The River Killers

by Bruce Burrows

  This book is intended as a salute to all the people who venture onto the ocean to try and make a living, and an extended middle digit to the people who try and prevent them from doing so.

  To the hardworking, dedicated people at DFO who do not deserve the disparagement expressed in this book, both of you have my deepest sympathy.

  The Maple Leaf C making the turn on its big set.

  ILLUSTRATION BY REBEKAH PARLEE

  One

  Four seine boats surged out of the narrow pass like killer whales on the hunt. There had been no salmon in Double Bay, so now the boats were on the move, hungry for prey. The three aluminum boats, sleek and fast, turned south and headed down Johnstone Strait. The old wooden boat, lower and slower in the water, wallowed heavily across the strait toward the Blinkhorn light.

  That was us then, the old Maple Leaf C and her crew of five hard-working but still poor fishermen. Flash forward to now: imprisoned in an Ottawa office, I surrendered to the flood of memories, the feel of the sun hot on my neck, the glare that dazzled across the water and the five of us on the bridge of the old Maple Leaf . We were desperately looking for fish in hope of making some money before the end of salmon season. It had been a tough year for us, relatively fishless but definitely not painless. More breakdowns than fish and more times in the wrong spot than the hot spot. However, hope springs eternal for fishermen as well as Leafs fans, and we were blessed in addition with the mindless optimism of the young.

  Who am I? Daniel Edward “Danny” Swanson. My clan inhabits coastal BC like ubiquitous hobbits, humanoid but genetically distinct enough to form our own subspecies. We mostly log, some of us fish, mine a little, but always in a symbiotic relationship with the big machines that are the other dominant species in our habitat. We work with them, we work on them, and, some would say, work for them.

  The females of our clan, as well as the males, could go on at length about the relative merits of hoe-chuckers versus grapple yarders. Our young could identify D-8 cats and articulated skidders before they learned Mother Goose. The relationship was intimate, although it had not yet led to actual interbreeding, even if we did wonder about Uncle Zeke.

  When one of my young nephews asked why Daddy’s loader wasn’t eating supper with us, it was pointed out that the machine wouldn’t fit through the door. And my aunt muttered that that was the only damn reason.

  So there I was, one of the five humans who functioned as replaceable components in the complex hunting machine that is a West Coast seine boat. It was a mid-August afternoon, 1996. The whole crew was operating on caffeine consciousness after fishing for thirty straight hours, fighting to remain alert, straining tired eyes and burnt out synapses in the effort to spot a sockeye jumping.

  As we approached Blinkhorn light we could see seven boats already there, so we turned slightly, looking for open water where we could make a set. Skipper Mark spotted the jumper, the distinctive anxious lunge of a sockeye close in to the beach. “Get ready, guys! Beach set.”

  Fergie and I scrambled into the skiff, which was being towed bow up off the stern of the Maple Leaf C. Billy and Christine took up their stations by the drum and the winch. Mark guided the big boat dangerously close to the cliff that rose almost vertically from the water. We scanned the rock face intently, looking first for a place where we could land the skiff, and then something to tie to. Mark yelled and pointed from the bridge and we could see the spot, a narrow shelf of rock just above the waterline, a crevice scarring the clean rock face, and thirty feet above, a finger of rock that could serve as a natural bollard. He swung the boat hard over and we circled for another pass. This time we’d be going for the tie-up and my stomach knotted hard. The tide was running like a river and I knew it would be tricky. There were lots of ways to screw up, but only one acceptable result: get the goddamn end of the net tied to the goddamn beach. Fergie and I might not have been the best skiff crew on the coast, but we’d never missed a tie-up and sometimes we were too proud of that. Occasionally we’d taken chances that other guys hadn’t gotten away with. There were enough ways to get hurt doing this job without pushing your luck. No time now to ponder risk factors and safety rules. Just pretend that neither existed.

