The Curve of Time

by M. Wylie Blanchet

  The peak above us, on which the summer sun shone all day, was dull, grey granite—but the snow lay about its feet like a slipped garment. Looking west, we were on the north side of all the dozens of peaks over towards Desolation Sound—and the sides towards us were fully clad in white, without any hope of ever melting. The autumn snow must already be falling on them at times.

  We had a snowball battle but the snow was coarse and granular and didn’t hold together well. The sun left us suddenly, and we were cold and tired. Doc suggested that we find a place for the night and get some food inside us.

  It took some time to find a place—among the moss in a more or less level place. We collected little twigs from some kind of scrub mountain plant, to try to get warm. But the twigs didn’t have any warmth in them. We were so thankful that Doc had insisted on adding a primus to his load. We heated a couple of tins of beans, and a billy of water for tea. Food made everyone feel warm again.

  But a camp is not a camp without a fire. It was getting too dark and cold to do any exploring, so we decided to turn in at once and get up early to do our exploring, and take pictures when the sun first hit the opposite mountains. It would only take half a day to get back to the inlet.

  Whatever made us think that one blanket each would keep us warm! Doc had the large eiderdown lining of a sleeping bag. It opened out full—and he and Peter decided to double up—Peter’s blanket under them, and the sleeping bag over them. The two girls found a hollow and filled it with moss—then curled up there together, under two blankets. I was left looking at my one blanket. None of us undressed—we put on all we had. But sweaters, shirts and shorts are not very much. Everybody except me seemed to settle down, and the deep breathing of unconsciousness soon rose from the smaller mound.

  I got colder and colder....I couldn’t feel my feet at all. I made plans. I waited until heavier breathing from underneath the eiderdown sleeping bag indicated that Doc was finally off; then stealthily I crept closer. Cautiously I felt for the edge of the sleeping bag, listening...steady deep breathing from Doc. I could count on Peter not to waken—small boys never do. I pushed him over against Doc and crept in, dragging my blanket after me. Oh, the blessed warmth of Peter’s small hollow in the moss...the blessed heat of his small back! Nobody stirred—nobody dreamt that an iceberg had slipped in to spend the night.

  I was wakened in the morning by something dripping on my face. I put a hand out cautiously, thinking that someone was playing a joke...but the whole sleeping bag was soaking wet. I opened my eyes—it was lightish, so it must be almost morning...but I couldn’t see a thing. We were engulfed in a thick, wet blanket of fog—on a mountain-top, a long way from home. Then I heard the sound of the primus being pumped, and I called out to Doc, who certainly wasn’t in the sleeping bag—and neither was Peter. Doc’s face appeared wreathed in white mist, looking wet and worried; Peter’s bursting with excitement—real adventure, lost on a mountain-top.

  Doc, I could see, was really worried. Unless we could manage to find Hasting Street, we wouldn’t be able to get down off the mountain. We only had enough food for two meals, and no way of keeping warm. We drank the hot tea, warming our hands on the hot mugs, and scrunched a piece of rye-tack. Doc thought it would be better to pack up at once and start down, then eat later. We rolled up the dripping blankets and sleeping bag in long rolls and hung them round our shrinking necks.

  Then, hand in hand, not daring to lose contact with each other, we inched along hoping we had come that way when we were looking for a camping spot. We couldn’t see a thing; there was nothing familiar underfoot. You could see the person whose hand you held—like some fellow spirit—but not the one beyond. I thought we were probably working too far to the right and towards the peaks—in our fear of bearing too far to the left and the cliffs. How slow were our uncertain feet; so reluctant, yet so eager!

  Then, suddenly, out of the mist on the right, Jan called out, “Here is the snow!” and added a second after with a shout. “And here are our footprints!” Doc questioned us closely on whether any of us had walked in the snow after the snowball fight—nobody had, we were sure. Then he said that he knew now just about where Hasting Street was. We would have to risk bearing farther to the left or there would be a danger of passing it. Hanging tight to each other we strung along.

  “Here it is, I think!” shouted Doc. We couldn’t see him, and his voice sounded all woolly and blanketed.

  We crawled up to him and cautiously spread out in a line to the right. There it was...we thought. One end of the line searched for and found the gutter, and then we were sure.

  We had ideas of a quick walk down the next two thousand feet of altitude in next to no time. Doc was the first to sit down with a bang before we had even started. Then my feet shot ahead of me, and I sat there jarred to the teeth. Dry granite was evidently one thing; wet granite was quite another. It might as well have been ice, to anyone in running shoes. We had to sit and slide or else walk in the stream the whole 2,000 feet—of altitude, not linear feet. It took us over three hours. We still couldn’t see more than three or four feet ahead of us—enough perhaps to keep us from stepping over a precipice, but not enough to give us any sense of direction. Then Hasting Street came to an end.

  By far the most difficult part was getting from the end of Hasting Street to the place of the rock cairn. Coming up, it had been tough enough, the scrambling up and over and down—cliffs above us and precipices below us. But now we couldn’t see where the cliffs were, or how close the drops—it was nerve-racking.

