High Stand

by Hammond Innes

  In court, Captain Cornish would read aloud the excerpt from his log recording the message I had transmitted. The time of that message, and the time entry recording his abandonment of the search for the lost fisherman and his alteration of course for Spider Island, would show a lapse of 181/2 minutes. That was the length of time they had spent discussing it before finally reaching the decision to abandon the Indian and alter course, and they had only made that decision because of the Mate’s insistence that I was the only person to whom he had mentioned the Kelsey’s navigation of the Spider in at least six months and that he had specifically referred to the cutter’s stern being made fast to a red cedar which was half-dead and had an eagle’s nest in the upper branches.

  However, having made the decision to head north, Captain Cornish in his testimony declared that the more he thought about it, and about the failure of the customs operation when he had been taking Edmundson up to the Cascades, the more he began to appreciate the urgency. His log showed that he was proceeding north at maximum revs and, allowing for favourable tide, was making just on 20 knots over the ground.

  We did not know this, of course. Huddled together in the narrow confines between timber and steel at the bottom of the hold, all we knew was that we were headed south at an estimated 6 knots and that another night would have passed before we were into the Narrows between Vancouver Island and the mainland. We knew we were heading south because the sun was shining on the port side of the wheelhouse and we assumed we would be going inside Vancouver Island because that was the normal towing route.

  As we steamed south it gradually became colder, the sun’s brightness dimming, daylight fading. The tug’s siren began to blare at regular intervals. We were in fog, white trails of vapour drifting across the logs, the cold and the damp earing into us.

  By then we were convinced that there was now only one man on the barge, for we had heard no sound of voices. Even from the top rung, with our heads in the open, we could hear nothing except the sound of the water rushing past. It seemed that the men from the logging camp, who had been on the barge when loading the cargo, had all been evacuated on the South American vessel. There might, of course, be two men on board, one of them sleeping. ‘We’ll have to presume that,’ I said. Brian didn’t say anything. He had heard the man at the wheelhouse singing to himself and thought it was to compensate for the boredom and loneliness of being on his own.

  There seemed only two possibilities open to us, and these were discussed endlessly: we could keep watch until the tug was approaching a suitable ship, take over the wheelhouse, then cut the hawser and steer the barge alongside. Alternatively, we could wait until we were in the Narrows, passing really close to a jetty or some small boat, then slip over the side and swim for it. Of the two I favoured cutting the tow and going alongside a Canadian vessel, and in the end Brian agreed. That way it wouldn’t be our word alone; we would have the barge and its cargo as evidence, as well as one of the crew. Also it would be dark. I didn’t like the thought of swimming for it in broad daylight, nor did the others. Even if the fog did hold, and we were not spotted by the tug’s lookout, we would still have to contend with the strong tides running through the Narrows.

  So finally it was settled. We would wait till the early hours, when it was still dark and we were somewhere off Port Hardy on the north end of Vancouver Island, then take over the barge. The only problem, of course, was whether we would be lucky enough to have a fairly slow vessel overtaking us at the right time. As soon as we had cut the tow, I would start transmitting a Mayday call in an effort to try and persuade the Rescue Coordination Centre at Victoria to take immediate action. The tug would know, of course, that it had lost its tow and I hoped my emergency call would discourage it from coming back for us.

  It was a good idea, but alas, the best laid plans … what we didn’t know was that the tug was on a bearing west of south, heading for the open sea passage down Vancouver Island’s rugged and largely uninhabited west coast. The Coastguard cutter didn’t know it either. Nor did the RCC in Victoria. Cornish had contacted them, using his HF single sideband, and they in turn had contacted customs. As a result, the cutter was ordered to wait up for the tow behind Pearl Rocks at the eastern end of the Rankin Shoals. One of these rocks dries as much as sixteen feet, and since it would be low water about two hours after the cutter’s ETA, there would be little chance of the tug’s radar picking it up, any blip being merged with that of the above-water rock.

  Cornish arrived there at 13.39 when the tug was seaward of the Hakai Passage on a course that diverged from the Calvert Island coastline. At 16.00 it was almost due west of Pearl Rocks. The fog was still very thick and Cornish, anticipating the speed and distance run by the tow correctly, had switched his radar scan to very close range, expecting tug and barge to appear in the North Passage between Pearl Rocks and Calvert Island, or just to the west of Watch Rock about five miles away at the other end of the Rankin Shoals.

