The Darkening Archipelago

by Stephen Legault

  “I can’t believe the government is letting Stoboltz continue to operate after what Darvin Thurlow was up to,” said Cole, looking down at his hands wrapped around his can of beer.

  “There’s no proof,” said Grace. “We never could prove that they were planning on playing God and releasing the super sea lice. They covered those tracks pretty well.”

  “Too bad Lance Grey couldn’t say the same,” said Cole.

  Nancy grinned. “That story I did for the National Post was like an atomic bomb dropped on Lance Grey’s head.”

  “Yeah, and the minister’s office was ground zero,” said Cole.

  “I expect there will be charges. The RCMP are opening an investigation. I got a source to go on the record. It was in Friday’s Post.”

  “Has the minister managed to avoid the fallout?” asked Grace.

  “So far, but I doubt he’ll survive the next cabinet shuffle,” said Cole.

  They sat and watched the birds circle overhead, the boat gently rocking in its slip.

  “I’m curious, Grace. What happed with Archie’s debt to the band?” Nancy asked.

  Grace smiled. “They forgave it. I told them that I’d sell the house and pay it off, but they said no. You know, I was surprised — even Greg said that it wouldn’t really serve the community to have the bluff house sold. I think he’s just trying to play nice so we don’t run him off the island for his dirty tricks with Stoboltz. What do you hippies call it? Good karma?”

  “Don’t look at me,” said Cole. “I’m from Alberta. We eat hippies. Ask Denman. He’s the one who meditates.”

  “Guilty,” said Denman, then he took off his cap and ran a hand over his bald head. “But no dreadlocks here.” Everybody laughed.

  Cole stood and stepped to the cooler. Grace stood up so he could open it, and he pulled another can of beer from the ice, sluicing the water from the can before opening it. “Anybody else?”

  He passed beers to Darren and Nancy. “Sarah, want a pop?”

  She smiled and nodded, and he handed her a root beer. She pushed the film of icy water from it and opened it, drinking the foam from the top of the can. She sat on her father’s lap, and he put his arms around her — for a moment everything in the world seemed perfect to Cole Blackwater.

  “Seems like most of the loose ends are wrapping up,” said Nancy. “Hey, Cole, when is your day in court?”

  “Not until mid July.”

  “What is Dan Campbell pleading?”

  “Crown says he’s pleading not guilty to assault with a weapon.”

  “You just going to show the judge that beautiful face of yours as evidence?” asked Nancy.

  Cole grinned and felt the jagged scar that criss-crossed the other marks already there. Sarah turned around and gave him a kiss. Cole said nothing. Nancy smiled at the two of them. He was a different man when he was with Sarah.

  “When do you start at the Sun?” Grace changed the subject.

  “First of July,” said Nancy. “I’ve already filed my last story for the Journal.” She glanced at Cole, but he seemed lost in a different world.

  When the party on the boat broke up, Cole and Nancy walked up the winding hill to the bluff house. Cole and Nancy lingered on the deck while the others prepared dinner in the kitchen. As the sun set on one of the year’s longest days, the waters of Knight Inlet danced with a thousand shades of blue.

  “God, it’s beautiful here,” Nancy said, looking east toward the coast range and then back to the narrow waters of the inlet.

  “It’s a great place,” said Cole. “Archie did a good job making sure it stayed that way.”

  “Listen,” said Nancy, which is what she always said when she was about to breach a difficult subject. “Listen.…” she sighed.

  “Don’t,” Cole said.

  “Cole, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. You’re right.”

  “I am?”

  “Don’t let it go to your head. It doesn’t happen very often.”

  Nancy punched him in the arm. “What am I right about?”

  “Guess.”

  “That sounds dangerous. Just tell me, wise ass.”

  “That I’m rotten at talking about things. About my father.”

  “You can’t keep it bottled up inside.”

  “I know that.”

  “It’s eating you alive. All your friends can see it.”

  “Don’t get all Dr. Phil on me, Webber.”

  She shot him a look. The evening sun coloured his face golden. “Denman says he’s got something that’s going to help.”