  We stopped for ten minutes’ rest. Doc broke off a chunk of cheese for each of us to keep us going. As we sat there, on boulders, young Peter picked up a stone and lobbed it into the fog. It disappeared...but didn’t land....Seconds later, we heard it land a long way below. Peter sat down suddenly and held on. We were not more than ten feet from the edge of that drop. Doc felt fairly sure that we had either missed the cairn, or were within a hundred feet of it. There had been only one sheer drop as deep as the sound of that stone between the cairn and Hasting Street. We tried it again with stones, and counted the seconds until they hit. It still didn’t tell us which side of the cairn we were on—but it did tell us that there was a four-hundred-foot drop.

  We couldn’t leave each other to scout ahead, but we tried to estimate the number of feet we covered now. Also we put stones on top of the rocks so that we could find our way back to the cliff—if we decided that we had already passed the cairn where we should make a turn.

  “There it is!” a woolly voice cried. It was six feet to the right. In shrinking away from the cliffs, we had almost over-shot our marker.

  The fog thinned momentarily, as though we had done our bit so it would help a little. Doc plunged ahead, with the rest of us like a comet tail behind him, seizing the chance to locate the huckleberry patch. That would mark the chimney we had to climb down towards the trapline with the blazes. Finally there was a shout from Doc—there they were, and there was the chimney. The fog closed down again before we quite got to it. Again we held hands, and advanced cautiously towards where we had spotted it. One by one we took off into space, with the horrible thought that it could be the wrong chimney. We hung on tooth and nail, dislodging stones and earth in our urgency. Another shout from Doc—there was a tree...there was a blaze—we were safe.

  We got out the primus, and while we were waiting for the water to boil we wrung out the sleeping bag and blankets again. We munched bully-beef and rye-tack, and finished up with peanut butter. Then we sank as deep as we could in our mugs of hot tea.

  Two thousand perpendicular feet below we came out into bright sunshine. Two thousand feet more and we were back at the wharf. Nobody had been worrying about us at all. It was just another lovely day, down in the inlet. We made our squishing way to the dinghy and back to Trapper’s Rock. There we fell into the sea—clothes and all. How warm the water felt, how hot the last rays of the Louisa sun!

  We cooked ourselves a great pan of bacon
and eggs—a big pot of coffee, and great spoonfuls of honey on top of peanut butter and crackers. Enjoyment is always greatest when you have enough contrast to measure it by.

  SPEAKING OF WHALES

  WHERE DO YOU COME FROM? WHERE ARE YOU GOING? I would wave a vague hand behind me. “Oh, from the south,” I would say evasively, or, “Oh, just up north—nowhere in particular.”

  What did it matter to anyone where we went? We ourselves usually had some idea where we intended to go. But we seldom stuck to our original intentions—we were always being lured off to other channels.

  Sometimes that wasn’t our fault. One summer we seemed to be beset with whales. Northern waters were a little strange to us then; and so were the particular kind of whale they had up there. We were used to the killer whales, which we often saw in southern British Columbia—they were black with the white oval splash that looked like an eye, and they were white underneath. They also had high spar-fins, sometimes four feet in height. You seldom saw them alone—they went around in packs. They would go charging through the narrow pass at home—blowing and smacking their tails. “Killers in the pass, killers in the pass,” the children would shout, from here and there. And everyone would race down to Little Point to count them through.

  The ones we saw up north were grey, or perhaps a dirty white—and very big, twice as long as our boat. They often lazed around on the surface, just awash, and blew huge spurts of air and water up into the air. You would see the spurt, and then have to wait until the noise reached you—something like a pile of bricks falling slowly over—and the sound would echo from cliff to cliff, until it whispered itself out.

  They would patrol backwards and forwards...backwards and forwards...across some inlet we wanted to go up...and we would meekly turn back. They didn’t appear to be feeding—just pacing the water. Perhaps they were waiting for their babies to be born—which is rather a critical proceeding. For when the baby is born into the water, the mother whale has to put her flipper round it and rush it to the surface to take its first breath, or else it will drown. Then it has to be initiated into the business of nursing. The two nipples are up near the bow of the whale, just behind the head. The nursing is probably, in the beginning anyway, a near-the-surface operation. The baby whale does not exactly suckle. It takes the nipple in its mouth, and the mother ejects a huge supply of milk into the baby in one blow—and that is all for another half-hour, when the procedure is repeated.

  That same summer, going back by Johnstone Strait on our way south, we were overtaken by a whole pack of killer whales. We didn’t hear them coming—they were just suddenly there, on all sides of us, big ones and little ones—all just playing. There must have been about twenty of them—chasing, diving, ducking and rolling with tremendous slaps of their tails. When you see the spar-fin of a big killer breaking water, it is like seeing the mast of a fishing boat appearing from behind a swell on the skyline.

  The biggest of these were around thirty feet, with a fin four or five feet in height. When one of them breaks water the head comes up first; then it submerges and the spar-fin rolls up. Just as the fin disappears, a flange of the tail rolls into sight, looking like another fin, but smaller. Then with a tremendous smack of the tail, the whale submerges.

