by Will Hobbs
“Take your side again,” the captain hollered. “We gotta bring ’em in faster. The sea lions are onto us.”
I looked to our wake but couldn’t see any sea lions. As I swung into the cockpit and started to pull the port tip line, the skipper reached for the hayrack and pulled himself out of the cockpit. He braced his way across the rolling deck and disappeared into the wheelhouse. This was my chance to look around more carefully, with Tor away, to see if I could find where his mysterious metal plaque had gotten off to.
No luck. It wasn’t anywhere to be found. I looked up as the captain appeared at the wheelhouse door. He had a pocket lighter in one hand and what looked like a small stick of dynamite in the other. His face was contorted into a hard angry knot. Muttering darkly, he lit the bomb and tossed it over the side. A second after hitting the water, it exploded. At the back of our wake, two startled sea lions leaped halfway out of the water.
Our raiders with the big bearlike heads were Steller’s sea lions. Some of the bulls are bigger than the biggest bears in Alaska.
For the time being, they let us be. Maybe they dropped back to pursue a free lunch from the boat behind us on the drag.
The captain stayed sour even though we were catching salmon hand over fist. If his mood was the result of his back aching, I wished he would take some more Tylenol. His disposition was giving me some pains of my own, so I tried to cheer him up. “I never dreamed it could be like this!” I yelled after landing yet another one as long as my arm. Its head was three times the size of my fist.
Torsen looked startled, almost like he’d forgotten I was there. “It seldom is,” he replied, his weathered face slowly breaking into a smile as he watched me work my lines. “Doesn’t get any better than this.”
The bite finally tailed off in the early afternoon. The tide had ebbed, Tor explained, pulling the feed farther out to sea and the predator kings with it. We cleaned fish until one-thirty. “What do you say we fix some eggs,” he said finally.
After nine hours of work, it was time for breakfast.
“What’s the count?” Tor grunted from the galley as he washed his hands in the sink.
“A hundred and three kings, thirty-seven cohos.”
“That’s not half bad,” he said with a grin. “Not bad for a morning’s work.”
7
AFTER OUR AFTERNOON BREAKFAST, the fish quit biting in Veta Bay. We pulled our gear and the skipper headed south until we joined another small fleet of trollers off of Granite Point. We were soon working the drag between Granite and Cape Chirikof.
The action picked up again, and I landed and cleaned king salmon well into the evening. We were the last of the trollers to steer for Cape Chirikof’s polished limestone slopes. Motoring past a deep sea cave, we slipped inside a finger of water behind the bony tip of the cape and dropped anchor in the company of half a dozen other trollers. There was wind in the forecast; the rest of the boats had run for a more protected spot around the lee side of the island. “What do you say we fix something to eat?” Tor said.
While the salmon was baking, I gave the skipper’s library a good looking over. It was above his bunk and spanned its length—three spill-proof shelves full. Most of the books were about Alaska and Canada. Some were about trolling, going back to the earliest days of hand trolling from small skiffs. There were quite a few about the Russians in Alaska. I was paging through one of them when I spotted something familiar—a picture of a plaque a lot like the one I had seen on the boat. This one didn’t have a number, or the Russian writing, but it had a two-headed eagle. The caption said the photo was of a metal crest that was a gift from the Russians to the Tlingits.
Then it hit me.
Not only had Tor found me trespassing on his boat, he’d caught me looking at what must have been a valuable treasure. Maybe he’d taken me for a thief—maybe a thief looking for something very specific. I flipped the book around so he could see it from where he was working at the stove. “Look what I found,” I said.
Tor’s face hardened, but that was nothing new. I kept going. “It’s like yours, right? I saw something like this myself once, but it was on a totem pole. That’s pretty cool, that the Russians got the double-headed eagle from the Indians.”
Tor stared at me like I was dumb as a ling cod. “You got that backward. The Indians got it from the Russians.”
“Oh,” I said.
