Killing Grounds

by Dana Stabenow

  “You on your way to fish camp, Joy-girl?” Old Sam said.

  Kate remembered then, the family fish camp a mile or so up Amartuq Creek, the very creek across the mouth of which Yuri Andreev had tried to cork Joe Anahonak not half an hour before.

  “Yes,” Auntie Joy said, “we fly George in from Niniltna, and come from town on the morning tide.” She beamed. “Fish running good, huh?”

  “Real good,” Old Sam said.

  As if to corroborate his judgment, they heard a whoop off to port. Pete Petersen on the Monica had just hauled in what looked like a seventy-five-pound king, which was selling delivered to the cannery for three dollars a pound.

  Kate looked at Old Sam. “We’re going to need this deck pretty soon.”

  Old Sam nodded. “Get the knives.”

  Kate went to the focsle. A storage area formed where the bow came to a point, the focsle served as food locker, parts store, tool crib and junk drawer. It was black as pitch inside, and Kate held the door open with one hand while she fumbled with the other for the flashlight hanging from a nail on the bulkhead to the right. The focsle was so crammed that the flashlight didn’t help much; she scraped her shin on a crate of eggs, caught her toe on a small cardboard box full of dusty brass doorknobs and snagged her braid on a bundle of halibut hooks before she found the sliming knives.

  They were broad, sharp blades with white plastic handles, and when she brought them out on deck they got down to the almost mutually exclusive jobs of butchering out the halibut and salvaging Doug and Jim’s gear. The four old women pitched in next to them, each producing her own personal knife in a gesture that reminded Kate irresistibly of the rumble between the Sharks and the Jets. The aunties’ knives had long, slender, wickedly sharp blades with handles carved variously of wood, bone and antler, with which they out-butchered even Old Sam, who had only been doing this for a living for sixty years.

  To everyone’s surprise and to Jim’s ebullient relief, the gear was in better shape than it had looked with the halibut caught in it. Doug said nothing as his brown, callused hands measured the gaping holes that would have to be mended before they could fish again. It wasn’t like there was a net loft up on the nearest beach, either. Kate remembered that his wife, Loralee, had had a baby six months before, a Christmas baby named Eddie, a chuckling, fair-haired child with enormous blue eyes like his mother’s and a jaw squared with a lick of his father’s stubborn.

  Doug must have felt the weight of her gaze and looked up, eyes narrowing on her face. Kate, who had a lively sense of self-preservation, refrained from offering sympathy. Doug would have taken it for pity and as a matter of pride refused any offer of further help, and if Kate knew her aunties, an offer of help was forthcoming.

  Next to her Auntie Vi spoke. “You got needles and twine?”

  Doug’s gaze moved from the young woman to the older one. “What?”

  Patiently, Auntie Vi repeated, “You got needles? You got twine?” He said nothing and even more patiently she said, “To mend your gear?” She gestured at the other women. “My sisters and me, you got needles and twine, we help mend.” She waited.

  He looked from her face to the faces of the other three. They were impassive. He looked back at her. “Well, sure,” he said slowly. “I’ve got needles, and twine, too.”

  “I’ve got a spare case in the focsle,” Old Sam put in, and looked at Kate. Kate, nursing her scraped shin, sighed heavily and went back to the focsle.

  Auntie Vi gave a decisive nod. “Good. We fix.”

  “I don’t know,” Doug began, and Auntie Vi said, patience gone, “Freya not going nowhere. We hang the cork line from the bow, one end from Tanya, other end our dory, use Samuel’s skiff to mend from, work toward middle.” Doug opened his mouth and she beat him to it. “We reef the net to cork line as we mend.”

  Doug still looked doubtful, but Jim slapped him on the back. “Sure, it’ll work. There’s no chop or swell, and with all of us working we’ll get it done in no time. Maybe even before the period’s over.” He knew, and Doug knew it, too, that this was an offer they couldn’t refuse. The four old women between them had more net-mending experience than the rest of the fleet combined.

