The Darkening Archipelago

by Stephen Legault

  “I sometimes get the feeling that Grey is running the show on aquaculture. That the minister is just a public face and that Grey does all the thinking on that file. Makes all the decisions.”

  Archie drank his coffee. “Not so unusual,” he said.

  “No. But scary. The guy hasn’t been elected. We don’t know anything about him. He’s certainly got no qualifications to be making such decisions. Christ, he’s got a degree in economics, not ecology or anything relevant. And he’s what? Like twenty years old?”

  Archie smiled at Knobbles. “Just listen to us old war horses,” he said.

  Charles Knobbles returned the smile. They sat for a moment. “So, what is it that you wanted to talk to me about?” Archie asked.

  “Right, I almost forgot. Listen, it’s good that you’re here today. In person. There’s going to be an announcement soon, I don’t know when. But soon. I just got wind of it from someone in the premier’s office. The minister of economic development, the minister for Aboriginal relations, and the minister of agriculture, maybe even the premier himself. They’re going to announce a new First Nations training fund. It’s designed to help First Nations people transition to resource economy jobs. Mining, forestry, and aquaculture.”

  “It’s been in the works for years,” said Archie. “I saw it when I was on council.”

  “Well, it’s about to be announced. And here’s the thing I thought you should know: It’s got a hefty budget attached to it for industry incentives. Big bucks. There’s going to be a bunch of money pushed through for business and First Nations partnerships. I think there’s going to be one between the North Salish and Stoboltz.”

  Archie smiled. “I should have seen that coming. How much?”

  “Not sure, but it’s going to be in the hundreds of thousands, at least. Likely in the millions. It’s a ten-year agreement. It’s on the up and up. From a lot of people’s perspectives it’s a good deal.”

  “Except that it cements salmon farming as the backbone of our economy.”

  “It will be pretty hard to argue that salmon farming isn’t good for Port Lostcoast. Everybody in town will be driving a new boat.”

  Archie breathed out and sat back in his chair. It seemed that the trickster had been tricked again.

  That was how they did it, thought Archie. They didn’t need to hide the cash in a paper bag and pass it under the table. They could make an announcement about it on the six o’clock news and get above-the-fold coverage in all the newspapers. They could use the provincial treasury like their own private slush fund to pour taxpayers’ money onto the fire that was burning and destroying a culture older than time. And they could get people like Greg White Eagle to stand up and applaud when they did it.

  Archie was sitting on the bed in his hotel room at the Traveller’s Inn. He had his coat off and his feet up, and he was flicking through the channels. He felt beaten. He had nothing new on what Stoboltz was up to in the Broughton, or why the samples of sea lice being analyzed at u vic were so much more virulent than the samples he and Cassandra were finding. He had been shut out of the minister’s agenda. He’d been laughed at by Lance Grey. And threatened. “In way over your head,” Grey had told him.

  Maybe, worst of all, he was about to be made a fool of by Greg White Eagle. Here was a man, thought Ravenwing, who had taken money, which he used to win an election. Here was a man who had likely bought the votes of his own people with that money, and who was about to be a hero when the minister announced the agreement between the First Nations, the province, and Stoboltz. Greg would run for chief, and the whole Nation would fall under this thumb.

  It made Archie Ravenwing sick to his stomach.

  He flicked the channels.

  He was about to have a shower when his cellphone rang. Maybe it was Gracie, calling to see how the day had gone. It would be good to hear her voice. Instead it was a voice he didn’t know.

  “Is this Archie Ravenwing?”

  “It is. Who’s this?” The caller id said the number was blocked.

  “We haven’t met, but I have something for you. Something I think you want.”

  “What is it? Who is this?”

  “Can you meet me?”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  Archie looked at this watch. It was ten-thirty. “Okay,” he said. “Where?”

  “Chinatown. Fan Tan Alley.”

  “How will I know you?”

  “You will.”

  The line went dead.