That was it. Tor didn’t say another word about the plaque. He just brought a platter of salmon to the table with some rice and sat down across from me. I avoided his eyes at first, wondering what new trouble I’d gotten myself into, but he seemed content to change the subject. “Are you sore from working down in the hold?” he asked.
I was more than a little relieved. “I can barely lift my fork,” I answered. “A hundred and forty-one kings, Tor. I can barely believe it. I suppose you’ve caught more than that in a day?”
“Close to three hundred once.”
“By yourself? How?”
“Just did it.”
“Over the years, how many kings make what you would call a good day?”
“I’m always trying to break fifty. Fifty is a good day.”
“And we caught a hundred and forty!”
“Sure, but the price is down, remember? These days you have to catch a hundred to make what you used to make catching fifty. So in reality, we caught seventy.”
“I guess it must be pretty discouraging.”
“I plead guilty to being cynical about our industry. If you’d been fishing as many years as I have, you would be, too.”
“I’m trying to work my numbers,” I explained. “Not on the cohos; I know they’re only paying thirty cents a pound. Any guesses what the average weight of our king salmon is running?”
“Close to seventeen pounds, dressed out.”
“What are they going to pay if we factor in number ones, number twos, and extra large?”
“On average, around ninety cents a pound.”
I reached for a pencil as he was serving the salmon. The fish was moist as can be, just the way I like it. Torsen had baked it in a mustard sauce and put slices of red onion on top. “Let’s see,” I said, “that’s about twenty-three hundred and eighty pounds of king salmon down in the hold, times ninety cents, would bring two thousand one hundred and forty-two dollars. Fifteen percent is my share, which would be…three hundred and twenty-one dollars. Can that be right?”
Torsen went back to eating and looked at me impatiently. “Sure, that’s right. Give yourself another ten or twenty bucks for the cohos.”
“That’s amazing! I’m already out of the red and into the black!”
“Eat up,” he said.
“Man, I can’t believe it! I picked the right boat, eh?”
“The other boats might be doing better.”
“No way—I’ve been watching. Say, how come you don’t play the radio out the deck speakers so you can hear what the other boats are saying about the bite?”
“Too distracting. It’s just talk, anyway. Guys complain they aren’t catching fish when you know full well they are, and vice versa. If they talk about gear that’s working, it might be to throw you off. The only time they tell the truth is among their own code group, and then it’s not on the regular frequency; it’s on their second radio that’s scrambled so nobody but them can pick it up. I tune into the weather when I’m in the wheelhouse. I pay attention to news about when the season might close. What else do I really need to know?”
“This salmon is as good as my mom’s,” I said, “and that’s saying something. She’d serve it with kelp pickles and beach asparagus, though.”
“Never had ’em.”
“You don’t know what you’re missing!”
“Prince of Wales Island has been pretty well logged off, hasn’t it?”
“Pretty much,” I said. “The logging communities went bust. Most of those folks left.”
“And the commercial fishing is going bust on account of all
the farmed salmon flooding the market. Prince of Wales must be hurting.”
“It is,” I said. “There’s government jobs, that sort of thing, sport fishing lodges…and there’s always subsistence. The subsistence families will be able to hang on.”
The big man looked irritated. “Is that what your parents want for you? Just to hang on living a subsistence life?”
“Not really,” I said, surprised by his reaction. “My sister thinks that’s what she wants, but she’s ten and doesn’t really know. My parents figure that I’ll probably find my way off the island, but I’m not so sure. I love Prince of Wales, and I’d hate to give up the fishing.”
“There’s no future in it.”
“Well, it would just be a sideline, that’s what I’m thinking. If I had a regular job the other nine months, like teaching for example, then the fishing wouldn’t be do or die.”
“Like that teacher from Craig does.”
“Exactly. Teaching might be the way to go. I get excited about learning stuff, and I like kids. Who knows, I might end up working with Julie.”
“I don’t suppose your parents can send you to college.”
“No, but I could maybe get some scholarships and loans, and partly work my way through. I used to think I would come home from college in the summers and make big money as a deckhand. Maybe the prices will come back up.”
“Don’t count on it.”
