The Complete Screech Owls, Volume 3

by Roy MacGregor

  Travis turned to Sarah. “Find Joe,” he said. “And fast.”

  Sarah skated away.

  The Governor General then picked up the original Stanley Cup. She looked around for the team captain.

  “Go, Trav!” Nish called, hammering his stick.

  “Yeah, Travis!” Sam shouted.

  Travis noticed Sam and Nish were now standing side by side. Something seemed to have changed between them.

  But he wasn’t looking for Sam or Nish. He had to find Joe Hall.

  The Governor General was walking towards Travis with the Stanley Cup in her hands. The Rebels were pounding their sticks on the ice in salute. The entire Corel Centre was on its feet, cheering.

  Travis looked around, nearly frantic.

  There was Sarah! And she had Joe Hall with her.

  Joe Hall, white as the ice, was leaning heavily on Sarah. He looked terrible.

  Travis turned first to Joe Hall. He handed him back his stick. The sparkle was missing, but Joe Hall managed a thin, quick smile.

  “You won the Stanley Cup for me,” he said.

  Then the Governor General presented the Stanley Cup to Travis. With trembling arms he took the trophy, thanked her, and raised it over his head to thunderous cheers.

  Travis knew that everyone expected him to hand the Cup next to his assistant captain, Sarah. But Sarah stepped aside, and Travis, smiling, did what both of them knew needed to be done. He handed the original Stanley Cup to Joe Hall.

  Joe Hall reached for it. He was crying. Sobbing openly, huge tears welled up in his eyes and rolled down his cheeks, splashing into the Stanley Cup.

  “Thanks, Joe,” Travis said. “And congratulations.”

  Sarah reached up and kissed Joe Hall. Still sobbing, he handed the trophy to Sarah. Sarah lifted it, then handed it off to Derek, then Nish.

  Nish pushed past several of the Owls to make sure Sam got it next. She raised the cup and did a little dance, much to the delight of the crowd.

  Where did Joe Hall go?” asked Travis.

  Sarah looked around. “I hope he’s gone to see a doctor.”

  Travis had no time to go look for him. There were photographers and reporters and more cheers and a Little Stanley Cup ring to try on. Soon an hour or more had passed, and they still hadn’t seen Joe Hall.

  Finally, with the cheering over and the ice already being cleaned, the triumphant Owls made their way back to the dressing room. Mr. Dillinger was there, packing up the equipment for the long bus ride home.

  But still no Joe Hall.

  Travis undressed, showered, and changed. He was just doing up his shirt when Data wheeled up and handed him a folded piece of paper. “You might want to look at this, Travis.”

  It was, as Travis expected, the results of Data’s computer search for Joe Hall. Sure enough, it turned out there were hundreds of Joe Halls, even several Joe Halls in hockey. But only one “Bad” Joe Hall.

  Travis read frantically.

  Hall, Joe: “Bad” Joe Hall was born in England but was raised in Canada. He played professional hockey at the beginning of the 20th Century, mostly for the Montreal Canadiens. He was famous for his bad temper–he was once taken o? the ice in a police paddy wagon!–but later came to regret the playing time his temper had cost him. Hall’s Canadiens met the Seattle Metropolitans to decide the 1919 Stanley Cup, but the Spanish flu struck the Montreal team badly. Five players were too sick to play, and when Joe Hall died, the championship was cancelled that year–the only time in history there has been no Stanley Cup awarded.

  Travis read it twice. He could make no sense of it. It was impossible.

  Sarah popped her head into the dressing room.

  Travis looked up, hopeful. “Did you find him?”

  Sarah shook her head, then she stopped and smiled. “I don’t know–maybe I did.”

  Travis was more puzzled than ever. Either she had found Joe Hall or she hadn’t.

  “Come on out here a minute,” Sarah said.

  She took him up the back stairs to the front foyer of the Corel Centre, where the original Stanley Cup was back on display and the fans were lining up by the hundreds to have their pictures taken with it and the other trophies from the Hockey Hall of Fame.

  But it wasn’t the trophies that Sarah wanted to show him. “Over here,” she said. “The display cases.”