  Archie looked at the phone in his hand. This day will never end, he thought. He peered out the hotel window. The night was thick with pea-soup fog. Archie stood and put a fleece coat on and pulled his raincoat over it. He found a pair of gloves, slipped his keys in his pocket, and left the hotel to walk downtown.

  Mystery man said he had something for him, something he would want. Well, let’s see, thought Archie.

  It was just few blocks from the Traveller’s Inn to the corner of Douglas and Fisgard, and from there he turned right and made his way toward the small, historic Chinatown. Oldest in the continent, he knew. The Chinese and the province’s First Nations shared a common historical thread, both having been exploited and demoralized, their resources stolen from them. The First Nations had been imprisoned and abused in residential schools, had their culture and language stolen, their fish, trees, and minerals taken without compensation. The Chinese had been forced to pay a head tax, and toiled in near slavery in the gold mines and later on the railroad.

  He crossed Government Street, passed under the Gates of Harmonious Interest — the ornate archway adorned with lions and colourful scrolled woodwork — and walked down the nearly deserted street. The air had grown cold, and the heavy fog that had formed on the inner harbour rolled in sheets through the downtown core of the city. The streetlamps were haloed in mist, and Archie couldn’t see the far end of the street. He walked briskly, feeling the chill through his clothes. He passed an open restaurant that served won ton noodles, and walked past two people sleeping in a doorway to a green grocer. Then he was at the mouth of Fan Tan Alley. He stopped and looked around him. A few people strolled up from Store Street toward Government. He watched them go. He peered into the alley, so narrow that in many places a man could reach across and touch both sides. It was dark, except for the light from a hooded lamp in the doorway of one of the alley’s shops, which cast a pale glow into the gloom of the night.

  Archie stood for another minute, waiting to be approached, then walked down the narrow alley, taking his hands from his pockets. It was a gamble. It had occurred to him that he was being set up. But then Fan Tan was a game of chance. He was taking his.

  He got halfway down the darkened passage, to a place where corridors led to courtyards, and wooden doors indicated where opium dens once operated, replaced today by a music store, a new age shop, and a traditional barber shop. He heard footsteps behind him. He turned and saw a man moving toward him through the misty night.

  The man passed under a dim light, but Archie couldn’t make out his face. He spoke, and Archie couldn’t place the voice. “Thanks for coming, Mr. Ravenwing. I’ve got something that I think you’re going to find very interesting.”

  19

  Nancy Webber always sat next to the window when she flew, especially if she was flying over the Rocky Mountains. She watched below her as the foothills disappeared beneath the airplane’s fuselage. It was late afternoon, and the sun was sinking into the western horizon, casting long, liquid shadows across the convoluted earth below her. She moved her face to the window and looked south, toward the horizon of bumps where just that morning she had walked. She could not discern the dark shapes of the Porcupine Hills from any of the other windrows of earth in the distance, but she knew they were there. Was it just this morning, at dawn, that she and Walter Blackwater had stood on the hilltop looking west toward the mountains painted by the rising sun? Now, as the sun faded, casting long, creeping shadows over the dales, Nancy Webber wonder
ed what exactly she had gotten herself into.

  Every decision she had made in her life had been proceeded by what she thought of now as “a moment of truth.” An instant of clarity that provided her with a choice. In that moment — really just a split second of insight — she could choose which direction to follow. She could make a choice to pursue a thought, an idea, a story, a person, or not. Sometimes she chose well, and other times, not so much. Of course, the trick was choosing in the absence of knowledge of outcomes. Who knew? Who knew what the choice might lead to? If she knew, would she choose differently? It was a false argument. She couldn’t know.

  But she could guess. Thirty-six years of choices had provided her with a pretty solid grounding on the consequences of her decisions.

  Her most recent moment of truth had come about five hours before the wheels-up of the airliner in which she was now seated.

