The Darkening Archipelago

by Stephen Legault

  In the morning Grace walked down to the general store while Nancy and Cole drank coffee and ate toast. She came back with a heavy brown envelope, which they eagerly tore open. Cole re-read the letter from Archie and felt a knot form in his throat. He handed it to Grace to read, and tears formed in her eyes as his words sunk in. Finally, Grace gave the letter to Nancy.

  Cole stood up abruptly. “I’ve got to talk to Cassandra Petrel,” he said, grabbing his coat and heading out the door.

  There was a sharp wind blowing from the north, churning the channel outside the tiny harbour into whitecaps. Cole turned up the collar of his leather coat and stepped into the wind, making his way down through the clutch of houses to the docks. He found his way onto the slip where Grace had told him he would find Petrel’s Whitby. Locating the boat wasn’t hard; it was the only sailboat in a harbour full of fishing rigs. Cole looked around to see if he was being observed, then knocked on the cabin of the boat above the companionway. The wooden door opened and Cassandra Petrel’s grey head poked out. She smiled.

  “Dr. Petrel, I’m Cole Blackwater.”

  “Oh, Cole, yes, Archie told me about you. Come in,” she said, moving back from the door. He stepped through the portal and down half a dozen steps to the galley of the boat.

  “Thanks,” he said, entering the room. It was a lovely space, decked out in polished wood and fine chrome finishing.

  “Can I fix you tea? Or coffee?”

  “Coffee would be good. Listen, I’m sorry to come by unannounced.”

  “It’s fine. This is Port Lostcoast. Everything happens unannounced around here. Do you want to sit?”

  “Sure,” he said. She pointed to a small, built-in couch by the door and he sat, looking around him. “I like your boat,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I like it, too.”

  “You’ve sailed all your life?”

  “Didn’t start out that way. My father fished. I grew up on a troller. When I was an undergrad I worked as a dfo observer on a dragger. But when I finished my PhD I sort of gave up spending time on boats. I was always in the lecture hall or in the lab. I spent all my time in front of a class of undergrads, a computer, or hunched over a microscope,” she said, grinding coffee. “But I missed the ocean. A few years ago events conspired to allow me to get back on a boat,” she said with a sly smile. “I sold my house in Victoria and bought this ketch in San Francisco. A friend of mine and I piloted it up here. I never intended to live on it. But I kept spending so much of my time up here and in the Charlottes that I figured maybe I’d just better move. I gave up on universities and here I am.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Oh, maybe six years now.” She handed him a cup of coffee. “Cream or sugar?”

  “Just cream, please.” She handed him his coffee and he sipped it, savouring the warmth. Cole didn’t know where to start. “You study sea lice?” he finally said, looking around the floating laboratory.

  Petrel laughed. “Yeah, I guess I do. Didn’t start out that way. I studied whales.”

  It was Cole’s turn to laugh. “Hard to get a whale in here,” he said, looking around.

  “It was National Geographic’s fault.”

  Cole sipped his coffee. “Really?”

  Petrel sat down opposite him. “Yeah. January 1979. You must remember the issue, Cole. It was the one where the magazine came with the little floppy 45 recording of whale songs.”

  Cole’s eyes lit up. “Of course I remember it! It was amazing!”

  “I thought so, too. The piece was called “Humpbacks: Their Mysterious Songs.” It was written by a guy named Roger Payne. I was an undergrad then, and one of my roommates brought the magazine back from spring break and played it.” She laughed at the memory. “She played it during a house party. We’d been listening to some disco crap, the Bee Gees or something. All of a sudden the whole house was filled with these eerie sounds. It was really wild. People just stopped dancing and stood still. After about a minute someone put an ABBA record on, but I got the whale recording and took it back to my dorm. I put it on the turntable and listened to it half a dozen times that night. I was captivated!”