  Doug was a proud man, with an innate disinclination for accepting handouts and an even stronger dislike for being beholden to anyone. Kate, watching him, saw him bite back that pride and bow his head to necessity and, perhaps, to the generosity of age and experience as well. With their years on the river, the four aunties had probably torn up their share of gear. They knew what it was like to watch impotently as the year’s catch passed them by, and they knew, too, what a hungry winter was like. “Thanks, Viola. I—Thanks.”

  She shrugged. “We helping each others. You help us sometime.”

  And that was that. In less time than it took to tell it, they had the gear draped over the bow of the Freya, Auntie Edna and Auntie Balasha mending toward the center from the dory, Doug and Jim mending toward the center from the Tanya, and Auntie Vi and Auntie Joy darting back and forth in the Freya, plastic needles flashing in the sun, talking and laughing nonstop.

  It isn’t easy, mending a wet net, but they did it. The task was made easier by the fact that the gear was fifteen mesh, or fifteen feet deep from cork line to lead line, for fishing the shallower waters near shore. Still, it was fifty feet long, and mending a net on water was a tricky business at best, swell or no swell, and it was two hours before the eight of them manhandled the mended net back to the Tanya’s deck and Doug and Joe rewound it on the reel in the bow.

  “Hold it,” Jim said as Doug prepared to cast off, and vaulted the gunnel to the Freya’s deck. He slipped and almost fell in the gurry and blood left from the halibut that Kate and Old Sam had been butchering out as the others mended the Tanya’s gear. Before she could nip out of the way he had scooped Auntie Vi up in his arms, bent her over backwards and thoroughly kissed her. He pulled back and grinned down at her. “Thanks, Viola. I’d propose but I’m already married. Want to shack up instead?”

  Auntie Vi flushed deep red and scolded him in Aleut, with a couple of extra words Kate recognized as being Athabascan and profanity thrown in for good measure. The other three aunties were rocking with laughter, and Jim, grinning widely, jumped down to his own boat.

  Even Doug was smiling. “Thanks, aunties,” he called as they pulled away. “I owe you one. Hell, I owe you ten!”

  “We’ll save you some steaks!” Kate called, and the two men waved once before getting back to the serious business of fishing salmon for a living.

  They watched the Tanya find a spot to set their gear and turned their own attention to the halibut. It had white flesh but its blood was as red as any salmon’s, and a considerable amount of it was spread across the Freya’s deck, mixed in with seawater that had kept it fluid.

  Kate had always been interested in the stomachs of everything her family shot and ate. The stomach contents of game were stories in themselves. She remembered a Sitka doe once that had had a belly full of seaweed dotted with blueberries and a couple of pop-tops. Halibut were especially fun to excavate since they spent their lives vacuuming up the floor of the ocean. This monster’s most recent meal had consisted of a Dungeness crab, two pollock, about a hundred tiger shrimp, a can of cat food with holes punched in it, a small piece of coral and one dark brown rubber hip boot, a little the worse for wear.

  “Tell me there’s not a foot inside that boot,” Old Sam commanded. Unenthusiastically Kate investigated. The boot was empty. Everyone relaxed. They all knew halibut were bottom feeders, and they all knew what sank to the bottom of the ocean when it fell overboard, and they all knew that halibut liked their food ripe. It didn’t stop them from eating halibut, or crab either, for that matter, but a foot in the hip boot might have given them indigestion afterwards.

  They pitched the guts over the side and began carving the carcass into cookable chunks. The halibut cheeks alone would be enough for an evening meal for the six of them. When they fin
ally got the spine out the resulting fillets were immense.

  So was the heart. “Jesus,” Old Sam said. “Look at that, will ya.”

  He handed it to Kate. She needed both hands to hold it.

  The dark red lump of grainy flesh pumped once against her palms. In one leap she was at the railing, where she dumped the still-beating heart down on the gunnel and backed away. Old Sam cackled with laughter, and the four old women giggled. A tinge of color darkened Kate’s face. She should have tossed the damn thing over the side and be damned to it.

  Mutt came to her rescue. She stood two feet from the rail, neck stretched to its farthest limit, the stiff hairs on her ruff raised, lips curled back from her teeth, nostrils flaring. She looked at Kate, eyes wide, and didn’t find any help there. She turned back to the halibut heart, extended her neck another inch and sniffed once at the jerking flesh. Her lip curled even farther and she backed up a step, uttering a low “woof” deep in her throat. That sound had been known to stop a brown bear in its tracks; unintimidated, the halibut heart beat on without pause. A rumbling growl and Mutt backed away on stiff legs, yellow eyes never leaving the palpitating lump of red flesh, and retreated to the bow, where she stayed until they got back to Cordova the next morning.

