by Fire
"What? Hey!"
They banked hard right and descended in a series of tight spirals that had Liam bracing both arms against the sides of the plane and praying for a quick, merciful end.
When he ventured to open his eyes again they were flying low and slow along the inner curve of the long beach, and Wy was cursing softly over his phones. "What's the matter?" he said, panicking again. "What's wrong?"
"This would be such a great business if it weren't for the goddamn fishermen," she said bitterly. "Look at that, I told that son of a bitch two barrels down and one barrel up with the gas pump on the standing barrel. Look down there--can you see any barrels standing up?"
Liam swallowed his gorge and leaned over to look out the window. The ground seemed to be moving by awfully fast to him, but he saw a dozen dumps of 55-gallon drums, from one to five barrels each. None of the barrels was standing upright.
"Well, hell," Wy said, and pulled the Cub around in a large left-hand circle and set it down neatly at the edge of the receding tide, about five minutes ahead of another Piper, a Tripacer this time, coming in right behind her. There were already three other planes on the beach ahead of them.
It wasn't the first beach landing Liam had made, but he had enough trouble with Anchorage International and two miles of paved tarmac stretching out in front of him; a slanted gravel beach was considerably harder on the nerves. Wy taxied to the nearest pile of drums and cut the engine. The Cub shuddered and the prop went from Liam's blurred lifeline to full stop. Wy folded the door out of the way and deplaned. "Come on, Campbell, let's top off the tanks."
"We haven't been in the air much over an hour," he said, climbing out gladly enough.
"With herring you top them off every chance you get," she informed him. "And the dentist didn't put a long-range tank on his plane." There was a pump and a wrench on the gravel next to the barrels. "Come on, help me roll this down." He joined her and they rolled one of the barrels to beneath the right wing and stood it on end. She went to work on the cap with the wrench.
"So," he said, feeding one end of the hose into the drum, "when do we know if or when we can go fishing?"
"Fish and Game said there might be an opening last night, not that there would be for sure. They'll be out here themselves already"--she nodded at the bay--"either on a boat or in a plane. Probably in a plane."
"Maybe the 206 taking off after us."
She nodded. "Maybe. Probably yesterday they got one of the fishermen to sample the herring, see if it's ripe."
"They trust what the fisherman tells them?" Liam said skeptically.
She gave him a tolerant look. "Why would he lie? He can't sell them green."
"Oh. Sure, that makes sense."
Wy fetched a stepladder from the back of the Cub and stood it beneath the wing.
She climbed the ladder, opened the tank, and fed the other hose in. "Pump," she said.
He pumped. The sun was up and playing hide-and-seek with the cumulus clouds scudding across the sky before a brisk wind. There was a light chop across the bay but nothing serious. From here the boats scattered across the water looked less like an armada and more like the residents of a small boat harbor, a forest of masts and booms on the horizon. "How do they test them?"
"What?"
"How do they test the herring?"
"Oh. They come up on a ball of them and dipnet some out. They break the fish open to look at the roe. When they're ripe, or just about to spawn, the eggs turn a little yellow."
"Yum," Liam said.
"Hey," she said, draining the last of the aviation gas out of the hose before closing the tank back up, "we don't have to eat 'em." She gave the cap a last twist, and grinned down at him. "We just have to help catch 'em and sell 'em."
He couldn't help grinning back. She stood at the top of the ladder, her face and form outlined against the blue sky, wisps escaping her braid to curl around her face, all the hidden lights in her dark blond hair glinting in the sun, her brown eyes alive with mischief. She looked so desirable to him that he knew a sudden wish to pull her off that ladder and tumble her onto the beach. His flesh rose at the very thought. Down, boy, he said to himself, and made a production out of removing the gas pump and closing up the drum. "So most of the herring goes to Japan?"
"Pretty much all of it." He heard her folding up the stepladder and replacing it in the back of the plane. "The Japanese like their seafood, bless them, and they consider herring roe to be a special delicacy."