  They moved over to several large glass cases containing memorabilia from the Silver Seven and the early Ottawa Senators. There were even photographs of the Rideau Rebels, and a great picture of “One-Eyed” Frank McGee and Harry “Rat” Westwick.

  But she wanted to show him something else. “Look in this case,” Sarah said.

  Travis peered in. Old skates, equipment, sweaters, a hockey stick. He saw nothing to tell him where Joe Hall had gone.

  “What?” he said.

  “Recognize the stick?” she asked.

  Travis looked again. It was in the far corner of the case. An old, perfectly straight hockey stick.

  And at the top, near the handle, was pencilled a single name.

  “J. Hall.”

  THE END

  It was Sarah who spotted the first body.

  She was standing high on the bridge of the Zodiac, staring out over the rolling sea off the San Juan Islands.

  Travis had seen her get to her feet and point, but with the wind roaring in his ears he couldn’t hear what she had shouted to the guide on the tour boat. Whatever it was, it caused the guide to stand, draw her binoculars up, and stare in the direction Sarah was pointing for some time before suddenly turning the Zodiac and revving the engines.

  The big open tour boat headed towards the area where Sarah was still pointing. The swells were high along the Strait of Juan de Fuca this early in the year, and at times the islands dropped out of sight for a moment before the Zodiac roared up the next wide, rolling wave.

  Travis didn’t mind the rolling. The same, unfortunately, could not be said for Nish, who lay flat on the floor of the Whale Watch tour boat and had turned the oddest colour of green Travis had ever seen in a human face.

  This was not the Nish they had started out with from Victoria Harbour. Before the Zodiac had rounded the breakwater and headed out into open sea, Nish had bounced about the big rubber-sided boat like a tropical storm–“Hurricane Nish,” Sarah had tagged him–and soon had everyone on the tour, Muck and Mr. Dillinger, all the Screech Owls, even the guide, howling with laughter as he kept interrupting the guide’s talk about where they’d be going and what they’d be seeing.

  They would be watching for dolphins and porpoises, the guide told them, and with luck they might even see a massive grey whale. She explained how to tell the porpoises from the dolphins. She told them there were more than thirty different kinds of dolphins in the world, and how it was important to protect them.

  “Not long ago we were losing twenty thousand of them a year in gill nets,” the guide said. “Tuna fishermen were letting them get tangled in the nets they were using to catch tuna, and the dolphins were drowning. Like us, they need to breathe air. We’ve saved a lot of them, but it still happens. That’s why all the dolphins we find off the coast of British Columbia are protected by law; we don’t want anybody, or anything, hurting them.

  “Everyone knows they’re mammals, of course, not fish. They’re as intelligent as chimpanzees and have memories like elephants. They’re better with numbers and better at following complicated instructions than most of us are–so treat them with respect. They may be smarter than us.”

  “Certainly smarter than some of us,” Sarah added, with a withering look at Nish.

  Nish crossed his eyes and rolled his tongue before sticking it out at Sarah and violently shaking his head.

  The guide said any dolphins they saw today would likely be Pacific white-sided dolphins, which were common along this coast. Killer whales, she added, were also dolphins and could be found off the coast of British Columbia as well, though they are rarely seen. They might get lucky, b
ut more likely they’d see a big grey, which was just as good, in her opinion.

  “Greys are beautiful animals,” she said. “Some of them are longer than a city bus, and once they get here they spend most of their time eating tiny little sea creatures they find in these waters. An adult grey will eat about twelve hundred kilograms of food a day–that’s the equivalent of ten thousand Big Macs.”

  “That’s what I usually order!” Nish had shouted.

  The dolphins, the guide said, prefer salmon, but also love a good feed of anchovies.

  “They order pizza out here, with anchovies?” Nish had screeched. “I think I’m gonna hurl!”

  And less than ten minutes later, with the sea rolling and sliding and slipping under him, he had indeed “hurled,” a small figure in a rain suit and life jacket hanging over the back of the Zodiac and barfing into the open sea as seagulls screeched overhead and the rest of the Owls mercilessly applauded and cheered his every retch.

