The Darkening Archipelago

by Stephen Legault

  His travelling companion had introduced himself when Cole had shuffled onto the plane and taken the last seat available in the ten-seater. Lance Grey, special assistant to the provincial minister of Agriculture and Lands for Fisheries and Aquaculture. Cole asked him how he knew Archie.

  “We worked together on the provincial Aquaculture Advisory Task Force,” said Grey, looking out the window.

  “I think Archie might have told me about you,” said Blackwater.

  “Don’t believe everything you hear,” said Lance Grey, a broad smile on his face.

  “I don’t. The truth is usually far worse,” Cole said, buckling his seat belt.

  Now the plane levelled then skipped once, twice on the flat water. The engines whined, and Cole’s body pressed into the seat belt, putting uncomfortable pressure on his churning gut. When the motion came to a stop, Cole breathed out heavily through his mouth.

  “You never did say how it is that you knew Archie,” said Grey, unbuckling his seat belt and straightening his sports coat.

  Cole pressed his palms against his thighs. “I was helping him shut down fish farms,” he said.

  They disembarked from the plane, the latest arrivals to Port Lostcoast. Cole sucked the moist ocean air into his lungs, feeling his legs wobble under him as he made his way down the dock. It had been two years since he’d been on Parish Island. The last time he was here was to serve the band council in its effort to keep the Broughton Archipelago off-limits to new fish farms. The BC Liberal government had reversed a policy by the previous government that kept these salmon-rich waters off-limits, and dozens of new farms were springing up along the migration routes of wild pink salmon. He had stayed for nearly two weeks, working with local band council member Archie Ravenwing, biologist Cassandra Petrel, and other members of the community to cobble together a defense against the corporate onslaught of open-net Atlantic salmon farms. They had joined with others along the coast — First Nations and environmental activists — to plot a joint strategy, and dug in for a long fight.

  The days were punctuated by time spent on the water, when Cole would ride out into the inlet with Archie and Grace Ravenwing. In the short time that Cole was in Port Lostcoast, he came to respect and admire Archie Ravenwing for his courage and vision. And he came to care for Grace and the rest of Archie’s family, who seemed to come and go from Parish Island on a nearly daily basis. Cole had left them with a four-pronged plan: take on the provincial government regarding its retrograde policy; target the public with messages about public health; take on the federal government about federal fisheries laws that were supposed to protect wild salmon; and go nose to nose with the fish farmers with an aggressive media campaign in Europe and across the United States.

  Cole knew it was not a spectacular plan. He knew it then and he knew it now. He’d been new to consulting, new to the job of stitching together other people’s ideas. He’d been distracted. Two years into his life on the West Coast, the events that had propelled him across the country still festered in a shadowy, hidden corner. He spent more time than he should have in the strait. He drank with Archie’s friend Darren First Moon and tried to steer clear of the inevitable loose cannons that a remote place beyond the reach of the police tended to attract.

  Cole woke with a hangover each morning only to start all over again. That was the extent of his experience in Port Lostcoast.

  The provincial government’s response to the strategy had been to create the Aquaculture Advisory Task Force to “study” fish farming’s future, while continuing to expand the industry at breakneck speed.

  Where Archie had passion and determination in spades, he lacked administrative skills, and Cole Blackwater’s invoices went unpaid, further supporting Cole’s precipitous downward spiral. Lacking new clients and mired in his own inadequacies, Cole couldn’t keep doing pro bono work, and he had to close the salmon farming file. He hated to do it, but what choice did he have? He certainly felt like he was abandoning Archie Ravenwing, his proud family, and the wild salmon that Archie defended.

  Now he was back in Port Lostcoast, only one day before the spring equinox. The salty air was still and warm. He walked to the end of the dock, the voice of Lance Grey still ringing in his ears like an annoying car alarm. He stole a look back over his shoulder to see Grey chatting with another band councillor who had greeted the plane.

  “Cole!” The voice brought his attention back to the dock, and Blackwater saw Grace Ravenwing running toward him. “Cole, I’m so glad you made it!”