Enthusiastic, the man wasn’t. “Hey, Tor,” I said, “you’ve hardly told me anything about yourself.”
“Not much to tell. I catch fish, eat, sleep.”
“I was just wondering about where you grew up, your family, that kind of stuff.”
“Now you’re snooping again. Another time, maybe. It’s after ten. When I’m fishing, I’m in bed by nine-thirty.”
“I was just curious, that’s all.”
“I don’t pay you for your curiosity,” he growled, and lay down on his bunk. He was snoring before I’d even cleared the dishes. It was unbelievable, the man’s talent for falling asleep.
I scrubbed dishes to the tune of his snoring. It was hard to stand at the sink. That knife I imagined in my back seemed to have its tip in my spinal cord. Thinking about the plaque distracted me some, and I kept trying to get a handle on my moody captain. One minute he could be laughing and hauling in kings, the next he was so gloomy it scared me.
When the last dish was done, it was all I could do to climb down the ladder to my bunk.
8
ON FOUR AND A HALF HOURS of sleep, I was fishing again. We were the first to pull out of the hidey-hole behind Cape Chirikof, the first to drop our gear. Early on we caught a few kings, but then the bite went dead. The wind was out of the west, pushing bigger seas than I’d ever been on. When a troller opposite us was down in the trough of a swell, all you could see was its mast and the tops of its poles. Welcome to the Gulf of Alaska, Robbie.
I asked the captain if the big seas had anything to do with the kings making themselves scarce. Tor scowled. “The kings run deep. What’s going on at the surface has nothing to do with it.”
Then he squinted, seeming to stare at my hands. “What’s that on your glove?” he demanded.
On the thumb and forefinger of my right hand, there were smudges of black grease. “No wonder we aren’t catching anything,” he said.
“Must be from the gurdy bushings,” I muttered. I didn’t know why he was so upset. “I’ll have to watch it closer.”
“Get out of the way,” was all he said as he crowded into my corner of the cockpit. I had to squeeze past him and stand by helplessly as he began to pull my lines.
I still hadn’t figured out why he was pulling them—I didn’t have a fish on—but I found out soon enough. He found a spot of grease on each of the lines.
Tor wasn’t going to cut me any slack on this. He wouldn’t even look at me as he replaced the hootchies and cleaned the greasy spots off the steel fishing line. Then came the lecture. “Salmon can smell grease a mile off,” he said, his sharp eyes drilling into mine. “Keep in mind, kid, they can smell their way back to the exact stretch of whatever little creek they were hatched at, no matter that it’s a thousand miles from the ocean.”
It was pointless to make excuses, although fatigue would have been the first on my list. Sorry, I was about to say, but I knew sorry wouldn’t cut it. “I’ll watch it closer,” I said. “I won’t let this happen again.”
“Go get a new glove,” he ordered, not that I wouldn’t have anyway.
A while later we had a small flurry of kings, three on my side, two on his. After I’d cleaned mine, he came over to my side, pointed to one just as I was about to throw it forward into the rinse bin, and said, “That one legal?”
He’d shown me how he’d built the cleaning cradles exactly twenty-eight inches long, which was the legal minimum for kings. I had forgotten to check. With the skipper watching close, I flopped the fish back into the cradle, hoping he was wrong. He wasn’t; it fell short by an inch.
“Set that one aside down below,” he said, “so they don’t catch us trying to sell it. See if you can keep your mind on what you’re doing. Quit that daydreamin’ and do what I’m paying you to do.”
I’d been working like a mule ever since I got on his boat. I couldn’t believe he was accusing me of slacking off.
A dark cloud over my head, I went below to ice the few fish we’d caught. When I got back up top, Tor was landing salmon and the pole on my side was rattling, too. I moved across the deck as low as a crab, bracing all the way against the heavy rolling of the boat. Torsen had his eyes on me like I was a greenhorn about to take a swim. I dropped into the cockpit and started bringing up my tip line. I could feel his eyes on the back of my head. I tried to work faster than I should have. As I was hauling in a big king hand over hand, the boat pitched in the direction of the fish. All it takes is an instant of slack in the leader. Just that fast, the fish shook the hook and was gone. I looked in Tor’s direction. Naturally, he was watching.