  She hung up the phone. She had been parked on the side of the road, pulled off into somebody’s gravel driveway. The trucks that raced by on Highway 22 rocked her car. She put the phone down on the passenger seat and let her hands fall lightly onto her lap.

  Now what? she wondered.

  Cole Blackwater was in trouble. Again. He believed that Archie Ravenwing had been murdered: his death at sea had been no accident. Cole had asked Nancy to come to Port Lostcoast — about as near to the end of the earth that you can get in Canada — and help him figure out what was going on.

  Why? Why had he asked her?

  “I’m a reporter, Cole. Is that what you want? A reporter helping you? You know what that means, right? We’ve been through this before.”

  Cole had been silent on the phone for a long time. Finally he had told her that he knew that she was a reporter, and he knew what that meant. He didn’t know where else to turn.

  He sounded lost. Adrift.

  She sat in her car and tried to think her way through this. Cole had told her that Archie Ravenwing’s boat had been found, and that there was a red, tacky substance that Cole thought must be traces of blood found where no blood should have been. If Archie had in fact been swept over the side of the boat and into the sea, why was there so much blood so far from where his body should have been swept overboard? Then Cole had said something about a marine chart with blue and red Xs on it, notes to call something called the sos coalition, the RCMP, the media, and himself. What did the Xs mean? she asked. He said that the red Xs were fish farms. The blue Xs were a mystery.

  Cole then told her about the package that he had received at his office in Vancouver just days after he had flown to Lostcoast, and the letter and cheque. And finally he told her about his suspicions about the fish farms doing genetic engineering, though to what end he didn’t know.

  Could she help him? he wanted to know.

  She had said she would think about it and call him back.

  He had sounded weary. Worn thin.

  There was so much about him she didn’t know. She shook her head, trying to shake off the conversations with Walter and Dorothy Blackwater, and with Sergeant Reimer.

  As she sat there, a thought occurred to her. Was Cole Blackwater aware that she had been to the Blackwater ranch? Had Walter Blackwater called him the moment she had left the Porcupine Hills and told him some ex-girlfriend, the same one who had ruined his marriage and destroyed his career, was now snooping around their old man’s death? If that was the case, what was Cole Blackwater’s motivation for pleading with her to come to Port Lostcoast?

  She shook her head, her raven-black hair falling across her face. Another truck passed her on the highway and her car shook.

  She opened her phone and speed dialled a number.

  “You were supposed to be back in Edmonton this morning. Where are you?”

  “I’m about an hour south of Calgary.”

  “You better have broken down or been accosted by cowboys, Nancy.”

  “I wish,” she said. “No, it’s more complex than that. I just got a call from a source about a story that is unfolding. I want to pursue it.”

  “Is this the same story that has had my star reporter creeping around the foothills for the last four days?”

  “Sorta.”

  “Explain sorta.”

  “I don’t know that I can.”

  “But you want me to let you follow this source’s information without being able to make my own evaluation of it, is that right?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Where?”

  “Well, that’s the rub,” she said. “It’s on the north end of Vancouver Island.”

  “That’s a joke, right? You’re joking.”

  “No joke. My source is onto a cover up of a big environmental story out there that might involve murder. Nobody else has this yet.”

  “You know that you write for the Edmonton Journal, right?”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “And that we don’t sell many papers on Vancouver Island, right? I mean, I could check with circulation if you want, but it’s likely very, very few. You know that, right?”

  “Get off of it, okay. We’re part of a national chain. Bump this story up to the Post.”

  “What should I tell them?”

  “Tell them to trust me. The last time I followed my nose we — won a National Newspaper Award.”

  The line was silent. Then he said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

  It was easy, thought Nancy Webber, face pressed to the window, to ask others to trust her. But did she trust herself? Why take such a risk for Cole Blackwater? Why take such a risk on Cole Blackwater?

  The flight attendant offered her something to drink; she chose coffee. She sipped from the tiny cup and witnessed the final moments of day, the last brilliant fire of sunlight disappearing from the tips of the mountains below, as if the rosy light was being sucked from the peaks by the approaching darkness.