  We bore down on the tie-up spot. Mark blew the horn and lots of different things started to happen all at once. Billy hit the pelican hook with a hammer, causing it to release the skiff line. The bow of the skiff dropped sharply. Maintaining my balance, I threw the sea anchor into the boiling wake and started feeding slack from the coiled beach line into the water. The sea anchor dug into the water and started to pull the net off the drum. I prayed it would come off clean and not backlash as the drum turned faster and faster. I knew Billy would be peering around the corner of the drum stand, watching the net intently for embryonic screwups while dodging bights of heavy lead line that threatened to break his neck. Fergie, standing in the stern of the skiff, was leaning hard on the oars, driving us toward the rock shelf where we would land. I continued to feed slack into the water, just enough so that the skiff was free to move forward but not enough to loop back and tangle Fergie’s oars. The bow of the skiff hit the rock and I jumped, beach line in hand and strap over my shoulder.

  Now came the hard part. I had to shimmy up the crevice, dragging the inch-and-seven-eighths beach line and heavy strap with me. I had to get up to the rock finger and tie the beach line to it, and do it quickly. Grunting and cursing, I started the climb. The skin on my knees and back was not standing up at all well to the abrasive rock. But urgency trumped pain. The net, with one end of the beach line attached to it, was drifting downstream with the fast-moving tide. The beach line was only twenty fathoms long and in about one minute it would start to pull away from me.

  Adrenaline is a very good painkiller, so I ignored the skin I was shedding and dragged the beach line upwards. Sweat threatened to blind me as I gasped for breath. The net was almost all off the drum, the corks forming a long “C” in the water, a full quarter mile from end to end. Our end of the net, which had been upstream of the tie-up spot, had drifted down to a spot directly below and was starting to pull away from me. I was running out of time.

  I reached the top of the crevice, level with the rock finger. I threw the rope strap over it like tossing a hoop over a peg. It settled down to the base of the finger with just enough slack that I could tie the beach line to it. With the last of my strength, I pulled on the beach line, getting out all the slack. I started tying the beach knot, quickly, like a cowboy wrapping the legs of a roped calf. Taking a bight of beach line, I passed it under and around the strap. The tide was running hard, so I did a wrap and a half, then two wraps back around the beach line itself. I’d calculated the length of the bight perfectly so that there was just enough of a loop left to pull a bight of slack through it and begin the chain. The beach line was coming tight now as the tide applied tons of force to the net. That force was transferred to the beach line and along it to the knot that I was attempting to tie. As the line tightened up, the knot would slip, so I had to make sure my hand wasn’t caught in a loop as I pulled through the last bights of the chain.

  And then it was done. The line strained tightly from the end of the net to the strap around the rock. Water dripped from the line, wrung out as the rope stretched and shrank under the strain. With a sudden shock, the knot slipped and scrunched up tight, smoking from the friction. I cringed momentarily before remembering how brave I was. Fergie was standing in the skiff, lounging over his oars. He shook his head. “Couldn’t have done it better myself.”

  “You couldn’t have done it, period,” I gasped. “This was a job for a highly tuned physical machine. Got a light?”

  Fergie laughed and threw me his lighter, then turned and rowed out to the end o
f the net to untie the sea anchor. I carefully coiled the bitter end of the beach line on the upstream side of the rock. There was a bit of a ledge I could stand on when the time came to release the knot.

  My breathing was almost back to normal, so I lit a cigarette. I leaned back against the cliff, enjoying once again the feeling of having done it, pulled off a tough one. The set looked good. Our end of the net had pulled out of the water a little as the beach line tightened up. I followed the line of white corks as they traced a shallow arc through the green waters of Johnstone Strait. Almost a quarter mile away, the Maple Leaf C held the other end of the net against the tide so the fish would be pushed into it. That was the advantage of a beach set as opposed to an open set, where the net just drifted in the water.

  From my vantage point on the cliff, I saw them first: schools of sockeye, heading right for the middle of the net. I yelled and pointed. “Going in! Going in!”

