by Will Hobbs
On our third day the early bite off of Addington was promising, with Tor landing fish in a dense fog. I felt vindicated: he wouldn’t have been able to fish at all without a deckhand in the wheelhouse to watch the radar monitor. I also did the steering, from the captain’s chair, avoiding phantom boats that were close but invisible.
The fog lifted late morning. With the tide out, the fishing was worse than poor. Tor was back in his captain’s chair, rubbing his beard and staring over the bow. Something about his expression reminded me of an Irish lord, a spiny rockfish that scares off predators with its looks.
I killed the downtime reading one of his Alaska books.
If I could have charted Tor’s moods, it would have been one crazy graph. Over lunch, to my surprise, he started talking about himself and his family. He was born in Bella Coola, British Columbia, a fishing community founded by Norwegian immigrants. “It looks exactly like a fjord in Norway,” Tor said fondly. “Huge cliffs and hanging waterfalls above the valley floor. Better than Norway on account of the gigantic red cedars.”
Tor still had two sisters living there, and a third who had moved to Florida. “Were you ever married?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said slowly. “Her name was Marie. Her folks had moved up to Bella Coola from Washington State when she was a couple years out of high school. Bought the town’s only general store. I used to hang around the store so I could talk to her. Marie was different from the other girls I’d grown up with. She wanted to be out on the water every chance she got. A born sailor, she was, and she loved the work.”
“She liked to fish?”
“That goes without saying. We got married and trolled together for five years out of Bella Coola.”
“Did you have any kids?”
“We had a daughter, Grace. She loved going out on the boat with us. When Grace got a little older, closer to school age, Marie decided that we ought to move down to Washington. Grace would have cousins to play with. Marie’s sister lived down there, in Anacortes. So that’s what we did.”
“Did you quit trolling then?”
“No, I kept trolling out of Anacortes, sometimes down the Oregon coast as far as San Francisco, but mostly up to Alaska. Alaska has always been my favorite.”
I wasn’t sure I should ask my next question. He’d been talking about his wife like she was in the past. “Are you still with Marie?”
“Lost her,” he said, and looked away.
I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t know what to say. “What about Grace?” I asked.
“She lives in Port Townsend. That’s less than an hour from Port Angeles, where I live. She’s been wanting me to move closer to her, even though we don’t get along all that great. She’s always nagging me to get something done about my back. She’s a nurse, so she’s inclined to think cutting on it will fix everything. I’m not so sure.”
“It’s good to have people worrying about you, I suppose. Shows they care.”
“I guess, but I’m not as stove up as she thinks.” Torsen got up, fixed us both mugs of coffee, then sat back down. “Biggest problem with Grace is, she lost her mother on account of me.”
I was in over my head. I held my hot coffee mug in both hands and stared into it.
When I didn’t say anything, the old-timer, looking straight ahead over the bow, said, “Grace was in the wheelhouse with me, twelve years old, when I lost her mother off the back of the boat.”
“Tor, I’m—”
“It was off the Oregon coast. Rough water, but rough water was nothing new to her. Marie liked to work the back of the boat. Grace and I were in the wheelhouse and I had the radio going. Maybe if I hadn’t been listening to the fishermen chatter on the VHF, I would have heard Marie yell out. I never heard a thing. There were other boats in the area…. I made my best guess where we’d been when she went over. All the fishing boats searched, the Coast Guard searched…. We never found her. Sometimes that happens, the sea just doesn’t give a body up.”
I was so stunned I couldn’t speak. I don’t know why, but I was picturing the bright orange tentacles of the octopus that almost pulled me into the ocean when I was three. I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose one of my family off the Chimes. I just know I would never be the same.
“I’m sorry,” was all I could say.
To my huge relief, the tattletales started jumping and ringing. We were back to fishing. We had a decent evening bite, and so did the sea lions.
Right when the bite was going good, one of those huge Steller’s lions popped up in our wake with one of our kings in its jaws, shaking that big fish like it was a rag doll. The sea lions eat all but the salmon’s head, cleverly avoiding the hook. The leader usually breaks close to the trolling wire; you lose the entire spread.
