

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

  With dusk also the fishermen were busy over their nets, still riding tothe _Blackbird's_ stern. Then they moved off in the dark. MacRae couldhear nets paying out. He saw lanterns set to mark the outer end of eachnet. 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 theirbunks, sound asleep.

  Under cover of the night the fishermen took pattern from the seiner'sexample. A gill net is nine hundred feet long, approximately twenty feetdeep. They stripped the cork floats of
f one and hung it to the lead-lineof another. Thus with a web forty feet deep they went stealthily up tothe mouth of the Solomon. With a four-oared skiff manning each end ofthe nine hundred-foot length they swept their net around the Jew'sMouth, closed it like a purse seine, and hauled it out into the shallowsof a small beach. They stood in the shallow water with sea boots on andforked the salmon into their rowboats and laid the rowboats alongsidethe _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 mixedcargo of coho and dog salmon, the heaviest cargo ever stowed under herhatches,--and eight fishermen divided two thousand dollars share andshare alike for their night's work.

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

  In the Gulf the obscuring clouds parted to lay a shaft of silver onsmooth, windless sea. The _Blackbird_ wallowed down the moon-trail.MacRae stood at the steering wheel. Beside him Steve Ferrara leaned onthe 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 newboats 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 hemust struggle for a living like other common men, to deprive him of thepower he had abused, to make him suffer as such a man would suffer underthat turn of fortune,--that would help to square accounts. It would beonly a measure of justice. To be dealt with as he had dealt withothers,--MacRae asked no more than that for himself.

  But it was not likely, he reflected. One bad season would not seriouslyinvolve a wary old bird like Horace Gower. He was too secure behindmanifold bulwarks. Still in the end,--more spectacular things had cometo pass in the affairs of men on this kaleidoscopic coast. MacRae's facewas hard in the moonlight. His eyes were somber. It was an ugly feelingto nurse. For thirty years that sort of impotent bitterness must haverankled in his father's breast--with just cause, MacRae told himselfmoodily. No wonder old Donald had been a grave and silent man; a just,kindly, generous man, too. Other men had liked him, respected him. Goweralone had been implacable.

  Well into the red and yellow dawn MacRae stood at the wheel, thinking ofthis, an absent look in eyes which still kept keen watch ahead. He wasglad when it came time for Steve's watch on deck, and he could lie downand let sleep drive it out of his mind. He did not live solely torevenge himself upon Horace Gower. He had his own way to make and hisown plans--even if they were still a bit nebulous--to fulfill. It wasonly 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. Ofthese the _Folly Bay No. 5_ somehow failed to get the lion's share. Thegill-net men laughed in their soiled sleeves and furtively swept the bayclear each night and all night, and the daytime haul of the seine fellfar below the average. The _Blackbird_ and the _Bluebird_ waddled down aplacid Gulf with all they could carry.

  And although there was big money-making in this short stretch, and thesecret satisfaction of helping put another spoke in Gower's wheel,MacRae did not neglect the rest of his territory nor the few trollersthat still worked Squitty Island. He ran long hours to get their fewfish. It was their living, and MacRae would not pass them up becausetheir catch meant no profit compared to the time he spent and the fuelhe burned making this round. He would drive straight up the Gulf fromBellingham to Squitty, circle the Island and then across to the mouth ofthe Solomon. The weather was growing cool now. Salmon would keepunspoiled a long time in a trailer's hold. It did not matter to himwhether it was day or night around Squitty. He drove his carrier intoany nook or hole where a troller might lie waiting with a few salmon.

  The _Blackbird_ came pitching and diving into a heavy southeast swell upalong the western side of Squitty at ten o'clock in the black of anearly October night. There was a storm brewing, a wicked one, reckonedby the headlong drop of the aneroid. MacRae had a hundred or so salmonaboard for all his Squitty round, and he had yet to pick up those on theboats 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 theGulf, and he said to himself that it would be wise to stay in the Covethat night. A southeast gale, a beam sea, and the tiny opening of theJew's Mouth was a bad combination to face in a black night. As he stoodup along Squitty he could hear the swells break along the shore. Now andthen 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 androse dripping to the next. He passed Cradle Bay at last, almost underthe steep cliffs, holding in to round Poor Man's Rock and lay a compasscourse to the mouth of Squitty Cove.

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

  He knew the boat instantly,--the _Arrow_ shooting through the night attwenty miles an hour, scurrying to shelter under the full thrust of hertremendous power. For an appreciable instant her high bow loomed overhim, 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 therules of the road at sea the _Blackbird_ had the right of way. If MacRaehad held by the book this speeding mass of mahogany and brass and steelwould have cut him in two amidships. As it was, her high bow, the stemshod with a cast bronze cutwater edged like a knife, struck him on theport quarter, sheared through guard, planking, cabin.

  There was a crash of riven timbers, the crunching ring of metal, quickoaths, a cry. The _Arrow_ scarcely hesitated. She had cut away nearlythe entire stern works of the _Blackbird_. But such was her momentumthat 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 haddone. 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 waswithin reach of his hand. But that did not occur to him. Steve Ferrarawas asleep in the cabin, in the path of that destroying stem. For astunned 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. Hestruggled back, up, gained the deck, dragging Steve after him. The_Blackbird_ was deep by the holed stern now, awash to her after fishhatch. She rose slowly, like a log, on each swell. Only the buoyancy ofher tanks and timbers kept her from the last plunge. There was a lightskiff bottom up across her hatches by the steering wheel. MacRae movedwarily toward that, holding to the bulwark with one hand, dragging Stevewith 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. Hecould still hear shouting. And he could see also that the wind and thetide and the roll of the swells carried the water-logged hulk of the_Blackbird_ in the opposite direction. She was past the Rock, but shewas edging shoreward, in under the granite walls that ran between PointOld and the Cove. He steadied himself, keeping his hold on Steve, andreached for the skiff. As his fingers touched it a comber flung itselfup out of the black and shot two feet of foam and green water across theswamped hull. It picked up the light cedar skiff like a chip and cast itbeyond his reach and beyond his sight. And as he clung to the cabinpipe-rail, drenched with the cold sea, he heard that big roller burstagainst the shore very near at hand. He saw the white spray lift ghostlyin the black.

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