"Hence the fourteen hundred dollars a ton."
"This year anyway," she said. "Last year it was only a thousand."
"Only," Liam muttered.
"Hey!"
They both turned to see a large man with a red face plowing toward them through the gravel. "What the hell do you think you're doing!"
"Gassing up our plane," Wy said mildly. "What's it to you?"
"That's my gas you're using!"
Wy looked from him to the fuel dump to the dozen other identical fuel dumps within eyesight along the beach. "How can you tell?"
"I told my guys to drop three barrels right about here, and a gas pump and a ladder with them!" The man seemed incapable of lowering his voice. The guy towered over her--towered over Liam, for that matter--and outweighed the two of them combined by at least fifty pounds. He had fists the size of rump roasts and shoulders like cinder blocks. He looked like the Incredible Hulk, and Liam didn't want to make him mad.
Neither did Wy. "Sorry," she said with an ingratiating smile, "we thought this was our dump. We told our guy to put ours here, too. And I brought our ladder with me." She pointed. "There's another three barrels right up the beach, with a ladder lying next to them."
The big man turned to look. "Shit, that must be another half a mile up!" He turned and glared at her. "This would be a hell of a business if it weren't for the goddamn fishermen, wouldn't it?"
"A hell of a business," Wy agreed, and he plowed off to yet another Super Cub that looked far too small to hold him, climbed in, and sprayed gravel all over them as he taxied down the beach.
"He's going to dig himself in if he's not careful," Wy said, observing the maneuver dispassionately. "Yup. Come on."
The big man was out of the little plane and cursing it with all his might when they arrived. Wy went to one strut, nodded Liam to the tail, and waited politely for the other pilot to finish relieving his feelings and take the other strut. He did, eventually, and they bulled the little craft up the beach to the next fuel dump. It was only a few hundred feet farther, but the sand and gravel were loose and when they were done Liam wanted a real shower and wanted it now.
He had to settle for a couple of sticks of beef jerky and a Hershey bar. "First class all the way," he said wryly. He washed down the jerky with bottled water. "So, is this pretty much the way the day went with Bob DeCreft?"
Her head snapped around and she gave him a sharp look. "Pretty much," she said cautiously. "The first warning announcement by Fish and Game came at ten a.m., the second at noon, the third at two. By then, the fuel dump was dry and Bob and I flew straight back to Newenham."
"Uh-huh. And Bob did pretty much what I'm doing, sat in the backseat watching for planes?"
"Pretty much."
"How long were you up?"
"Including stops to refuel? Maybe eight, ten hours."
"So, no herring caught that day. That's why they're opening today?"
"Why they're maybe opening today," she corrected him. "We did get a short opener three days ago in Togiak. April twentyninth, the earliest herring season has ever been. Didn't come anywhere near the quota, though, which is why we get another shot at it."
"When is herring season usually?"
"Another two weeks or so. Middle of May, sometimes later."
"Why is it so early this year?"
"They're saying El Nino--you know, that warm current of water in the equatorial Pacific that sometimes moves too far north and west and throws everybody's weather out of kilter?"
>
"No snow in Anchorage? Floods in North Dakota?"
She nodded. "That's it. It's affecting more than just the weather. They caught a marlin in Puget Sound, tuna off Kodiak Island."
"Herring in Bristol Bay two weeks before time."
She smiled, clearly pleased with her exceptional pupil.
"You know, last night when I was looking out your window I saw a king jump in the river. It occurs to me it's early for king salmon, too."
"Way too early."
"Wy, did Bob say or do anything out of the ordinary that day? Did he have a fight with anyone on the ground?" Liam hooked a thumb over his shoulder at the big man refueling his Cub. "Duke it out with a pilot over a misplaced fuel dump, maybe?" She shook her head. "Okay, did he get into an argument with anyone on the radio?"
"No. Remember, the spotter can't talk to the boats, only to the pilot."