  “What is it?”

  “He won’t tell me. Says I have to trust him.”

  “That sounds interesting. Can I watch?”

  “As long as it doesn’t involve needles, crystals, or someone playing a didgeridoo over my naked ass, sure, I don’t see why not.”

  “Can I write about it? I’ve got to make a good impression on the people of Vancouver.”

  He shot her a look and she laughed.

  “Thank you,” he said, turning to look at her.

  “For what?”

  “For not writing about it.”

  She looked at him a moment, her dark eyes meeting his.

  “You’re welcome.”

  He looked away, out at the harbour. “I thought you were just in this for the story.”

  “I wasn’t sure myself what I was in it for.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I’m sure,” she said.

  Epilogue

  The sun blazed like a white scream. It was the first of July. The dark, rain-cloaked days of spring had yielded to summer’s persistent tug; there hadn’t been a storm cloud since the beginning of June. The sky had been blue for three weeks. Only over the mountains on Vancouver Island, and in the highest reaches of the coast ranges on the mainland, did a few cottony clouds form each afternoon. At midday the sun baked the high ranges, melting the remaining glaciers, creating mirages that danced above the serrated horizon.

  At the ocean’s edge it was cooler. The tide of air that flowed in rhythm with the lunar surge, up and down Knight Inlet, took the bite out of the heat. That atabatic breath of air — moving up the mountain slopes during the day and down each evening with katabatic wind — created convection currents, swirls of warm air that rose up the edges of the forests and cliffs where they met the sea.

  U’melth, a solitary black raven, rose on the atabatic curl, rose up with the churning current into the sky. The bird hove above the calm waters of Knight Inlet and then drifted west, out toward the fjord’s mouth and the dappled constellation of islands beyond. In the sunlight, the bird’s beak glistened like polished obsidian while the bird’s eyes remained opaque, inscrutable. The raven drifted, not spending an ounce of energy in flight, gliding from air pocket to air pocket, hovering over the margins where the dark forest slipped down the sides of hills to meet the sea below.

  U’melth had seen more than thirty summers come and go. He was old, even for his kind. A few white feathers over the raven’s dark eye gave him a patriarchal stature.

  Motion caught U’melth’s interest. Far in the distance, toward a point of land that fingered the inlet, an unkindness of ravens was gathering at the ocean’s edge. The patriarch tucked his wings to his body and sped toward the assembly. Within a few minutes the solitary bird had joined the council numbering more than fifty. Some were perched on the branches of fir and spruce while others hopped along the shore from rock to rock. Others still turned overhead, rising up and sliding down air pockets the way children might play on a slide. While they appeared to do so at leisure, they were intent in their focus. All were absorbed by the dark mass wedged between two barnacle-encrusted boulders at the water’s edge.

  At high tide this place was five feet beneath the sea, but now, near the tide’s ebb, the dark human form was a foot above the high water mark. A dozen birds were perched on the corpse while others moved about at the side of the clot of tattered clothing. The
grandfather raven tucked its wings to its side and dropped from the sky to investigate. Landing on a rock with a bounce, he opened his mouth and tilted his head to one side. The others gave him no credence. Raven hopped twice and peered down on the mass to inspect the find.

  An unmoving arm protruded from sodden clothing. The hand was fat and white, the bloated fingers the size of Sitka spruce cones, the skin torn and hanging like rags.

  U’melth flapped three times and landed on top of the body. With his beak he pulled at the dark clothing. Other birds joined, and some feathers were ruffled in the effort to get access to the rest of the meat. In a moment the raven was able to find a place to peck and soon slipped away with a mouthful to eat. Finishing, it swooped back in for more. Two more mouthfuls were thrown back into the open throat before a harsh cry pierced the air, and the raven flapped safely out of reach of a bald eagle returning to pillage. Soon half a dozen eagles were standing on the rocks, challenging the ravens. The ravens took to the trees and croaked and jabbered and waited. U’melth watched the sun on its summer parabola.

  The life of the man passed into the life of the raven.