  “I know what you mean,” said Cole. He closed his eyes. “Mr. Elliot’s third-grade homeroom,” he said. “That’s where I heard it. This was Claresholm, Alberta, you understand. Popular Mechanics was the magazine of choice in most households. But Mr. Elliot brought the record in one day. He closed the door and drew the blinds. Nobody knew what was going to happen. We all thought Elliot was a bit crazy so we all just sat there, all these grade-three kids. And then he turned on the record player and turned up the volume and put on that little record. It blew us away. Some kids got pretty scared. It was a little creepy. But for a bunch of kids in the foothills of Alberta, it was astounding to hear those first recordings of whale sounds.”

  “Songs of the Deep,” said Cassandra. “Well, it got me hooked. I went down a marine track in my zoology courses, and then spent the next fifteen years studying grey whales, humpback whales, and later, killer whales. It was the orca that led me to these little guys,” she said, picking up a glass vial of sea lice.

  “Killer whales aren’t troubled by sea lice,” said Cole.

  “No, but their food is. I was studying orcas, and looking at their food, and then their food started to disappear, and that led me up here, and to this,” she said, holding the vial.

  “Bet nobody ever made a recording of sea lice to put in National Geographic,” said Cole.

  “No. But in a way, these little buggers have a way bigger impact than the biggest whale.”

  Cole was silent. He finished his coffee.

  “So anyway, that’s a roundabout way of saying that sea lice aren’t very sexy, but they are at the very centre of what’s happening to a dying ocean.” She put down the vial and folded her hands on the table. “Now, what can I do for you, Cole?”

  Cole’s smile faded. “I’m afraid I have to tell you something that might upset you.”

  Petrel’s face darkened.

  “Well, Grace and I have come to believe that Archie Ravenwing was murdered.”

  The colour drained from Cassandra Petrel’s face. The corners of her mouth dropped.

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you this. We spent the last few days in Alert Bay hoping to recover the Inlet Dancer. But we found something that makes us think that foul play is involved in the disappearance of our friend.”

  “What is it?”

  “We found what we think is blood congealed in the seal around the engine compartment. If it is blood, it leaves a really big question as to how so much of it was spilled on the deck of the boat, and why it’s there if Archie was swept overboard.” Cole briefed her on the ongoing RCMP investigation.

  Cassandra placed her cup of tea on the counter that separated her tiny sitting room from the galley. She took a breath and exhaled, shaking her head.

  “Dr. Petrel, I need to know what you and Archie were talking about. He wrote me a letter and said he thought that Stoboltz was up to no good. He said that you knew about some kind of genetic engineering going on at Jeopardy Rock. Something that involved Atlantic salmon. Archie said he suspected that they were working on sea lice, too. Can you help me understand this?”

  “I’m not a geneticist, Cole. My degrees are in biology and zoology.”

  “But you know a little about this field, don’t you?” he pleaded.

  “Enough to fill in some gaps,” she said. “What Archie and I know for sure is that Stoboltz was spending a lot of time and money trying to breed Atlantic salmon to be more resistant to disease and to parasites like sea lice. No big surprise. If you have millions and millions of dollars invested in fish, and a little critter the size of your pinky nail could take them down, you’d want to find ways of strengthening that fish’s defenses. Of course, we’ve always believed that the best way to protect both farmed fish and wild salmon is to have contained pens on dry land. That way, the Atlantic s
almon don’t pass on disease to wild salmon, and they don’t pick up sea lice from the surrounding ocean. But it’s expensive, and if the government won’t push the companies to do it, they sure aren’t going to do it on their own.

  “So no big surprise that they were doing genetic work on salmon. But what we didn’t realize until Archie came back from Victoria with the packet of information someone passed on to him was that Stoboltz was engineering sea lice as well. They were, in effect, creating a more potent breed of sea lice. Smaller — so that more of them could attach themselves to a salmon smolt — and more aggressive, so that the rate of mortality among the smolts would be higher.”

  Cole drew a sharp breath and looked down at the floor. He sat forward. “Why? Why in God’s name would they want to do that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “No idea?”

  “Oh, I’ve got lots of ideas. But no proof.”

  “Can you guess?”

  Petrel smiled. “Archie asked me to guess the last time he was here.”

  Cole locked his fingers and looked intently at Dr. Petrel. “I think that whatever you and Archie were guessing at must have been pretty much bang on, Doctor. I think that Archie went out to Jeopardy Rock to try and get proof, and my guess is that’s what got him killed.”