  “I wouldn’t have missed it, Grace,” said Cole sombrely. He dropped his flight bag and embraced the young woman. She hugged him tightly, her small body disappearing in Cole’s leather jacket. He could smell her hair, like flowers, and the feel of her against him made him dizzy.

  “I’m so sorry about your dad.”

  “Me too,” she said, lifting her gaze, her eyes red.

  They stood looking at each other for a moment. Finally she said, “So, how was the flight?”

  “To be honest, pretty awful. I’ve been in lots of these puddle jumpers, but I never really enjoy them. The Queen Charlotte Strait was lovely, but I could do without the splash down.”

  “Come on, let’s get you settled.” She took him by the arm to lead him down the dock.

  “I appreciate you asking me to stay at your place. Are you sure it’s okay?”

  “Why not? It’s big enough, and it feels pretty empty now with Dad gone,” she said, a tear sliding down her cheek.

  She hooked her arm into his while he slung his bag over his shoulder and steadied himself after the flight and the night of drinking. With Grace leading, he trudged toward the tiny town.

  “I’ll see you around, Cole,” said Lance Grey striding past them, his flight bag and computer on tiny wheels bumping along the uneven dock. “Oh, hi Grace,” he said, looking back. “I’m sorry about your dad.”

  “Thank you, Lance,” she said, not turning to face him.

  “Well, see you.” Lance reached the end of the dock before them and continued down the hard-packed dirt street toward Port Lostcoast’s only accommodation, a six-room bed and breakfast next to the gas station.

  “You know Lance?” Cole said as they reached the end of the dock. Grace led them to a grey 1988 Ford Ranger pickup.

  “Oh, sure. He’s here all the time, schmoozing the band council, schmoozing the business folks in Port McNeill and Alert Bay, schmoozing everything with a pulse.” She laughed, and Cole thought she sounded just like her father when she did. “He’s a dirt bag. I think he means well, but there is something about the way he does things that’s just, well —”

  “Slimy?”

  “Yeah,” she said, opening Cole’s door as he hoisted his bag into the cluttered bed of the truck. The box was strewn with fishing nets, broken paddles, floats, assorted tackle, a dented and rusty tool box, and an assortment of beer cans and soda bottles.

  “Dad’s truck,” said Grace, seeing Cole take inventory. “Bit of a pig. I only drive it once in a while. I thought you might have had more luggage, or I would have walked.”

  “I like to keep stealthy. You know, slip in and out of town without any fuss.” Cole grinned.

  “I remember….” Grace said, not smiling.

  Red faced, Cole got in the cab and kicked a space on the floor for his feet. Grace slid in behind the wheel. “The only part of his life that wasn’t a junk heap was his boat. I’ve managed to keep the house in one piece since Mom died, but it’s been a Herculean task.” The truck rattled to life and Grace piloted it up the hill and between houses whose colourful paint jobs were weathered and chipped from the winter gales that howled down the Queen Charlotte Strait and over tiny Parish Island. Grace piloted the truck up a steep hill, past an exposed cliff face, and onto a hillock where seagrass blew in the light breeze.

  They parked in front of a ramshackled home that looked as though it was a perpetual work in progress. The original house was squat and sturdy, and two new wings
jutted out on either side, one built into the rocky hillside devoid of trees and scoured by the ocean winds, the other built on stilts on the side of the cliff where it plunged down to the harbour. A broad deck, lacking a railing, circled that addition, twenty feet above the rocks below.

  “Dad called it the Bluff House,” she said, shutting off the engine.

  “I remember,” Cole smiled. “Is that addition new since I was here last?” Cole asked, pointing to the precarious wing on stilts.

  “Dad was never content to do just five or six things at once, you know,” Grace said, leading Cole up the oyster-shell pathway to the front door. “He was never satisfied to leave well enough alone. Always tinkering, finding fault, finding something more to do.”

  Cole nodded, and knew that Grace Ravenwing was talking about more than the house.