  Mark saw them too. Black smoke belched from the stack of the Maple Leaf C as Mark pushed the throttle ahead. He wasn’t just holding the end of the net now, but pulling it upstream to a point where he could turn and tow it back toward the beach. As the boat pulled on the outside end of the net the strain was transferred to our end. The beach line creaked and stretched even more. It had shrunk under the strain to less than half of its normal diameter. I cowered away expecting it to snap. “Look out, Fergie. She’s gettin’ tight.”

  Fergie was concentrating on the sockeye. They were no longer swimming like tame little piggies toward the middle of the net. They’d turned and were coming our way, threatening to escape around the end of the net. Fergie started banging on the skiff and I found some rocks and hurled them into the water. The banging and splashing had an effect and the fish turned again toward the middle of the net.

  The Maple Leaf C had started the turn. Heeled hard over, she shuddered and strained as she towed her end of the net around in the beginnings of a circle. Soon she was pulling straight toward us, and I could see Billy standing by the drum, frantically popping the plunger in and out of the water to scare the fish from swimming out his end. The winch was screaming as Christine wound in the slack in the running line. I watched Mark on the bridge. He was motionless, almost rigid at the wheel. He knew what we all knew. This was a big one, maybe a whole season’s worth of fish in one set.

  As the big old seine boat slowly pulled closer to us, dragging one end of the net with her, we all felt the tension build. There was the realization that a valuable catch was almost, but not quite, within our grasp. For me, there was the additional tension of hoping but not knowing if the beach knot would release when it was supposed to. Because if it didn’t, I would have to cut the strap, and I was hoping not to have to get anywhere near a rope straining that close to the breaking point. It was quivering with a pent up force that could kill when unleashed. And it was my job to unleash it.

  As a small boy, I’d taken immense pleasure in hunting flies with an elastic band. As they bumbled and buzzed against the windowpane, I’d pull the elastic tight, aim, and then let it snap. The result was almost always a messily squashed fly. It was too much fun to feel guilty about then, but now I was subject to an occasional foreboding of karmic justice. I was now the fly, the beach line was the elastic band, and I half feared some malign insect spirit seeking retribution.

  There had been too many beach men snapped into oblivion by beach lines breaking, beach lines whip-lashing free of a hang-up, or beach lines coming tight at the wrong time. And whenever that happened, another green kid squashed like a fly, the big fishing companies that owned most of the seine boats would send to town for another box of beach men. Expendability was an unfortunate fact of our profession. But what the hell. Me? I was nineteen years old and bulletproof. Occasional intimations of mortality were brushed aside as signs of weakness. Not me. Not me.

  I shrugged involuntarily as I dismissed these unpleasant musings. Only the immediate reality was important. And that reality was that we were on the verge of completing a really big set. The big boat was only one hundred feet from us now and my mind emptied, focusing only on Mark, waiting for the signal to release the beach line.

  Two years earlier, we’d had an incident that was laughable (after the fact) as a result of mixed-up signals. At the time, the signal to release had been a simple wave of the hand. But on one occasion, Mark had been beset by a wasp. As he frantically tried to brush it away, I’d mistaken his gesticulations for the signal, and I’d let the beach line go prematurely. Ejaculations ensued. And so it was that the signal was changed to a wave of the hat.

  So when I noticed that Mark wasn’t wearing his hat, I felt a pang of unease. But seine boat skippers are nothing if not cool and resourceful. As I watched, Mark carefully and slowly reached down to the shelf under the controls, grabbed his hat, and put it on his head. Then he immediately pulled it off and began waving it frantically. I picked up the end of the beach line, braced myself carefully, and gave a sharp pull. The knot was supposed to unravel and come undone. It didn’t.

  I felt a sinking sensation in my stomach, but I set my feet farther apart, took a firmer grip on the rope, and pulled for all I was worth. There was a loud crack and the line simply disappeared. When it reappeared, it was floating flaccidly in the water, one end still attached to the net.

  My specific job, the role of the beach man, had now been successfully completed. Relief energized me as I scrambled down the cliff and leapt into the skiff. “Giv’er,” I yelled and Fergie rowed hard, not to where the big boat was but to where we knew she would be as she closed the circle of net.