  Cassandra reached for her cup of tea, now cold. She took a sip. Her hands shook. Cole could see the anguish on her face.

  “Dr. Petrel,” he insisted.

  “It’s just Cassandra out here, Cole.”

  “Please.”

  “I think that Stoboltz plans to release those engineered sea lice into the Broughton Archipelago.”

  Cole sat back, his hands falling to his sides. His face twisted into a question.

  “Think about it this way,” said Petrel. “You’re in a fight with the bleeding-hearted environmentalists over the future of salmon farms. You’ve paid off the local politicians, in this case a band councillor. You’ve got the provincial government in your pocket. But you still can’t seem to convince the public that farmed Atlantic salmon is good for you. There’s these nagging concerns that they have higher levels of disease. And then there’s the question of what the Atlantic salmon are doing to the native stocks. People start saying, hey, fish is good food, but we prefer the wild stuff. Hell, we’ll even pay more for it. That’s what’s happening. Carrie Bright’s campaign has been working.

  “But the salmon farms and the pests that they bring, namely our little friends there —” she nodded at the plastic baggies filled with sea lice on her table in the galley — “are driving the wild fish toward a painful, almost certain, extinction. Why not speed it up? Why not give the native stocks the push they need? Get it over and done with fast. So you breed your Atlantic salmon to be more resistant to sea lice. Because it’s only smolts and juveniles that succumb to sea lice, the adult Atlantics in the open pens are pretty safe as it is. But, to be sure, you beef up their resistance so that young fish can withstand higher levels of infestation. And then you breed sea lice that are more aggressive, and you release them into the general population. I’d do it by infesting a bunch of Atlantic salmon with the lice and engineering a massive escape. It’s not uncommon for farmed fish to escape into the wild population. It happens all the time. But now you’d have thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of fish covered with this new super breed of sea lice escaping just as the migration begins. The native salmon wouldn’t know what hit them. Within a few years, the entire populations in the Broughton could be wiped out. The rest of the coast wouldn’t be far behind. And these little guys are travellers. So the sea lice could spread all up and down the coast. — And then there is Asia and Europe. What Stoboltz is up to, if my theory is correct, could be the end of wild salmon forever.”

  Grace met Cole on the road outside the general store, where he was walking with determination up the dock, the look on his face dark as a bruise.

  “Hey, Cole,” Grace said.

  He looked up, his face clearing a little. “Hey, Grace.”

  “You look pretty angry.”

  “Just talked with Doc Petrel.”

  “What gives?”

  He looked around him. They were alone on the dirt street. “She thinks — well, guesses, actually — that Stoboltz was doing genetic engineering on both penned salmon and sea lice. She hypothesizes that Stoboltz is planning to wipe out wild salmon.”

  “You’re kidding. You think that’s what Dad discovered at Jeopardy Rock?”

  “I think so.” Cole looked out at the harbour. The chill wind pushed at his face, his hair flew in the wind.

  Grace took a deep breath of the cold air. “Okay,” she said. Cole reached his hand out and took her arm.

  “Your father would be so proud of you, Grace,” he said. “You are being so brave.”

  She pushed a tear aside, looked up at him, and smiled. “I’ve got to go check on the whereabouts of some boats,” she said.

  “Okay,” said Cole. “I’m going to follow up with Nancy on this.” He let go of her arm and walked toward the bluff house.

  Grace watched him go. She took another deep breath and let it out. When Cole Blackwater had come to Parish Island several years before, Grace was a new teacher at the school in the Port Lostcoast Community Centre. Fresh from community college with a teacher’s certificate, Grace had returned to her home to help other young people find meaning in their lives. Too many of her friends had dropped out of school and, finding only seasonal work on the fishing boats, had turned to alcohol to fill their days. Depression was like a dark cloud hanging over her community. Several young people tried, and one succeeded, in killing themselves the year Grace came home to teach. She thought if she could give them a glimpse of their potential, they might move off Parish Island and attend school in Alert Bay after eighth grade. Families there took young people in and helped them complete high school. Who knows, they might go to a trade school, community college, or even university. Then if they wanted to return to the islands, they could. That was what she had chosen for herself.