  But this pack were not travelling, they were playing—putting in time. One of the big ones chased or pushed a smaller one straight up in the air, clear of the water; and its chaser followed, out to the shoulders. One of them surged straight for the shore when chased. He hit the shallow water with a force that stood him straight up on his head—a great bleeding gash showing on one side. He fell back and somehow managed to struggle back into deep water. Our fears increased after that. There was nothing to prevent them coming up underneath our boat—quite unintentionally.

  But we couldn’t escape from them—they were between us and the shore, and on all sides of us. We couldn’t hurry, we couldn’t lag behind—they either hurried too, or else waited for us. Mile after mile...at last, at some unknown signal, they all dived deep at the same moment—and the sea was quiet and empty, and our ears rang in the stillness. When next they surfaced they were heading full speed up a channel which, if they intended to continue south, would take them through the Green Point Rapids.

  “Do you suppose they wait for slack water?” said Jan.

  “Perhaps that’s why they were just fooling around,” suggested Peter.

  “I didn’t like that fooling!” Said John.

  I got out the tide book, and looked up the slack water tables. Slack water has not necessarily much to do with the height of the tide. Yes, it was just half an hour before slack water in the Green Points. If they hurried, they could get through the Green Points, the Dent Island, and the Yucultas, all in the same slack. That was evidently just what they intended to do.

  I revved up the engine and we chased after them. We couldn’t hope to get the whole way through, for it was a big run-in. But we could get through the Green Points, and then cut in behind the Dent Islands and tie up for the night. The fishermen there would tell us what the killers had done.

  “Don’t go too fast,” said John, anxiously.

  “Oh, I can’t catch up with them,” I reassured him. We certainly wouldn’t care to be escorted through the rapids by a school of whales.

  The killers are savage things. They normally hunt in packs. But once we saw a savage fight between a lone killer and a small grey whale—very one-sided, since the grey whales have no teeth. The killer had chased it into shallow water. They went round and round—in and out among the reefs. The killer must have been taking bites out of the grey one whenever it got close enough—the water round them was foamy and a bright pink. Then the grey one made a break for more open water—the killer hot on its tail.

  They turned up a blind channel—so the outcome was not in much doubt.

  Another time, near home, I was awakened in the night by the loud tail-smacks and blowing of killers in the pass. I could tell by the direction of the sounds that they must have turned into the bay. The next morning the children came running into the house to report that there was a crowd in the cove on the other side of the bay, all gathered round something on the beach. I took the binoculars over to the point, but I couldn’t make out what the crowd were interested in. We piled into the canoe and paddled across.

  Most of the crowd had gone by the time we got there. But a group of fishermen were still standing talking beside a small grey whale that lay on its side on the mud. It was still alive. Every now and then it would let out a great gusty sigh. There was a big gash in one side, but not enough to kill it. The fishermen said they had also heard the killers in the night; and later they had heard the commotion in the shallows.

  “The whole pack of them went ploughing right past our boats,” they said. “Evidently, they had all ganged up on this little fellow, and chased him right in the bay, where he got stranded.”

  The sun was quite hot, and there wouldn’t be enough tide to float the whale until the evening. The men were throwing the odd pail of water over it to keep it damp. But the poor whale sighed, as though it didn’t think it would help much. I think they are like porpoises and have no sweat glands—without the water to keep them cool, they over-heat. That night the fishermen put a rope round its tail and towed it a long way out. It was still alive, but they didn’t seem to think it would survive.

  Our clock is not very reliable—the tide had not quite turned when we reached the Green Points but it had no force left. We played the back currents, and got through quite easily. Another twenty minutes and we could feel the push of the current. Once we passed Phillip’s Arms, I struck across over to the north side—the current carrying us almost as fast to the east as we made north. One of my nightmares is having the engine stop just above the rapids. If I didn’t get in behind Dent Island we would be swept into the worst of the rapids. A huge whirlpool forms in the centre there, and everything is drawn into it from all sides.

  I let out my breath as we edg
ed our way into the bay at the back of Big Dent. We tied the boat up to a boom log and ran across to the other side of the island to watch the big run-in. A couple of fish-boats were lying inside a boom, and we went across to ask them about the whales.

  “Did the killer whales go through?” I asked the men.

  “Sure, about an hour ago—they always wait for slack water.”

  But they weren’t sure whether they waited because they didn’t like the current, or because it was the best time to fish. What we really wanted to know was, how the whales knew when it would be slack water.

  We sat on the cliff and watched the whirlpools forming and moving across; then the final hole in the middle, swallowing up the sticks and logs. If you meet a whirlpool, you are supposed to decide calmly which side to take it on—one side throws you out, the other draws you in. I always forget at the critical moment which is which. However, there are many local stories of boats that have been sucked down, or had narrow escapes. One story the people tell is of a small fish-boat whose engine had stopped, and which was going round and round in a whirlpool. An Indian, seeing it from the shore, paddled out in a small dugout and took the man off—just as the boat filled and sank.