  In fact, at 16.00 we were almost twenty miles west of the shoals.

  Two hours later, with the fog still thick, it was almost dark, and it wasn’t until then that the cutter came out from behind Pearl Rocks and began a long-distance radar scan. But it had missed the opportunity to pick us up and identify the tow, for by then we were approaching the offshore shipping lane for Prince Rupert and the North and had several vessels within a few miles of us.

  That was the position as night fell and the cold increased. A wind had sprung up, waves slapping noisily at the bows, the tow line jerking and the three of us huddled together for warmth. I remember being conscious of Miriam’s body close against me, Brian’s too, and we were all of us shivering, the breeze and the damp cutting through our clothing, eating into our bones.

  Some time shortly after midnight we must have passed Cape Scott at the north-eastern tip of Vancouver Island, nothing near us now except endless forest and the occasional logging camp. I thought we were in Queen Charlotte Strait, heading for Alert Bay and the start of the Narrows, and that we would soon be off Port Hardy. Puzzled by the barge’s increasing movement, I climbed the rungs and poked my head out above the line of the deck. There was a light in the wheelhouse, blurred with vaporized moisture, nothing else - nothing visible at all, the night intensely black. Once I slithered out onto the deck and crawled to the side, so that I could look for’ard, but the fog was so dense I couldn’t even see the bows, let alone the lights of the tug.

  Wind and waves increased steadily until the barge developed a corkscrew motion interrupted periodically by the snatch of the towline. Cold and worried, we let time pass, uncertain what to do. No point in cutting the tow if there was no other vessel in sight and, though I poked my head out above the level of the deck at regular intervals, there was no sign of a coast, no lights, no other vessels, just utter blackness and the fog clinging to the barge’s towing lights in a blur of ectoplasmic white.

  It was shortly after four that Miriam woke me to say she thought she saw a star. By the time I had sorted myself out and got my head above the level of the deck the fog had gone, the night sky diamond bright, everything very clear - the barge’s light, the tug’s too, I could even make out the line of the towing hawser dipping into the waves and the whole shape of the tug at the far end of it. But nothing else. No lights where the shore should be. It seemed as though we were being towed through a void. Yet the position of the North Star showed that we were steaming just east of south, the course we should be on for the Narrows.

  Now the voyage took on a nightmare quality. We weren’t where we should be and I was completely lost. I had no means of knowing that we had altered course at least 45° to the eastward on reaching Cape Scott shortly after midnight, and that before that we had been heading west of south. Instead I began to feel as the Flying Dutchman must have felt, the voyage going on and on without end. I suppose at some point I reached the conclusion that we were on the Pacific coast of Vancouver Island, but I wasn’t conscious of it as a decision, there was no calculation,
it just suddenly became apparent to me, and for a time I kept the knowledge to myself.

  When I finally told the others the sun was up, but still no sign of the coast and the only ship an empty ore carrier headed north and a long way past us. All to the east was shrouded in fog, a dense bank of it that presented a dark, lowering wall. Once, and once only, I thought I saw something — a darker shadow, high up like a mountain thrusting the wet blanket of the fog skyward. It was there for perhaps an hour, and then it was gone, and by midday we were in fog again, with nothing visible beyond the grey, enclosing walls of it, only the shadowy shape of the tug ahead.

  By now the movement had become most unpleasant, a roll and a swoop that combined with the cold, the cramped space that confined our movements and the resinous cedar smell of the logs to produce a sickening sensation that was near to nausea. We weren’t actually seasick, thank God, though Brian’s face became very white and he yawned a lot. The truth was, I suppose, we had nothing to bring up. We hadn’t eaten anything at all for over two days, which was just as well perhaps since there was no way we could empty any movement of our bowels over the side. For myself, I felt constipated and no longer in the least hungry. But thirsty, yes. I presume it was the salt in the air, and nausea. My mouth felt dry and rough, my body at rimes breaking out into a cold sweat that had me shivering violently.