  Archie had introduced Cole to Grace as their great hope in the fight to bring down the salmon farmers. Grace sat in on their strategy sessions. A number of white activists from Victoria had come to Parish Island for the weekend; they, along with Archie, Darren, and half a dozen other members of the North Salish First Nation, sat in the living room of the bluff house to plot strategy. Cole had led them through the day, and by the end they had a working plan to stop the expansion of salmon farming. By the end of the day, Grace Ravenwing was quite smitten with Cole Blackwater. His brooding good looks, crooked nose, shaggy mop of dark curls, and his slightly softening, but still able, body stirred her.

  Grace walked along the pier to the harbour master’s office. She looked at her watch. The office opened at eleven am. She was right on time.

  Grace had found Cole aloof. It was hard to read his intentions. She wasn’t entirely unaccustomed to white men’s lack of emotional maturity, but with Cole it was tinged with something else. Fear? Anger? It was hard to say. In the end, Grace knew it would never work. They had kissed one night at the end of the docks, the moon spilling ribbons of silver across the rolling water. But Cole had pulled away, explaining that it wasn’t right. That Archie was his client. And that he wasn’t ready for this.

  “Okay,” she had said.

  They had walked back to the bluff house arm in arm.

  Cole Blackwater was, is, a good man, thought Grace, but he’s got something to work out of his system, she mused. Some kind of poison. Everybody could see it. Except the great Cole Blackwater himself, she thought.

  She knocked on the harbour master’s door, then stepped inside.

  “Hi, Grace, how you holding out?” said Rupert Wright from behind a small desk.

  “I’m doing okay,” said Grace, closing the door to the small room behind her. She gave him a weak smile. The room smelled of pipe smoke and coffee.

  “Can I offer you something to drink?”

&nb
sp; “No, thanks, Rupert.” Grace looked around her.

  “Something I can help you with?”

  “Well, I’m curious about what records you have for the night my father disappeared. I want to see which other boats came and went that day.”

  Rupert Wright looked at her. He was in his seventies, long retired from the Coast Guard. Port Lostcoast was his retirement posting. He maintained the part-time position of harbour master, and in exchange lived in the back of the tiny office and had free mooring on the government dock.

  “I can have a look,” he said. He turned in his seat and clicked the mouse a few times, waking up his computer. “What’s on your mind, Grace?” he asked, his back to her as he found the correct file.

  “Oh, not much. I guess I’m just wondering if anybody might have seen my dad that day.”

  “Lots of boats out in the inlet. Not all of them would have started here,” he said. “I don’t have access to other harbour logs,” he said, still looking at the computer.

  “It’s okay, I’m just curious is all.”

  “Can’t blame you. Here you go. It’s not complete, you understand. Just a head count at noon and at sunset. Though there wasn’t much of a sunset that day, you’ll recall. Hell of a blow.”

  “Yes,” she said, stepping behind him. “Hell of a blow.”

  He pointed to a screen and she read the names.

  “Is that Greg White Eagle’s boat?” she said, pointing to an entry.

  “Yup. He calls it First Eagle.”

  She read the list.

  “What about this one?” She pointed to an entry.

  “It was out all day,” said Wright.

  “Can I look at the previous day’s entries?”

  “Sure.” He called them up.

  She scanned the page. A shadow darkened her complexion.

  “Whose boat is that?”

  “That one is a Stoboltz boat. It came in around eleven in the morning. Left a few hours later. Find what you were looking for?”

  “I found more than that,” she said, the smile now gone from her face.

  Nancy Webber sat in Archie Ravenwing’s office. What she was doing was dangerous, she knew it. She sipped a coffee and twisted in Archie’s swivel chair. Coming to Port Lostcoast had been a mistake. She shouldn’t have left Alberta. But here she was, sleeping under the same roof as Cole Blackwater. Cole had seemed somehow lighter since she had arrived. She guessed that the distractions of trying to unravel the mystery surrounding the disappearance of Archie Ravenwing had kept him from descending into the dark, brooding place where he sometimes fell. He seemed more alive. More vital.