  They entered the main home, where the aroma of seafood stew greeted them. The front door led to a mud room, where slickers and boots and float coats were hung on pegs, and a broad deacon’s bench was open, exposing hats and gloves and assorted fishing paraphernalia. Cole pulled off his shoes and dropped his bags, looking around the sprawling home. A wide, open kitchen with broad windows providing a view out over the harbour and the strait beyond opened off the mud room. There were no cupboards above the counter to spoil the view, and Cole recalled many meals prepared in this kitchen while watching pods of orca or humpback whales swimming up and down the watery west coast highway.

  “It smells great in here, Grace.”

  Grace swept into the kitchen and checked on the stew. “You hungry?”

  Cole felt his stomach rumble, and he hoped it was from hunger and not his airsick hangover. “I could eat,” he decided.

  They sat at the dining room table, floor-to-ceiling windows providing a panoramic view over the Queen Charlotte Strait to the north and the mouth of Knight Inlet to the east. To the west were the humpbacked shapes made by the clutter of islands scattered up the southwestern side of the Broughton Archipelago.

  “Good grief, it’s beautiful here,” said Cole, swabbing his bowl with freshly baked bread.

  Grace nearly spit out a mouthful of stew, not quite able to suppress a laugh. She dabbed at her mouth and smiled. “I see you’re maintaining your promise to Sarah, Cole. You sound more like Charlie Brown than a brooding hoodlum.”

  He scowled at her. “Who’s a hoodlum?”

  “You are. You look like the guy who stands at the back of the room in gangster movies — you know, in the shadows. And when the guy can’t pay the money he owes, the boss says something like —” Grace improvised an Italian accent — “my man Guido here’s goin’ a breaka’ you knees.”

  Cole laughed. “That’s pretty good, Grace. I know this Italian guy named Frankie Fingers who does a pretty good Salish accent. You should hear him!” Then he added, “Truth is, I slip up every now and again, but I’m trying. I’m really trying.”

  “You’re a good father, you know.”

  “Thanks, but it doesn’t always feel like it. We’ve had our ups and downs.”

  “Every father and daughter does. My God, my dad and I fought like badger and bear, but we loved each other and there was always respect.”

  Cole stood and brought their empty bowls to the sink. He sat back down.

  “So Grace, can you tell me what happened?”

  She drew a sharp breath. “I don’t really know, Cole. The RCMP and the local search teams haven’t recovered Dad’s body yet, and they haven’t found the Dancer. They haven’t officially declared him dead,” she said, tears spilling from the corners of her eyes, creating glistening tracks over her face. Cole reached out and took her hand, and she squeezed his fingers. Even in her grief she was beautiful, with her high, round cheeks, almond eyes, and thick, black hair that fell halfway down her back. She was full bodied, but by no means heavy. Voluptuous, the kind of body Rembrandt loved to paint. She was in her late twenties and looked youthful. Natural. Her beauty had stopped Cole in his tracks more than once.

  “Our people think it’s important to send the spirit on to the next world quickly, so we’re not willing to wait for the official medical examiner’s report.” She stopped a moment and looked out the window. Cole let the silence sit between them.

  After a few minutes she spoke again. “The RCMP and the people from the Joint Rescue Centre down in Victoria figure that Dad was trying to make it home through a big gale that blew up. He had been out nosing around the mouth of Tribune Channel, looking for trouble as usual. They figure he must have misread the storm and pushed for home after dark. He didn’t make it. The Coast Guard, the RCMP, and even the Navy had boats, helicopters, and those big airplanes from Comox in the inlet looking for the Dancer. My brother Jacob and Darren First Moon have been out on Jacob’s boat all week. So have many other men, from all over the place. There were boats here from as far away as Victoria. But no sign of him….” Her voice trailed off. Cole grasped her hand tightly.

  Grace held her face upright, wiping her tears with the back of her free hand.

  “You said he was looking for trouble. You think he was being reckless?”

  “Dad was never reckless when it came to the sea. He was pretty cautious. No, I think he was nosing around that farm at Jeopardy Rock, or further up Tribune Channel. He told me that he was onto something. Something that just wasn’t right, but he didn’t say exactly what.”

  Cole looked out the window as a glaucous winged gull landed on the patio of the new addition.

  “We had a bit of a tussle recently, and, well, he stopped telling me what he was doing then.”

  “What did you fight about, Grace?”