  Miriam seemed the least affected. I think because her mind was locked in on her thoughts, and her memories. She might have slept around occasionally, in an effort to fill the vacuum of her marriage, but the deep affection she had for Tom had always been apparent. Most of the time she seemed asleep -at least, she lay very still, curled up in a foetal ball as though to protect herself — and when she was awake she sat with her eyes wide, staring at nothing. She didn’t talk, though her voice was firm and quite decisive when asked a direct question; when, for instance, we had been deciding whether to swim for it or not. Her answer to that had been quite simple: ‘You don’t have to worry about me. I’m a good swimmer and can probably last longer in the water than either of you. So whatever you decide …’ And she had left it to us.

  That second day at sea, cooped up in the bottom of the barge under a vast weight of cedar logs, seemed interminable, time dragging, the cold unabated by occasional glimmers of sunshine.

  Whenever these occurred I would climb the rungs and hang there, my face just above the cold, wet steel of the deck, my eyes desperately searching the opaque brilliance of the humidity, searching for the shadowy shape of a passing ship, and always my hopes dashed. I saw nothing, except once. Once I was lucky and caught a glimpse of the coast away to the east of us.

  It was only a brief sighting, and at the time I had no means of knowing where it was. But now, looking at the chart, it is quite obvious it must have been the Brooks Peninsula, which sticks out from the mountainous bulk of Vancouver Island a good ten miles between Brooks Bay and Kyuquot Sound. It looked to be about three, maybe four miles off. The time was then 10.17 according to the entry in my diary.

  It was almost ten hours later, at 20.04, that I had my first sight of a shore light. I had poked my head above deck because I had been woken by the deep bay of a big ship’s foghorn sounding off at intervals between the higher pitch of our tug’s warning note. I nearly missed the light ashore, my eyes fixed on the sudden sight of a vessel coming out of the fog into good visibility and passing so close I could hear the sound of her engines. She was all lit up, rows of portholes, and above them a blaze of lights that showed a great bow wave creaming back to the white water at her wake. She must have been a cruise ship thundering down from Alaska on her way back to California. She was going far too fast for our purpose, and anyway, she was past us.

  And then, just as I was about to duck down to tell the others what it was, for the sound of her passage was loud against the hull and they were both peering up at me interrogatively - just at that moment I caught the powerful beam of a light swinging in an arc behind the brilliance of the vessel’s stern. After that there was nothing, my eyes following the stern of the big ship now well past us, still blazing with light. They would just be sitting down to dinner and there would be wine and jugs of iced water. I licked my lips, wondering for the umpteenth time what the hell I was doing here, why I had been fool enough…

  And then, suddenly, there it was again, stabbing out of the blackness well astern of the cruise ship, a powerful beam reaching a white finger of light into a bank of fog, then coming clear as it swung steadily across the ship, reaching out and momentarily illuminating the tug, swinging past it and suddenly blinding me, then on to vanish into fog again. And with the light came the distant sound of what I thought at first was a diaphone, but later identified as a horn. It was a double blast at intervals of about forty seconds and I guessed, quite correctly, that it was sounding two every minute.

  I must have watched the beam pass over us at least half a dozen times before I lost it, and the lights of the ship, as the fog rolled over us again. But I could still hear the foghorn. I had been counting the interval between the flashes. It was a powerful light, undoubtedly a lighthouse, and it was flashing white every fifteen seconds, perhaps a little more. If only I had had a chart I would have known where I was.

  In fact, it was the San Rafael lighthouse at Friendly Cove in the south-eastern corner of Nootka Island, and Brian identified it as such. Having explored this part of the coast when visiting his grandfather’s old home, he reckoned we ought to be about halfway down it, probably opposite where Cook had landed on his third and fateful voyage, the first landing on the Canadian west coast by an Englishman. ‘If it’s the lighthouse I think,’ he said, ‘then it marks the entrance to Cook Channel and the fjords leading up to the forestry centres of Tahsis and Gold River. But better wait till we’re in the Juan de Fuca Strait.’ That was after I had suggested taking over the barge now and trying to raise the lighthouse on the VHF set. There was a bit of a wind and it was blowing onshore, variable, but quite strong in the gusts, and the ride should be making. ‘It’s about three miles off, maybe less, and we’ll be pushed into the land quite fast.’