  Now Nish was flat out, green and groaning–but at least he was quiet. This was no time for wisecracks. Whatever Sarah had sighted, it seemed to have the guide deeply concerned.

  Twice they turned and circled back, the guide continually rising from her pilot’s chair to lift the binoculars and scan the rolling sea for whatever it was that Sarah had seen.

  “There!” Sarah called, pointing. This time Travis heard her.

  The guide turned the Zodiac sharply, easing it up one long, rolling swell and down the other side, where, almost magically, the boat drew up alongside the object of their search mission.

  Travis, sitting on an outside seat beside Sam, Nish’s new partner on defence, leaned over the round rubbery wall of the Zodiac and stared hard.

  It was a dolphin–rolling lifelessly in the sea, shreds of pale, white flesh stringing out in the water from its underside.

  And something else–fading to pink in the water, but dark red closer to the rolling, unreal looking dolphin.

  Blood.

  “I think I’m gonna hurl,” said Sam in her deepest voice.

  “What happened?” Travis asked.

  “Maybe it got struck by a ship?” suggested Data, who was strapped into a seat just the other side of Sam.

  The guide was out of her pilot’s seat and down close to the side of the Zodiac. She had out a long pole with a hook on the end and reached with it into the water. But the boat was rolling too much. Muck, the Screech Owls’ coach, stood to help. “You take the controls,” he said to her. “I’ll pull it in.”

  The guide nodded, and a moment later she had put the outboard engines into reverse and pulled the boat around so that it and the dolphin were at least drifting in the same direction.

  Muck, his lips tight and jaw set, reached for the dolphin with the pole and caught it along a front flipper, the hook pulling the creature so it rolled over completely as it came towards the Zodiac.

  There was a black, gaping hole on the dolphin’s other side, fresh blood still streaming from the wound.

  The guide came down from her seat for a closer look. “What the–?” she said.

  “A swordfish?” Data suggested. “Ran it right through?”

  Muck was shaking his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “It’s been shot.”

  It was Travis who spotted the second body.

  Muck and Mr. Dillinger had tried to hoist the dead dolphin into the Zodiac, but it was too large and slippery for them to handle, so they ended up using the mooring ropes to lash the poor creature to the side of the boat while the guide made slowly for harbour.

  All of the Screech Owls were upset. They’d come out to see grey whales swimming and playing in the sea, and they’d found, instead, a dead dolphin. “Shot,” Muck had said, but it made no sense to Travis. Shot for what reason? he wondered. And who would do such a thing?

  Jenny Staples, the Owls’ goalie, was sobbing. A few of the others, Fahd included, were brushing away tears and trying to pretend that it was just the splash from the sea. Travis’s throat felt tight and he avoided having to talk. He sat, staring at the rolling horizon, and tried to think of anything but the death of this beautiful creature that now lay strapped to the side of the boat, blood stringing out pink behind the small wake that rippled from its tail fin.

  Muck and Mr. Dillinger talked in low voices as they leaned over the side making sure their ties held. The coach said it must have something to do with tuna fishermen and gill nets, but Mr. Dillinger didn’t think there was any tuna fishing done off these waters. Mr. Dillinger said it must have been some idiot with a rifle out for nothing more than a kick, but Muck shook his head in disgust. Muck looked angry, as if somehow this attack on an innocent sea creature had been an attack on himself and his team of peewee players.

  On the slow journey back to shore, a huge, mottled grey whale breached off to one side. The next time the gigantic dark creature rose out of the water, several of the Owls raised their disposable cameras and clicked off a few shots before it disappeared again in a thundering crash of spray, but they did so without much enthusiasm. Hardly anyone said a word, except to point out where the whale was coming up again.

  Soon, however, it had moved off and there was only the slow drone of the engines on low speed, the trickling sound of water as it played between the trussed dolphin and the side of the boat, and the hypnotic rise and fall, rise and fall of the wide, rolling sea.