"So did he get into a fight with you?"
Her hesitation was infinitesimal, and he would have missed it if he hadn't been watching her so closely. "No."
He gave a long stretch. She watched him like a mouse waiting for the cat to pounce. "So it was just a normal day in the air?"
"As normal as it gets during herring spotting. Speaking of spotting." She checked her watch, and this time there was no mistaking the relief in her words. "Two hours to the announcement, or so we hope. We'd better get back in the air."
"Why do we have to go up so soon?"
"We need to do some scouting," she said, and waved him forward. "Find out where those little silver bastards hang when they're making babies. Come on, come on, let's move like we got a purpose."
* * *
ELEVEN
So they moved like they had a purpose. The Cub raised up off the beach smoothly and without incident, Liam helping in his usual fashion by clutching the edge of his seat. They headed south down the coast for about thirty minutes before making a one-eighty and retracing their steps. Fifteen minutes later she pointed out the left side. "Look," she said. Even over the headphones her voice sounded tense with excitement.
"For what?" he said, forcing himself to look out.
"Herring."
"What do they look like?"
"Big dark patches in the water. If you see some, poke and point."
"Okay."
All Liam saw was an endless expanse of green with a shoreline that looked too far away, a couple of boats cruising through, their wakes zigzagging with apparent aimlessness, and three other small planes at one, three, and eight o'clock, flyspecks on a light blue horizon. Then there was a glint of something in the distance, at about ten o'clock. He focused on that spot, and saw it again. "Hey?"
"Poke and point," she said, and he poked her in the shoulder and pointed past her left eye.
"Attaboy," she said. "Let's take a look." She made a slow left bank that from a distance would have looked as aimless as the course of the boats below. Ten minutes later they were drawing a perfect circle in the sky, as if they hadn't a care in the world. It was herring, all right, a dark patch with occasional flashes of silver as the fish hit the surface.
"Too small to bother Wolfe with," Wy said. "He's high boat; he's not interested in less than the offspring of an entire species."
"You don't like him," Liam said, looking at the back of her head, which didn't reveal much.
"Nope," she said.
"Then why work for him?"
"Because he's high boat," she said, in a tone that made him feel a fool for asking. "I'd work for the devil himself if he'd been high boat for herring for four years running."
"Fourteen hundred dollars a ton," Liam said.
"We can only hope," Wy said.
They found two other schools--Wy called them skeins--both too small to bother with. One already had a couple of boats sitting on it, waiting for the go-ahead to drop their nets. The second was being scouted by another plane, a Cessna 172 on floats. Liam knew that because they got close enough for him to read the manufacturer's lettering along the side.
"Knock that crap off, Miller," Wy ordered, and it took Liam a moment to realize she was talking to the pilot of the other plane. The 172 waggled its wings and banked hard left rudder. It was a little above and a little ahead of the Cub, and Liam had an excellent view of the bottom of its floats through the skylight in the roof of the Cub as it roared overhead. "Sweet Jesus," he muttered, forgetting his mike was hot.
"Get used to it," Wy said. "And don't forget, when you see a plane out of the pattern, don't be shy about pointing it out. Yell; slap me if that's what it takes to get my attention. Got it?"
"Got it," Liam said, clenching his teeth as the Cub pulled what felt like ten g's as Wy circled to head back down the coast.
"Good."
"Tell me again about the pattern."
"There's really only two rules. One is, always circle to your left. Two is, always keep the beach on our left."
"Explain it to me again."
With saintlike patience, Wy explained it to him again. "If we're all circling left, we're all circling left. Minimizes the chance of collision with somebody circling right. As we circle, we come up on and cross the shoreline. As we cross the shoreline, if we keep the beach on our left, it keeps us in the circle and going the same direction."
Liam realized and appreciated her patience, but he needed the repetition. The rules were safety rules. The safer Liam felt, the less distracted he would be, and the less distracted, the more observant. Observant in particular of planes that didn't circle to the left and didn't keep the beach always on their left.