  U’melth feasted for two days, and when there was little left to eat, he flew east into the setting sun, up Knight Inlet, its waters shimmering like the scales of a snake resting between the backs of rising mountains. That night, Grandfather Raven rested in the top of a giant Sitka spruce and, in the morning, glided on the gently moving air currents to the headwaters of the inlet. There U’melth played along a cliff wall with ravens half his age, all of them riding thermal air masses to the top of the bluff, then tucking their wings tight to their bodies and plunging down, down, toward the forest below.

  That night U’melth died in his sleep. He fell from the Sitka spruce in which he was perched and landed on thick moss and a mass of spruce needles at the tree’s base.

  By the next morning, a dozen species of carnivorous beetles and two massive banana slugs had taken up residence on U’melth’s body. Ants had begun to colonize the bird’s wings and the length of his abdomen. The following day, centipedes burrowed into the raven’s fat belly.

  After two weeks all that remained of the raven were its wings, skull, and beak. A mouse gnawed at the calcium in the raven’s bones. In a month there was nothing left to mark U’melth’s passing.

  The life of the man passed from the raven into the lives of insects and creatures too numerous to number.

  Summer became autumn. Rain fell nearly every day. The insects that had made a feast of U’melth’s corpse fled their subterranean tunnels for the forest floor, seeking shelter from the flood. They drowned by the hundreds, and when the waters drained back into the earth and the dendridic arms of the creeks that laced the woods, their bodies became part of the humus. Their bodies’ energy and nutrients passed into the living skin of soil that covered the stone skeleton of the coast ranges, the same soil that nourished the giant Sitka spruce that rose pillar like toward the sky from which U’melth had fallen.

  The life of the man passed from raven to insect and from insect to earth.

  Like a giant straw, the Sitka spruce sucked life from the soil. A microscopic slurry of nutrients and water rushed up the xylem and down the phloem of the massive tree. The soil’s nutrients became the tree’s blood, its life force, and built bark and limbs and leaves and heartwood.

  From man to raven to insect to earth to tree.

  Fall slipped into winter and winter into spring. The earth completed another circuit around the sun. Salmon pushed their way up into the headwaters arm of Knight Inlet. Born there years before, the pink salmon found their way into the tiny tributary stream over which the Sitka spruce stood like a centurion. The salmon had ranged across the Pacific ocean, survived countless perils, and had charted their way back to the very place of their creation.

  Grizzly bears followed them. Called by the thrashing of the fish, the bears came down the mountain sides like drunken sailors, pushing each other aside and swatting at the salmon, carrying them into the woods, sometimes only eating the brains and leaving the rest of the fish to rot into the roots of fir and spruce along with the detritus of the forest floor.

  Winter came. The bears retreated into the mountains. The eagles moved up the inlet, threading their way into the headwater tributaries. The dying salmon lay in spent and stinking heaps along the banks of the creeks for the eagles to gorge on. They were followed by the ravens. And the ravens by the gulls.

  By midwinter’s day, little could be seen of the great orgy of feasting that had followed the arrival of that season’s salmon run.

  The giant Sitka spruce towered over the creek. Snow fell on the earth and clung to the tree’s branches.

  Spring arrived with a vernal aurora of colour and life. Salmon smolts pushed their way from under rock gardens and the cooling shade of mossy stream banks and swam west, following the primordial urge to join with the sea. Many were eaten by predators before they could taste salt water.

  Summer again, then fall, then winter. Summer.

  Twenty cycles came and went. Twenty trips around the sun. The giant spruce survived seasonal storms, the pleading of logging companies for access to the ancient forests along the coast, and lightning in the summer, gale-force winds in the fall, snow in the winter.

  It was in December, twenty-one years since man became U’melth and U’melth became insect and tree, that a winter storm surged up the valley like a runaway train, tearing at the sides of the mountains, toppling lesser trees and piling them like matchsticks along the banks of the inlet.

  The giant spruce, five hundred years old, was toppled. The earth shuddered when it crashed to the forest floor. A dozen other smaller trees — spruce, fir and cedar — fell with it. The Sitka spruce bridged the tiny headwaters tributary, its trunk not more than a foot above the water when the creek was in spring flood, its moss-draped branches stuck like daggers into the creek’s surge, creating a natural seine.

