“It looks bigger than Abel.”
“Reckon it was. Three hundred pounds, the fishermen figured. Maybe more. Abel, he was never more than a hundred and sixty.”
“The one that got away,” Hy grinned.
“No wonder.” Jamieson passed the book back to Gus. “I didn’t know cod got that big.”
“No.” Hy knew all about cod – and a lot of other things, trivia of all sorts – as a result of her work with clients, chief among them, the Department of Fisheries. She didn’t need the money. For years her nest egg had been a secret, but now everyone knew she was heir to the perennially bestselling back-to-the-landers’ bible, A Life on the Land, her mother’s legacy.
Hy had written all about cod for the Department of Fisheries website. “They’re usually about ten or twenty pounds, but in the deep waters of the Atlantic, some grow to a humungous size. Two hundred pounds. One weighed in at ninety-six kilos. You do the math. Bet that one ate a few lobsters in his time.”
“Cod eat lobster?” Jamieson raised her eyebrows. Strange.
“Yup. Wild duck, too. They don’t have to be big to do it either. Cod have some odd eating habits. They’ve opened them up and found wood, rope, pieces of clothing, old boots, jewellery, stones. Put that on your dinner table. And they’re cannibals. It’s a fish-eat-fish world. In some places more than half of them eat their own young.”
“No wonder the industry died.”
“I don’t think eating each other was the problem.”
“So, if Abel’s cod was from the deep Atlantic, what was it doing here?”
“Probably got blown this way, a freak. Brought in by a storm, a current, maybe slipped into the Gulf Stream somehow, although that might be warm for a cod.”
Gus closed the book. “Abel never gave up on it. He wanted that fish bad. Bad. He never forgot.”
“It wouldn’t still be alive?” Abel, likely, wouldn’t still be alive, either, Jamieson thought, a grim expression on her face. Hy could tell what she was thinking.
“Not that one. Maybe another. They can live fifteen to twenty years, but that’s about it. One on record made it to twenty-seven.”
“How could he possibly hope…twice in a lifetime…?”
“Why not?” Gus began putting a new set of stitches on her knitting needles. “He was good at finding ’em. Everyone’d follow Abel to the fishing grounds. He’d know where they were, the cod. He said he could hear them grunt.”
“Grunt?” Jamieson looked mystified.
“That’s how the male cod lets the female know he’s ready.” Hy grunted and grinned. “They call it the cod serenade. Lasts about fifteen minutes, then starts up again. Usually at night. It’s not random grunting, there’s a pattern to it, a melody of a kind.”
“It wasn’t just that, though.” Gus slipped a needle into the wool, looped the yarn over and began a new row. “Not just the grunting. He could smell cod.”
“Smell cod?” Hy and Jamieson spoke at the same time. Gus wondered why she was speaking of Abel in the past tense. Well, that’s just how she would have said it if he’d been sitting here in the room. That was past. The fishing. Twenty year or more.
“I’ll grant you, any fish can smell out of water, but in water?” Jamieson looked over at Hy for backup. “You can’t smell fish in water.”
Hy shrugged. “I don’t know. I do know cod have a sense of smell. They can smell their prey. I don’t know why they need to, since they eat practically everything. I do know about the grunting, and some kinky facts about their sex lives. Sometimes they engage in threesomes. That is, a single male will butt in, so to speak, on a mating couple and get his sperm in the mix. Then there’s size. With cod, it matters. If a guy is smaller than a gal, no way he’s going to get lucky. Our guy must have been very, very lucky. He probably had a deep voice, too, because the grunting gets deeper and deeper as the courtship heats up, and it’s the deep grunting that attracts the female.”
“You certainly know a lot about cod.”
“It’s the website work. I know everything you’d want to know about the sex lives of multiple species.”
“C’mon.” Jamieson had the hint of a smile. Her friendship with Hy was softening her.
Hy smiled. “Try me.”
“Barnacle.” Jamieson looked smug.
“Funny you should mention that. I happen to know that the barnacle has the largest sex organ of any animal, relative to its size.”
“Not the whale?”
“Not the whale. The barnacle, stuck on a rock, or on a whale, for that matter, has to reach out, searching for a mate. There’s no ‘your place or mine?’ They can both stay home. If he doesn’t get lucky at the end of the night, he’s bisexual, so he can f…”
Jamieson held up her hand, and indicated Gus with her eyes.
“…himself,” Hy finished. She shook her head and smiled. “Cod only knows,” she said on a sigh.
Had Abel gone on a quest for a big fish? What had happened to him on the way? Because Jamieson was sure something had happened. That Abel could not possibly be still alive. Not at his age, and not if he had taken to the open water.
***
The season was over, and Abel was taking a busman’s holiday, some recreational fishing, hoping – as all fishermen do – to catch the big one.
He’d waited for the tide to cover the Big Bay sandbar and let his boat be carried by the current of water to the west of the bay, past the spit of land that boasted the tallest dunes on Red Island, massive heaps of soft golden sand dominating the shoreline, cutting off easy access.