  But he shook his head. ‘Not fast enough. And apart from that one ship, and it’s past us now, I haven’t heard anything passing us close.’ He wanted us to wait until we were in the Juan de Fuca Strait. ‘There’ll be plenty of ships around us then.’

  The logic of it was unanswerable and I would have agreed if it hadn’t been for Miriam. She had scrambled up the log butts and had seen the lights, had watched the fog roll in again, blotting out even the lights of the tug. ‘And suppose the fog holds. Suppose there’s fog all the way to Seattle, to the moment we tie up at the SVL Timber quay. We’ll never see another ship. And it’ll be daylight.’ And she added, her voice trembling with urgency: ‘We’ll never get a chance like this.’

  Brian started to reason with her, but she wasn’t in a reasoning frame of mind. She was very close to hysteria and it was only then I began to realize what those eighteen days cooped up in that lonely lakeside hut had done to her. ‘You can wait if you like. Not me. There’s a lighthouse there. I saw it. There’ll be lighthouse keepers, a village, people - honest, straightforward, ordinary people.’ Her voice was quite wild, the words tumbling over themselves. ‘If you won’t cut the tow loose I’m going to swim for it.’ She was staring at Brian, her eyes very large as she looked into his face.

  He wasn’t going to budge. I could see that. And so could she. ‘All right,’ she said and unzipped her anorak.

  She was literally starting to strip off. ‘For God’s sake, Miriam!’ I had my hand on her arm, restraining her, my voice tense. ‘Don’t be silly. You’d never make it.’ I could feel her trembling.

  Brian tried again, his tone gentler than I had ever heard it before, but it made no difference. Nothing he could say, no pleading from me, had any effect. Her mind was made up and nothing would budge it. She had seen a light ashore and developed a mental block, so that she didn’t seem to hear what we were saying, and it
gradually dawned on us then that if we didn’t do what she wanted and cut the tow, we should have to restrain her physically.

  Brian looked at me, a half smile and little shrug. ‘So we cut the tow. Agreed?’

  I nodded slowly, thinking it wouldn’t take long for the men on the tug to realize the barge was no longer attached. Fog or no fog, their radar would soon pick us up, and then what? But when I tried to explain this to Miriam, she simply said, ‘You’ve still got that gun, Brian. You can hold them off for a rime, and every minute that passes, we’ll be closer to the shore. We won’t have to swim so far.’

  She smiled then. She actually smiled, a look of triumph on her face as though what she had said was unanswerable. And in a way it was. Darkness and fog, with a lighthouse three miles away, or daylight in the Strait with some vessel passing us a lot nearer. You could toss a coin as to which was the best course of action. Neither was very sensible or necessarily offered much hope.

  ‘So we cut the tow,’ I said and Brian nodded.

  ‘Not much choice.’ That smile again. Then he turned to Miriam. ‘Two rifles, a walkie-talkie and VHF, but no ammunition and that tug a hawser length away. Better get out your prayer mat.’ He swung himself onto the steel rungs. ‘Okay. Let’s go.’ And he began to hoist himself up to the deck.

  The wheelhouse was empty and we closed the trap door on whoever was sleeping in the cuddy down below. ‘I’ll leave you to handle things this end,’ he said to me, and he laid his rifle on the shelf in front of the wheel. ‘Start calling on the radio as soon as I’ve slipped the tow and get that Coastguard here quick. I hope to God,’ he added as he pushed out through the leeward door into the night, ‘there’s a quick release on that hawser.’

  The door slammed shut, his figure swallowed instantly in the black void of the fog, and we stood there, Miriam and I, waiting. I gave him two minutes by my watch to get up for’ard and work out how the release mechanism worked, then I switched on the VHP set and, with the mike close against my mouth, began calling on channel 16: ‘Coastguard cutter Kelsey. Coastguard cutter Kelsey. This is Redfern calling Kelsey. Come in please, Kelsey.’ To my surprise the Kelsey answered immediately and it was Cornish himself, his voice loud and clear. I gave him our position. ‘We are on the barge and cutting the tow. The tug won’t take long to pick us up and to hold them off we have only two rifles. Hurry, hurry, hurry. It could be a matter of life or death.’