  “God, it seems so stupid now,” she said, fresh tears forming in her red eyes. “Dad could be such a conspiracy theorist sometimes. He was going on about how Stoboltz was doing research at one of their farming operations, where the old dfo labs are up at Jeopardy Rock. He thought they were doing genetic engineering or something, breeding super salmon. I guess I didn’t take him seriously enough. But you know how he was. He really rubbed people the wrong way when he thought he was right and everybody else was wrong.”

  “Your dad could be pretty persistent.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess I know where I get it from. But the thing is, Cole, he was really rattling people’s cages lately. Since he lost the election to Greg, he was impossible to get along with. Always fighting with someone. If it wasn’t Greg, it was Darren. If it wasn’t Darren, it was one of the rednecks from the bar. That bigot Dan Campbell. And Lance Grey, and the minister, too. He seemed to be on their cases constantly. People would cross the street when they saw him coming. They just didn’t want to deal with him. Even Darren First Moon and he were at each other’s throats.”

  “Seems like he was really upset about something. You don’t know anything more about what he was onto at the dfo station? Maybe there’s something I can help with, you know….”

  “No idea.” Grace shook her head. “But you’re welcome to have a look through his papers and his computer, Cole. Maybe you can figure it out. I really don’t know much. He just shut everybody out, at least when he wasn’t picking a fight. He still talked with Cassandra, but not often. He was off on his own most of the time.”

  “That doesn’t really seem like Archie’s style, does it?”

  “He was always a bit prickly, but the way he was provoking people the last few months was a bit much, even for him.”

  Cole found himself very curious about Archie’s preoccupation.

  “Cole,” said Grace thoughtfully. “There’s something else.”

  “What is it?” he asked, distracted by his own ruminations.

  “Well, it seems pretty strange, timing wise.”

  Cole looked at her, listening.

  “The day before he went up Knight Inlet and didn’t come back, he dug his will out of a file and left it on his desk.”

  Cole felt a shiver clamber up his vertebrae.

  Grace shook her head. “I didn’t even know
he had a will. He sure never talked about it. But when he didn’t come back, I went to his office to see if there was anything that might be helpful to the Coast Guard and I found it on top of his usual clutter. What do you think about that?”

  Cole broke eye contact with Grace. “I don’t know,” he lied, looking out the window at Knight Inlet. But it seemed obvious; for whatever reason, Archie Ravenwing believed that his life might soon end.

  6

  What usually got Nancy Webber into trouble was too much thinking, too much reflection. Her first impression was most often correct, her first impulse the one she should follow. But given sufficient time to brood, she could find a hundred reasons to second-guess her intuition and jump to all manner of erroneous conclusions.

  The drive from Edmonton to High River takes about four hours if Calgary’s main highway, Deerfoot Trail, isn’t backed up with commuter traffic. Intuition told her to let the proverbial sleeping dogs lie. Cole Blackwater was a dog that should just be left to doze through his life — as he did so well, Nancy thought. Before clearing Edmonton’s city limits, she had twice almost turned around. But the longer she drove the more she second-guessed her intuition, and by Airdrie, hundreds of kilometres south of Edmonton, she had convinced herself of a massive cover-up of Henry Blackwater’s death, and also that she was the one to get to the bottom of it.

  That morning the lack of traffic on the Deerfoot allowed Nancy Webber to sail down to High River at a nice prairie coast of one hundred and twenty kilometres per hour. She arrived just after noon on Sunday, March 20. She tried to remember when she had last been in High River but couldn’t recall, and decided that this must be, in fact, her inaugural visit. She parked near the newspaper office and searched for lunch.

  What began as a service centre for the ranching community, and had later served the region’s short-lived coal mining operations and then the oil and gas developments that pocked the foothills, was now a bedroom community for burgeoning Calgary. Like many foothills towns, High River maintained a small, rustic, though not antiquated, downtown with the usual assortment of curios shops, a quilt store, a genuine First Nation’s jewellery and artwork boutique, and a bookstore that doubled as a coffee shop. But High River’s current energy sprang from the sprawling developments that ringed the downtown centre of the community, threatening to suck the life out of the historic downtown core.