  As the skiff surged through the water, I grabbed the free end of the beach line and pulled the slack into the skiff. When all the slack was out of the rope, I kept pulling, which served to aid Fergie’s rowing. Speed was important as we were needed back on deck. In about one minute and thirty seconds, the combination of the Maple Leaf towing on one end of the net and the deck winch pulling on the end that we had just released would result in closure of the circle trap.

  The skiff bounced off the bow of the big boat, and I grabbed the line that had been rigged from bow to midships. As Fergie stowed his oars and pulled the oarlocks, I held on as the big boat continued to move ahead and the skiff slid back. When we reached the center cleat, I swung aboard and secured the skiff. Fergie was right behind me and went immediately to the port-side davit. I leapt back into the skiff and began coiling the beach line in readiness for the next set. Another hard-won safety lesson came into play here. Even though the skiff was rocking in the swell of boats roaring by, I was careful not to grab the side of the skiff for balance. Fingers caught between the skiff and the big boat would be squished like bananas between bulldozers.

  While I was coiling the line, Christine and Fergie were completing a crucial segment of the set. Ever since we’d released our end of the net by undoing the beach line, Christine had been pulling it in toward the boat via the running line and the deck winch. She was good at this and always managed to pull hard enough to get the end in quickly without pulling too hard and breaking the running line. Fishing is ever so much the fine balance between “as hard as possible” and not “too hard.”

  As the end of the net was pulled up to the boat, Christine slowed and then stopped the winch. Fergie leaned over the railing, grabbed the safety strap, and, careful to get it on the right side of the running line, draped it over the purpose-built cleat. He yelled, “Down!” and Christine reversed the winch. As the running line came slack, Fergie pulled the blondie, releasing the metal link that attached running line to pursing line.

  Christine then popped the winch into neutral and began pulling slack off the winch, so that Fergie could pull the line sternward about fifteen feet and feed it into the pursing block. He closed the block, yelled an okay, and Christine put the winch into forward so we could begin pursing up. We’d enclosed the fish by pulling the net into a circle, but they could still swim out the bottom. When the pursing process was completed, we would have
closed that hole like closing a drawstring purse and the fish would have nowhere to escape.

  Meanwhile, Billy had started to wind the net onto the drum. As the drum pulled in the rope that led to the end of the net, the wire cable that had served as the tow cable for the net came slack. While the net continued to wrap onto the drum, Billy carefully disengaged the big steel hook on the end of the tow cable and threw it free. He had to do it in such a way that neither he nor the cable became caught up in the net and wound onto the drum. This was another potential screwup that could not only ruin the set but ruin a drum man too. And we didn’t want to see Billy wrapped onto the drum because, humanitarian considerations aside, he was the most important guy on the boat now. It was his skill at winding the net properly onto the drum, picking up the right amount of lead line, and making the corner after the rings came up that was now crucial for the success of the set.

  As Billy wound in the net, using the spoolers to pile the net evenly, with the wraps tight to one another and no lead line rolling over the cork line, the circle of net shrank inexorably. Simultaneously, Christine wound in the purse line/drawstring at just the right speed. Fergie strained to pull the slack out of the end line, which gathered up the bunt end of the net, and I ran over to help him. Taking up my station by the drum, I saw a sockeye jump along the cork line, then another. “Inside!” I yelled. Mark had come down off the bridge and was trying hard not to look anxious. “Maybe we got ’em this time,” he said.

  With over half the net wound onto the drum, the purse line was tight and vibrating. As we peered over the side, watching for the shiny brass rings of our big drawstring purse to be pulled up to the surface, we saw bubbles forming in the water. “Holy shit,” said Mark. “We might have to braille this one.”

  The bubbles told us there were a hell of a lot of fish in the net, their collective exhalations forming bubbles of carbon dioxide. We didn’t have a stern ramp, so if there were too many fish to pull over the stern, anything over about fifteen hundred, we’d have to dip them out with individual scoops of the brailler, a dip net that could pick up a hundred or so fish at a time.