  She finished her coffee. Again she asked herself the question: why take such a risk on Cole Blackwater? She was fairly certain he wouldn’t lie to her again. He’d learned his lesson the hard way. But what Nancy Webber couldn’t reconcile was this: was she on this plane because of the story, or because of Cole Blackwater himself? And if it was the latter, was it because of what Cole Blackwater had once meant to her, and might mean again, or because of the unanswered questions she had about his father’s death? Was it Nancy Webber, reporter, on the plane, or Nancy Webber, once and possible future lover of Cole Blackwater, who watched the darkness consume the light far below?

  She made her living asking hard questions, and now found herself in the awkward place of not being able to answer her own troublesome inquiries.

  — In the morning she awoke and wondered where the hell she was. It took her almost a full minute to remember that she was in a hotel within sight of the Vancouver airport and not in one of several places she had slept in Alberta during the last week. She rose and walked naked to the shower. She had forgotten what it felt like to wake up on the coast after having been in Alberta. Her skin didn’t crawl, her eyes didn’t itch. Her nose wasn’t raw and dry. She felt as though her body was sucking in the moisture from the air around her rather than exhaling it into the parched air of the prairies.

  She looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair was messed from sleep and there were dark circles under her eyes, the result of not enough sleep the last few nights. She pressed her hands to her face and ran them through her hair. Then she let her hands trail down her body, over her breasts and across her hips. She straightened and sucked in a breath of air. There was no denying that she was getting older. But everything still held its shape. She still felt good about her body. No issues there. The running helped. She let out the breath and turned the water on in the shower. She smiled at her reflection in the mirror, then caught herself thinking about Cole. About the way they used to make love. She astride him, her hair trailing over his chest. His big hands on her hips, moving her back and forth.

  She shook her head.

  There was no denying that she wa
s drawn to him like a moth to a flame.

  Nancy caught a flight from Vancouver to Port Hardy at ten am. Shortly after noon she rented one of the three available cars at the Port Hardy terminal and began driving south to Port McNeill. At times she felt her breath coming fast, and she fought to control convoluted emotions. Fear was there, and anticipation. Was it anticipation of the hunt, a journalist’s instincts for tracking the story? Or something else?

  Nancy couldn’t deny that the tingling she felt was lust.

  She felt a flush of anger at herself. She was here for the story. One of the stories. Right now, any story would do.

  It was late in the afternoon when she reached Port McNeill, just in time to catch the 5:10 ferry. She dialled Cole from the ferry lineup.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “Feels like the middle of nowhere.”

  “Actually, it’s not even that central. You’re on the fringes of nowhere.”

  “I’m in Port McNeill waiting for the ferry. Where can I meet you?”

  “When you get off the ferry, turn left and come to the government docks. It’s only a few hundred yards. I want to show you the boat. They’ve got it up and out of the water at the end of the pier.”

  It had been years since Nancy had been on a ferry. On the ride over, she stood at the bow of the boat and shivered, watching the shoreline pass, watching clouds scud along the ragged, clear-cut peaks of Vancouver Island. As she approached Alert Bay, a bank of fog rolled along the shore and obscured the town. When the boat docked, she climbed back into her rental car and drove up the pier; she turned left and found a place to park at the government docks.

  All too soon she found herself standing where the metal ramp dropped onto the wooden wharf. The afternoon was cold, and she had only the clothing she had grabbed for her trip to High River last Sunday morning. She had put on her leather jacket for the crossing and now pulled it tightly to her body, the cool, wet air clinging to her, burrowing into her bones. Mist clung to the water. There wasn’t a trace of wind, and the fog seemed to move of its own volition. Above, the sun tried to push its way into the vapour, to burn it off, but the fog held its ground, pooling low on the water and creeping like an ethereal snake across the heavy boards of the government pier, only to drop again into the pit of mist below.