At ten the radio crackled into life, and the same lifeless voice heard the night before came on. "This is the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. There will be an announcement concerning a herring opener in the Nushagak District for both drift and seine at twelve noon, May 2, on this frequency. I repeat, this is the Alaska Department of--"
"The Alaska Department of Hurry Up and Wait," Wy finished for him. "Okay, that's it, the point of no return. Time to head back to the beach and gas up." She stood the Cub on one wing, Liam grabbed for his stomach, and they headed back the way they had come. Below passed boats too numerous to count, two and three and four and five at a time, each group guided by its own spotter. Wy shook her head and said disapprovingly, "Five boats is too many for one plane to spot for. So is four. Three is about right. Two would be better."
"Why?"
"Because you've already got too much to do. You've got to fly the plane, look out for other planes, spot the herring, track the herring, and advise your boats. Advising three boats where to put their nets is plenty. Advising five, something else suffers."
They set down on the beach without incident, although the tide was considerably higher, and the available landing strip, to Liam's terrified eye, considerably narrower as a result. Someone had been at their fuel dump while they were gone; the first barrel was empty. The other two hadn't been tapped, and Wy took the discovery philosophically. "Probably whoever took it will let me know and reimburse me."
"How do you know?" Liam looked up and down the beach again. "It doesn't look like any of the dumps are marked. How does anyone know which gas is his? If you're taking somebody else's gas, or he's taking some of yours, how do you know?"
She shrugged, getting the stepladder out again. "Happens every year. The dumps aren't well marked; we're all using the same gas; everybody's in a hurry. After the season closes, the pilot will put the word out that he took some gas he thought was his and turned out not to be, and who can he pay back?"
Liam thought about it, working the pump arm, listening to gas slosh through the hose. "I'm not going to get this, am I," he said finally.
She tossed him a cheerful grin. "Nope. But don't worry about it, I've never been shot at for thieving." The grin flashed again. "Not yet, anyway." She topped off the wing tank and closed it up. She paused, up on the ladder. "What's that?"
"What's what?" He looked up from closing the drum and saw her pointing at the edge of the bea
ch where it began to slope down. There was a thick stand of tall ryegrass bending gently in the breeze.
She scampered down the ladder and hared up the beach. "Wow, look at that!"
He came panting up behind to find her burrowing into the soil with both hands. "Wy, what is it?"
"Help me dig!"
He saw a round shape emerging, and fell back with an explosive sigh. "Jesus, I thought it was a dead body at least."
"Come on, help me dig!"
He resigned himself, and helped her dig.
It was a glass float, one of thousands and over the years probably millions that had broken loose from Japanese fishing nets and floated across the Pacific Ocean to wash ashore on Alaska's coast. The usual find was four inches in diameter. This one, a clear green unbroken sphere with tiny bubbles of air caught inside the shell, was over eighteen inches across.
"Score!" Wy said, sitting back on her heels and beaming.
Liam remembered the glass floats from the Cub's inventory. He sat back and brushed the dirt from his hands. "Beachcombing's part of herring spotting, I take it."
"Beachcombing is a part of everything," Wy said severely, getting to her feet. "You never know what you're going to find--a glass float, a walrus tusk, an eagle feather. A case of Spam."
"A case of Spam?"
She nodded. "I found one last year, washed up on shore south of here. The box was falling apart but the cans were okay. We're still eating them." She held the float up by its netting, admiring it. "I bet I could get a hundred bucks for this."
"You sell them?"
"Five bucks for the little ones, seven-fifty if they've still got their nets. And on up, depending on what kind of shape they're in and if they've still got their netting on." She grinned. "I get a lot of tourists my way, Liam. They don't call themselves that, of course, they are fishermen and hunters and hikers and like that, but they're tourists all the same, from Outside and overseas and all over the world. Most of them have never seen something like this. I've got a basketful of them in my shack at the airport."