“I’ll take care of this one,” I told Tor, climbing out of the cockpit before he could. In the wheelhouse, I didn’t see Tor’s lighter next to the little pile of bombs he kept ready at the table. I reached for a box of barnburner matches instead.
I had to be quick, and I knew I’d never be able to light the match out on the deck. The wind had come up. I lit the match right there at the table.
The boat pitched just as I was reaching with my free hand for one of the bombs. I dropped my match and it fell to the table—a hair away from the tips of two of the fuses.
Tor had already told me about a guy who lost his hand to one of these things. They were called bombs for a reason. I slammed my hand down on the table, knocking the match to the floor. I looked in the direction it went, and there was Tor filling up the doorway.
“You fool kid!” he thundered. “You could have blown up the wheelhouse and sunk my boat!”
9
I HAD A BAD NIGHT. I couldn’t shake the image of the captain, furious at me, yelling angry words, then storming off into a cold silence. In my dreams he was towering over me, threatening to shove me into the freezing waves.
I woke to drizzle across the face of Steamboat Bay. A long, raw day of fishing was in store. So far we’d been working dry, getting away with murder. Now it was back to normal in rainy Southeast.
My mind’s weather was just as gloomy. Tor didn’t want me aboard and I didn’t want to be there. I’d be doing us both a favor if I called this off.
When Tor, over donuts, started talking about selling the fish we had, then heading north for the grounds off of Coronation Island and the west coast of Baranof Island, I went with my gut. “I’m thinking I’ll get off at Craig, when you go in to sell,” I announced.
I was surprised by how stunned he looked, like a fish hit with a gaff club. “Get off? I thought you signed on for king season.”
“I did. But I’m thinking about changing my mind.”
“Bad weather, is that it? Rainy day blues?”
“I’m used to working in rain—we get ten or twelve feet a year in Protection. I kind of miss my family, I guess. The fishing doesn’t look like it’s going to be that great, and—”
“Hold on there. Four days, and you want to go home? Homesick, are you? You miss your mother, I bet.”
“And my sister and my father,” I said, trying to ignore his sarcasm.
“Fishing doesn’t look like it’s going to be that great? How can you tell? We’ve only gotten started.”
“They might close the season in a few days.”
“Or they might not. We’ve listened every evening. There’s no talk of that.”
“Well, there’s another reason.”
“And what’s that?”
“I’ve been making too many mistakes.”
“What are you talking about?”
I named them for him, from the grease on my glove to the sea lion bombs.
“That’s all you can come up with?” he growled.
“Isn’t that enough? I almost blew up the boat last night!”
“Well, you didn’t, and you won’t make that mistake twice. You’ve been a big help to me.”
“You never said so�
��.”
The highliner seemed genuinely astonished. “What do you want from me? You’re sixteen years old. You need me to pat you on the head and tell you you’ve been a good boy? Is that what you want?”
“No, no, I—”
“I think I know what this is really about. You’re thinking you won’t make any money, am I right? To start saving for college or whatever?”
“It wasn’t realistic. Julie warned me.”
“What does she know? You could make real good money, on this boat, this king season, if you weren’t a quitter. Is that what you are, a quitter?”
“Not really.”
“I’m not even going to give you the chance to quit. I’m holding you to king season, like you signed on for. Forget about getting off in Craig. I’m not going to sell in Craig.”
It was my turn to be surprised. “Where will you sell?”
“I’m not going in. This first round, I’ll sell offshore, to a tender. The Angie is anchored in Kelly Cove, around the back of Noyes Island.”
This news hit me hard. I couldn’t get off his boat even if I wanted to. I felt seasick—I never get seasick. “You really think the fishing’s going to pick up?”
“Look, whether it does or not, you can still make some money.”
Tor seemed determined to keep me on the boat. “I give up,” I said. “I’m totally baffled. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Your time has come.”
“My time for what?”
“To learn about that Russian plaque you’re so interested in.”