  Seasons came and passed. The giant spruce slowly sank into the earth. Its bark melted away in winter storms, the stout, mossy arms that punctured the creek became skeletal limbs. A dozen spruce and fir saplings grew along the great nurse log’s bulk. Bears crossed the river on its back, stepping around the forest of its spine.

  Twelve spring floods raged and fell, and the giant spruce sagged until its branches finally sank under the creek’s seasonal surges. The water pooled behind it and pushed at the tree’s deteriorating skin, and slowly the demarcation between tree and creek became imperceptible. Branches broke from the trunk during floods and jetted downstream. The pulpy centre of the tree gave in to water’s patient tug, and soon it began to decay from within.

  Seven more autumns came to pass. As if by some miracle, salmon continued to arrive. Spawned. Died. Their carcasses caught in the crooks and hollows of the great tree’s decomposing. Bears ate the salmon. Eagles pillaged as they wished. Ravens chided each other, sitting on the back of the sunken log.

  The flesh of the tree passed into the water. Salmon swam into it, breathing it in, mouths agape with exhaustion and the final spasm of life that was their mission — procreation. Then they died and drifted into a quiet eddy. The life-giving waters passed over the fry as they were born, the great tree’s nutrients became the water, then the salmon, and also their spawn. It was their breath of life as they slipped from the shelter of the giant spruce and raced for the sea.

  The life that was man, raven, insect, earth, and tree became salmon.

  From the narrow banks of the headwaters’ tributary, the salmon fry surged out into the open inlet. Waters so vast, the tiny smolts were like motes of dust in a galaxy of swirling dark water. As if programmed, the pink salmon pushed en masse westward, and those that survived the gauntlet of predators made the turn from the inlet into Tribune Channel and threaded their way toward the opening where the knot of islands ended and the Queen Charlotte Strait opened, its vastness startling to the pinks born into such tranquil waters.

  Most didn’t s
urvive, but those that did could not know the perilous fate their ancestors faced, their journeys roughly punctuated by fish farms, now long gone. Where once disease, pollution, and the curse of sea lice sucked the life from their tiny bodies, now open water welcomed them.

  Soon the coursing salmon broke the grip of the mainland cluster of islands, and the ocean surged and moved around them, the waters bottomless, the edges of the world dark green memories far beyond the reach of their growing bodies.

  Past Cape Scott, the western tip of Vancouver Island, and then the Scott Islands, and then out into the vastness of the great open ocean, the life that was man, raven, insect, tree, and finally salmon, became, at last, the sea.

  THE DARKENING ARCHIPELAGO

  Stephen Legault on the evolution of a series

  Back to the beginning

  The Cole Blackwater mysteries were conceived during a rain-soaked trip to Costa Rica in the fall of 2003. Before the metaphorical ink for the plot of the first book had dried, I began to think about what other kinds of trouble Cole might find himself in.

  Cole Blackwater is, in the words of his drinking buddy, Dusty Stevens, an environmental crusader — a champion of lost causes. But the greatest compliment anybody gave me after The Cardinal Divide was released was that the environmental message was “subtle.” Because, first and foremost for me when writing the Cole Blackwater series is the plot. If the book is to be just a thinly disguised polemic on environmental and social justice issues, then I may as well just write essays. That said, the Cole Blackwater mysteries are an avenue for bringing important issues facing the future of our society, and our planet, to a new audience. As I continue to develop this series, I find no shortage of subjects to choose from.

  In 2003, when I first pieced together The Cardinal Divide, I was working for a small national conservation organization called Wildcanada.net. One of the campaigns we championed was called “Farmed and Dangerous.” On behalf of the Living Oceans Society we helped people take action to ensure a future for wild salmon and stop massive new salmon farming operations from being developed along the bc coast. I began to wonder what the illustrious/altruistic Cole Blackwater might have to say about salmon farming, and how he could get involved in the effort to rid the province’s coastal waters of these death traps for wild salmon.