  Kate felt like joining her. Cut out from its chest, separated from its body which even now was being boned and sliced into steaks behind her, the organ beat on relentlessly, heaving up and down on the black-painted surface of the gunnel. “How long’s it keep doing that?” she said.

  Old Sam shrugged. “I seen ‘em beat for hours after getting cut out of a body. Just ain’t ready to give up, I guess.” He grinned at her. “Bothering you, girl?”

  Kate drew herself erect and lied like a trooper. “Of course not.”

  Old Sam laughed, and the damn halibut heart kept beating while she hauled buckets of water up over the side to wash down the deck. It kept beating as she wrapped and stowed the halibut fillets in the walk-in freezer next to the engine room below aft, and it was still beating when Old Sam moved them back to their original anchorage just in time to meet the first laden bowpicker as she waddled up, hold spilling a mound of fish from gunnel to gunnel.

  “Okay, girl, get them hatch covers off,” Sam bawled from the bridge. “Time to hunt and gather.”

  Two

  THEY WERE LUCKY in that the fish were running so well, encouraging the fishermen to off-load full holds into the Freya and go back for more. If the fishing had been slow, the holds of the smaller boats would not have been filled by the end of the period, and they would have hauled their own fish back to the canneries in Cordova, where they would have earned a penny extra a pound, a penny Old Sam regarded as by rights belonging to him. Since Kate was earning a deck boss share, she fell kind of proprietary about it herself.

  The hatch covers, long boards twelve feet in length, came off to reveal the square mouth of the Freya’s hold. With a revulsion Kate didn’t understand herself she moved the still-beating halibut heart to the stern, out of the way and, truth be told, out of her sight.

  She would have thrown it overboard if Old Sam hadn’t been watching her every move with a gleeful eye. Old Sam would have thrown it overboard if he hadn’t taken a perverse delight in how much it bothered her. Between the two of them, the halibut heart was destined to thump up and down on the gunnel until the end of the season.

  She laughed at herself, at the both of them, until a hail from an approaching boat reminded her to get to work before Old Sam had even more cause to flex his testosterone, and she trotted forward again to catch the line tossed her by Tim Sarakovikoff. He skippered a trim little bowpicker called the Esther, named for his mother, who would be proud when she heard her namesake had been first in the period to come alongside.

  Maybe an inch taller than Kate, with broad shoulders and arms roped with muscle, Tim was flushed with pleasure and triumph and had fish scales caught in his eyebrows. “Am I first up?”

  “I don’t see any other fish in our hold.” Kate said.

  He peered down the open hatch. “No shit?”

  Kate grinned. “No shit.”

  An answering grin split his face, clear-skinned and topped with straight brown hair that flopped into his eyes. For just a moment Kate allowed herself to fall in love with his clean-limbed youth, his obvious ability, his sturdy self-sufficiency and his joy in his work. “Come on,” she said, slapping his shoulder. “Let’s pitch us some fish.”

  The boom swung over the side, and Kate let out enough line to lower the brailer, a wide tube of netting suspended from a circle of steel, to the deck of the Esther. Tim donned rubber gloves and stooped to pitch fish into the brailer until it was full, when Kate swung the boom back over the gunnel and centered the brailer over the Freya’s open hold. She recorded the weight of the fish from the scale attached to the boom (an innovation for the old girl; thanks to her antediluvian skipper, the Freya was moving into the twentieth century just as the century itself was moving out), tugged on another line, and the bottom of the brailer opened up and salmon cascaded into the Freya’s hold in a silver stream, redeemable on shore for groceries and school clothes and rent and boat payments.

  There was a shout to port when Tim, dizzy with delight at the final count, went into the galley to get Sam to write up his fish ticket. Kate looked around to see Yuri Andreev and the Terra Jean warp alongside. Yuri had evidently managed to catch a few fish in spite of not being able to cork Joe Anahonak.