Rod and reel. He was using rod and reel, a point of honour. Too easy to anchor a few lines to the back of the boat, or throw over a net and trawl. No. He wanted to really catch it. A big cod. A cod he had seen that summer. Seen and couldn’t believe the size of.
The boat was bobbing on the water, and he leaned back and closed his eyes for a moment, the gentle rocking lulling him to sleep. It had been a long day; they were all long days, starting before dawn.
It was a bubbling sound that startled him awake. He sat up, looked down at the water, and saw the strangest thing.
The water was circling, around and around, the circle enlarging with each turnabout, soon grabbing at the boat and pulling it around, too. Around and around.
The water was bubbling, as if it were boiling.
Abel stood up, secured his rod, and leaned over and stuck a hand down into the water. He winced and pulled it out. Boiling. No, not boiling. Freezing. So cold it felt like heat, the point where the two extremes of temperature merged into one undifferentiated pain.
Cold. As cold as the deep Atlantic.
He stuck his hands in his armpits to warm them. His face screwed up in puzzlement. He knew these waters as well as he knew the land, the language of the sky, as well as he knew the cod.
In this newly strange place there were cod – that he knew, just from sniffing the air. He could smell them. There was the salt, of course, in the air and in the water. There was something mingling with the salt, something…metallic. He smelled it and tasted it on his lips.
And then he heard them – the cod. He heard them above the whistle of the wind and his own breathing.
The cods’ grunts.
Unmistakable.
They were here – breeding.
The water was churning, the boat circling.
A tug on the line.
He grabbed the rod. He clung to it. Yanked it, and a giant cod leaped out of the water. A fish twice as big as he was.
He would never be able to bring it aboard. He couldn’t – wouldn’t – set it free.
It flipped around in the air, sending the boat rocking from one side to another, spinning, and then yanked the boat out of the circle, dragging it along, backwards, in a bid to escape, dragging it around the spit against the current,
and all the way to Big Bay, where it dumped Abel’s dory onto the sandbar and broke free, just after Elmer Cole snapped his shot.
The cod wove erratically, free of the tether, slapped its tail in the water, and, with one plunge, was gone.
***
There was that one photo only of Abel hanging onto the fish. It created a sensation in the village. The one that got away didn’t belong to Abel alone. It belonged to everyone. The biggest cod they had ever seen. The local teacher at the time – a cousin of Abel’s – tried and failed to get it into either the Guinness Book of World Records or the International Fish and Game Association’s world records. There had been two stumbling blocks. The fish couldn’t be weighed. And it hadn’t been caught.
The Guinness people added that you couldn’t tell in the photo that it even was a cod or that the photo wasn’t faked. There were no supporting documents or witnesses. The villagers didn’t see why any of that mattered.
“It was a damn big fish,” Wally Fraser swore, out of hearing of his wife.
“Could of been a tuna,” said Estelle Joudry.
Someone pointed out that tuna came bigger than that, much bigger, five hundred pounds and more.
“Believe it,” carpenter Harold MacLean had said. “They caught one in Nova Scotia not so long ago was more’n eleven hundred pounds.”
Suddenly, their three-hundred-pound cod seemed puny.
“That’s as may be, but tuna don’t come into shore like that.”
“Neither do cod,” said Wally. “Not the big ones.”
That’s what the Guinness people didn’t understand. Big cod had been found in the deep Atlantic but never in the benign waters of The Shores, warmed by the Gulf Stream.
“Abel never gave up on that fish,” Gus said. “He tried his luck many times in that same place, but the conditions never were the same again. He always said something about the moon lining up with Ethan Cooke’s chimbley.”
The Shores fishermen fished cod the conventional way and caught plenty in the good years until the fishery was closed down. There was a time when only tourists could take cod, allowed ten pounds each on deep-sea fishing jaunts. They didn’t usually want the fish, or not that much of it. They were in it for the experience. So the fishermen took home most of the catch. Not enough to sell, but enough to satisfy their own cravings for the tasty fish, worms and all.
“Would Abel have been allowed to keep a three-hundred-pounder after the moratorium?” Hy mused, then answered her own question. “Probably not.”
Chapter 20
There was an unusual amount of activity on the west side of the massive dunes that sheltered Big Bay. They were difficult waters to manoeuvre because of the strong current that pulled vessels out to sea. Even large ones had to fight against it.
A fisheries vessel was motoring around a large pool of water, a swirling circle of exceptionally cold water created by an unexplained shift in the current. A shift that had redirected it, so that now it was pulling the cold waters of the deep Atlantic in. That’s what had brought Seamus here, doing his private business on the public purse. He’d brought the old man with him.
He had them taking and comparing temperatures, assessing the size of the phenomenon, and dragging fishing nets, allowing them to get sucked down into the circling pool.
They had been trying to finish their work before the day began for the local fishermen, but they couldn’t do everything in the dark. Even the dawn was dark, the sun’s light filtered by the grey smoke from Quebec. When would it stop?
Cursing and coughing, two men hauled up an empty net, and, as they did so, there was a tug on the other net.
“Clear out! Clear out! Give us some room here.” Seamus elbowed the two crewmen out of the way and grabbed the winch. Working it with difficulty, he pulled up the net, trembling with excitement.