  Some of the Owls were dozing off. Fahd was slumped over. Sarah was leaning on Sam, both of them nodding sharply from time to time as they bobbed in and out of sleep. Andy lay against Wilson in the seats up ahead. Dmitri and Lars and Simon were asleep too, their hooded heads down low as if in prayer.

  Travis kept watching the sea. He could not stop wondering how this had happened. If Muck was right and the dolphin had been shot, could it really have been for sport? For a kick? Maybe it was a fisherman who’d accidentally caught the dolphin in his nets, and when he couldn’t untangle the poor creature he had put it out of its misery.

  But that didn’t seem possible. There was no torn netting on the dolphin, just the gaping black hole in one side where dark blood was still seeping out and thinning to pink, eventually fading to nothing as it washed away in the sea.

  Perhaps the dolphin hadn’t been shot. Maybe Muck was wrong. Maybe it was a shark attack! A swordfish, like Fahd said. A bite from some fierce sea creature. Maybe it was the mark of a suction cup from the arm of a giant squid or octopus.

  But Travis knew nothing about the ocean and decided he shouldn’t pretend to. He’d have to wait, like everyone else, to find out what had happened. He just hoped it wasn’t a gun that had done this.

  Would it be murder? he wondered. Can you murder a dolphin? Or does it have to be a human before it counts for that much. But then the guide had said they’re smart as us, they breathe like us, they can learn, they speak to each other.

  It would be murder in Travis Lindsay’s opinion, anyway.

  He tried to doze off, but couldn’t. He watched, instead, the slowly approaching land and the islands merging into the horizon behind. It was difficult adjusting to the size of the ocean after all those summers at his grandparents’ little lake up near Algonquin Park, where he and Nish last summer had managed to swim from shore to shore while Travis’s dad stayed alongside in the rowboat and kept a sharp eye out for waterskiers and wakeboarders. At the lake he was never out of sight of the shore. Here, if he looked to his left–what had the guide called it, port?–he could see nothing. For all he knew, there was nothing in that direction all the way to Japan.

  He was staring out, thinking of Japan and Nagano and the Big Hat arena, when suddenly he thought he saw something. He half stood, but then crouched back down. He didn’t want to shout out if it was nothing. Maybe it was just his imagination playing tricks on him.

  He waited for the next long roll of the sea. Then he saw it again–a flash of something white.

  Another dolphin?

  He waited until he had seen it twice more before he s
aid anything. By now he was sure. He stepped over to the pilot’s seat, where the guide was nursing the controls and staring ahead towards her destination.

  When Travis finally caught her eye, she looked down, wary. It occurred to Travis that she, too, might have been crying.

  He pointed to the west. His voice caught slightly. “I-I see something over that way.”

  The guide said nothing. She stood up, raised her binoculars, and stared for a long time. One long swell, then a second, then a third, the guide still staring, seemingly as uncertain as Travis had been.

  She put the glasses down, and Travis saw a look of extreme anger flash across her face. She said nothing to him, but turned back towards the two men on the far side still holding the dolphin tight to the Zodiac.

  “We have another sighting on the port side!” she called.

  Muck and Mr. Dillinger looked up, Mr. Dillinger’s eyes blinking behind water-spotted glasses. “Of what?” he called.

  “I don’t know,” said the guide. “I’m not sure.”

  Muck got to his feet, lifted his hand to shield his eyes, and stared. “We’d better check it out.”

  The guide said nothing. She turned the boat at once towards the object Travis had seen. The movement jolted the dozing Screech Owls and several stirred. Sam and Sarah stood up together, staring out to see where they were going.

  “W-wh-what’s goin’ on?” said a voice below Travis. He stared down into a face that was not nearly as green as it had been a half-hour earlier. Still, Nish did not look at all well.

  “We’re turning,” Travis said. “There’s something in the water.”

  “Fish?” Nish said sarcastically.

  Nish was trying to smile. He was coming back, recovering from his bout of seasickness.

  “You want to sit up?” Travis asked.

  “Give me a hand.”

  Travis helped his pal onto the seat beside him. Nish shook his head and rubbed his face.

  Slowly, at times almost seeming to go backwards, the Zodiac crawled over the rolling swells towards whatever was floating in the distance.