  It was late for kings, but the Esther had brought in three and the Terra Jean five, so Kate limbered up the small scale and weighed each individually, reporting the results to Old Sam, ensconced in bleak formality at one end of the galley table. Tim was seated a respectful distance down the bench, the four aunties between, sitting like little brown birds in a row, steaming coffee mugs in their hands, eyes bright and inquiring.

  Old Sam never joked with the fishermen as they came aboard to deliver; he’d spent seventy-five summers fishing and tendering on the waters of Prince William Sound and he took the business seriously, as seriously as he took his reputation for fair dealing. If Old Sam wrote a fish ticket that reported Tim Sarakovikoff had delivered five thousand pounds of reds to his, Sam’s, hold, then by God there were five thousand pounds of reds with Tim’s brand on them to be delivered to Kamaishi Seafoods in Cordova, the same five thousand pounds for which Tim would be paid hard cash money at the going rate per pound at time of delivery when he got back to town, or at the end of the season, whichever he preferred.

  Whenever Kate got a moment in the frenzied hours that followed, she looked up to find the fleet drifting, nets out, their crews moving up and down cork lines in skiffs, hauling the net up wherever they saw a cork bob and picking the salmon caught in the mesh of the net below the surface of the water. It was hard, backbreaking work, but Alaskan fishermen were the last of the independent businessmen, stubborn, self-reliant, always cantankerous, frequently adulterous and, in Kate’s admittedly biased opinion, wholly admirable. The state had done its best to regulate where they fished, but the fishermen still delivered to whoever they damn well pleased, which was probably whoever paid them the most per pound, but could also be whoever had pissed them off the least, and the opportunities for pissing off an Alaskan fisherman were legion. They were sovereign unto themselves and fiercely beholden to none, so long as the Mother of Storms saw fit to let them be, and so long as they got their boat payments to the bank on time.

  The Dawn, the Rose, the Darlene, the Deliah, the Tiana, the Danica, the Priscilla, all came, delivered fish and went. An hour before the period ended, the Tanya pulled up to port, Jim beaming and Doug nearly giddy with relief. They delivered three thousand pounds and took their ticket away rejoicing, Jim this time outright proposing to Auntie Vi and taking his rejection in good spirit. A skiff came alongside so loaded down it was shipping water, a redheaded woman in yellow rain gear at the kicker, a setnetter delivering from the beach. She was followed by Mary Balashoff, another setnetter from t
he opposite end of the beach. Kate thought she saw a third and equally loaded skiff put off from the beach and tie up to a drifter, but she was too busy to pay much attention.

  The Freya’s trim line was a lot lower in the water than it had been that morning when the Esther returned for a second time, her young skipper’s triumph having given way to weariness, but it was a happy fatigue, and when Kate told him he was high boat for the period his broad brown cheeks flushed like a boy’s. “Am I really, Kate?”

  She smiled, almost as tired as he was. “You really are.”

  He stood there, dazed and delighted, savoring it. He was nineteen years old, and it was only his second summer of fishing on his own. “Wait till I tell Dad.” He grinned suddenly. “Wait till I tell Mom!”

  Kate laughed. “Should keep her happy for a while.”

  “You don’t know my mom. She’ll say any boat with her name on it ought to be high boat every period.”

  “And she’s right,” Auntie Joy said sternly from behind them. They turned and saw the twinkle in her eye.

  Tim tried to frown and failed. “Ah, you women all stick together.”

  “Make her come out and pick her own fish,” Kate suggested.

  He brightened. “I like that plan.”

  Thinking of Esther, a dignified elder with a passion for bingo, Kate quite agreed, and Auntie Joy laughed her joyous laugh.

  There was a vicious thump and scrape against the port-side gunnel. “Hey!” Kate said, turning.

  Water roiled up from the screw of the white-hulled drifter with the flying bridge and the reel in the stern. She was riding low in the water, silver salmon slipping across the deck as her skipper manhandled her into place. A chunky, sullen young man of perhaps fifteen stood in the bow and hurled the bow line at Kate, who just missed catching the lashing line with her face. “Hey!” she said again, and stooped swiftly to gather the line up and hurl it back at the boy with interest.