Was this the prize?
There was a stunned silence when they saw what was in the net.
“Whew,” someone whistled. “That’s a two-hundred-pounder.”
“Three-hundred-pounder, if you ask me.”
It was more than Seamus could handle. The crew took over.
“I hope it’s a girl,” said one, hauling on the catch.
“Hard to tell.” Seamus shook his head.
“With a three-hundred-pound cod you shouldn’t have to squint.”
But they all were. Squinting.
“Actually, impossible. Only if we cut it open,” said Seamus. “Then where will we be?”
“Doing a tummy tuck on a cod.”
“Can’t you arouse her somehow?”
Seamus grinned. “You might, mate, but I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of three hundred pounds of passionate codling. Especially if it was a he, not a she.”
The men who’d been working the winch looked over at Seamus. Great excitement and high fives all around as they swung the net and poised it over a tank of sea water. Then the net lowered. The big fish didn’t fit. The tank was too small. It was the biggest Seamus could fit on the boat, and that was after he’d stripped the vessel clean of everything but the bare essentials. There was only enough water in the tank to keep the fish alive until they got it back to Winterside. They wouldn’t be taking it to Winterside.
“We’ll have to throw him back,” Seamus growled. So near and yet so far. For the first time, he knew what that meant.
He couldn’t look. He turned his back on it as they swung the net down into the water and released the fish. It took a while, the fish was flipping around so much, but it found its way out and they hauled up the net, free of cod, with a couple of captive crabs in it.
Seamus, a bitter twist to his mouth, turned once the fish was gone, his back to the circle, the failure of his plan.
The Hat Man was staring, bewildered, at the empty tank across from him.
The fish had been here, hadn’t it?
He couldn’t remember.
One minute here; the next, gone.
***
The computer. Why hadn’t anyone checked the computer? Hy picked up speed as she cycled along the Island Way, afraid that Jamieson might have the same thought and get to it before her. There were bound to be clues on it, something that would tell them where Abel was.
Her hands were shaking with excitement at what she might find out as she dashed up Gus’s front stairs. She wrenched her wrist tugging on the metal screen door. It was locked. How unusual. Then she remembered. Gus had gone to Charlottetown overnight. That, too, was unusual. So was the occasion. It was Gus’s seventieth eighth-grade reunion. All but one of the graduates were still alive. That made five. All grandmothers, Gus just barely, happily armed with photos of her latest accomplishment, Little Dottie, born since the women had last met. All the women, except Gus, were widowed.
Or was she? Gus had taken that doubt to Charlottetown, too.
***
“Do you have the fish?”
“What?”
“The fish. I thought you were getting a fish today.”
“Any fisherman knows you can’t predict if you’re going to make a catch.”
“You have the entire fisheries department at your disposal. All that, and you couldn’t catch a fish?”
“We did catch one. Threw it back.”
“Too small?”
“No, too big.”
There was a long silence on the end of the line.
“Couldn’t fit it in the tank.”
More silence. Too big? “How big?”
“Three-hundred-pounder, easy.”
“Can’t you get a tank that will hold it?”
“That window is closing.”
Ferguson didn’t pick up on the anxiety in Seamus’s voice – the fear of his boss’s return. Imminent. And inconvenient.
“If we catch another, we have to find somewhere
to put her.”
Ferguson stood up and looked down over the fields to the pond.
“There’s a lotta ‘ifs’,” Seamus persisted. “If we get another, if we can keep her alive, if we find somewhere to put her.” And if, he thought privately, he’d be able to transport a fish that big to Newfoundland. Seamus had no idea how he was going to do that. His confidence that he could pull this off was sinking. He didn’t feel like a hero right now.
Ferguson was shocked. So close. They were so close. “If…” he underlined the word with his tone. “…we get another, we’ll find somewhere.”
“Where?”
Ferguson had had it in mind all along. To get the fish here. Near him. The pond.
“The pond.”
“The pond?”
“More or less the natural habitat. We can use it as a holding tank.”
Seamus had to admit it was a possibility. It was a saltwater pond now, after last winter. Still – “Temperature can vary from one area to another. If the pond was right for cod, they’d be there already.”
“I think it’s our only option. The pond will be the ideal place,” Ferguson insisted. “You can just drive the fish in there.”
“You mean corral it?”
“Maybe. Get it on a line and chase it there. Or in a net and drag it there. I don’t care how you do it, just get it there.”
Seamus hung up, thinking The Hat Man might be useful. Move that cod out the old-fashioned way. It hadn’t worked thirty years ago, but, who knows, it might today.
He might need the old man after all.
***
The piece of land that Letitia and Ferguson had bought cradled the pond, from its northernmost to southernmost tips. This half share didn’t make it theirs. The pond, like the shore, belonged to the village. Not all the villagers were certain of that. Gladys Fraser assumed that if she owned that piece of property that hugged the pond, the pond would be hers, too. And why not? The person who owned the land on the other side of the pond was Jared MacPherson. When Ferguson found out the owner, Jared, was in jail, he went ahead and did what he wanted, without asking. Anyone.
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