My whole life, I’d never felt time go so slow. This one morning was like a life sentence.
It got worse. I’d never fished in that much wind. It blew the leaders around and made it tough to keep them from tangling with each other as I arranged them along the rail. At one point I thought I’d snapped a leader onto the wire in the gear tray but I’d missed. As soon as I let go, the entire spread, flasher and hootchie and all, plummeted to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
My highliner watched it go. He looked at me with undisguised contempt. He didn’t say a thing, just reached for one of his spare spreads and handed it to me.
Midday, we made sandwiches from cold cuts. Lunch took fifteen minutes and felt like fifteen hours. If Tor wanted to make me feel like a herring in the talons of an eagle, he was succeeding.
After we ate, we pulled the gear and ran north to Noyes Island and the Cape Addington Grounds. The wind quit and it turned flat calm. The sport boats appeared from the fishing lodges. The sun came out and you could see halfway to China. The bite picked up. Suddenly we had a couple dozen kings, and I quit moping. Just as suddenly, the action was over. Back and forth we worked the drag between the rocky foot of Addington to the big haystack rock to the north. Late in the afternoon the sport boats sped off, and the trollers had the evening light to themselves.
In all my life I had never seen such a spectacular sight as Cape Addington. I knew my mom would have loved to paint it. Trees with wind-tortured shapes clung to the crevices at the very top of the gray cliffs. Eons of winter gales had scoured the stone clean and so smooth you wished you could touch it. Along the tide line, the grays gave way to reds and oranges. To the south and east, the trees reached all the way to the base of a long arm curling off the cape. It was mostly composed of huge limestone blocks cut so squarely they might have fallen from an Incan wall.
My boss noticed I was admiring the view. “No finer cape in Alaska,” he grunted, “unless it’s Edgecumbe, north of Sitka. Addington
and Edgecumbe were both named by Captain Cook. Did you know that?”
“I didn’t,” I admitted.
“Seems like somebody who might be a teacher in southeast Alaska would at least be interested in the history.”
“I am,” I protested. I thought of that Russian plaque of his. I was way interested in that piece of history.
We managed to boat a few more fish. Just as I flopped a big king into the bin, I looked up and there was the Julie Kristine right across from us. And there she was, Julie Kristine herself, waving just like she’d said she would, then pumping her fist up and down to show she was excited about me landing fish. Her son, Bear, was doing the same. Her father, as big a man as Torsen, was a blur of motion on the far side of the cockpit, gaffing a king.
I waved back, and hollered so loud they might have even heard me.
Tor just stared as he popped his pain pills and washed them down.
I missed being on a family boat. No question, they were having a lot more fun.
Eight P.M. and the Storm Petrel was still on the drag, even though the fishing had gone completely dead. I sat at the wheelhouse table looking over the bow, and Torsen sat in his captain’s chair behind the wheel, staring straight ahead. I could pretty well guess what he was thinking. His back hadn’t seized up on him, and if it wasn’t going to, hiring me had been a mistake. I was like a weed in a perfect garden, just an annoyance. Every time he turned around, I was right there.
The Storm Petrel was a bigger boat than my family’s, but it sure felt smaller. And this was only our second day.
Tor studied a pink booklet, the tide tables, while glancing occasionally to the bow. From inside the wheelhouse of a troller, the fishing is easily monitored even though you can’t see the trolling poles. There are ropes rigged from the poles down to bungee cords that connect to the bow with little bells attached. When you’ve got fish on, the bungees jump and the bells ring.
These tattletales, as they’re called, had nothing more to tell that day. Dusk found us anchoring in Steamboat Bay, around the north point of Noyes Island. Torsen, back on his regular schedule, was asleep by nine-thirty. I stayed up only a few minutes longer to tabulate my earnings for the day, about seventy-five dollars.