Tor got up and went over to his bunk. From under the foot of his mattress, he pulled out the metal plate. He set it on the table and pushed it in my direction.
“You’ll appreciate this, being as you’re part Russian. Go ahead, feel it, touch it. Looks old, doesn’t it?”
“It does.”
“Well, it is. You’re looking at only the third possession plaque ever discovered. It’s the real deal.”
“Possession plaque? What’s that mean?”
“See this writing down here? In Russian it says, ‘This land belongs to Russia.’ You ever been in the Bishop’s House Museum, the old Russian Bishop’s House in Sitka?” His eyes were gleaming.
“I went there once. I’ve been in the Russian cathedral, too.”
“Forget about the cathedral. The Bishop’s House has a copy on display—behind Plexiglas—of Possession Plaque Number 12. The original is locked up in a safe somewhere. It’s too valuable to be shown to the public, especially since it was the only one ever found.”
“Until this one?”
“No, until Number 15.”
“Who found Number 15?”
“I did.”
“How about this one—Number 13?”
“I did. Both have the double-headed eagle crest, which makes them even more valuable. Number 12, the one in Sitka, doesn’t have it. They weren’t all made exactly the same.”
“Your two—how did you find them?”
“It wasn’t easy,” the highliner said evasively. He appeared to be in uncharted waters.
Now that he’d told me this much, I was dying to know more. “I mean, where did you find them?”
“You don’t need to know that,” he snapped, like a dog over its food dish.
“Okay,” I said. “How about the one they have in Sitka? Where was that one found?”
“About six miles north of town. They dug it up back in 1935 at the original site of Russian Sitka.”
“The fort the Tlingits demolished?”
“So you know a little history after all. That’s right—St. Michael’s Redoubt. The fort was built in 1799, and the Tlingits weren’t too happy about it. Your native ancestors had been fighting tooth and nail to keep the white men—the Americans, the British, the Russians—from getting a toehold on their lands. They were happy to swap furs for guns and knives and cookware, but then they just wanted the intruders to go back to wherever they’d come from. It was the Russians they were especially afraid of. The Russians had been enslaving the people from the Aleutian Islands to hunt sea otters for them ever since Bering’s discovery of Alaska back in 1741. The elite in China were paying more for a single sea otter pelt than a working man could make in a year.”
“I never understood how so few Russians could enslave so many hundreds of hunters.”
“Easy. ‘Follow our gunship in your kayaks or we kill all the women and children back in the village.’”
“Okay, I got it. They had cannons.”
“By 1799, the sea otters were all but extinct in the Aleutians, and pretty well wiped out around Kodiak and southcentral Alaska. The Russians moved on to where there were plenty. They got a toehold in the islands of southeast Alaska, the homeland of the Tlingits.”
“Who fought back.”
“With a vengeance. Alexander Baranof, the head of the Russian-American Company, was away when the Tlingits stormed the fort in 1802. They leveled it. But in 1804, Baranof returned with a bigger and better gunship and hundreds of his Aleut slaves. The Tlingits fought hard, until one night they retreated. Baranof built his new fort on the best high ground available—the Tlingits’ former village—and ringed it with cannons. The Tlingits were never enslaved, but they did come around to trading with Baranof. They’d already been trading with the Americans—the ‘Boston men’—for more than a decade.”
“What’s this all about? Where do the possession plaques fit in?”
Torsen looked at me long and hard, as if trying to make up his mind about me. If he didn’t trust me, why was he telling me all this?
“You made this your business,” he said with a cold stare, “snooping around on my boat like you did.”
A chill went down my spine. “I thought we could forget that.”
“History and eggs, neither can be unscrambled. Just listen. You’re involved, we can’t change that. Maybe it will come out to your benefit. In the Bishop’s House, they’ll tell you there were twenty plaques all together. There are records of how many, but not where they were planted.”
“Planted?”
“That’s right, buried in the ground. Each had its number engraved on it, along with the words ‘This land belongs to Russia.’ They knew about the Spanish exploring up here not so long after Bering’s discovery, and they knew about Captain Cook’s search for the Northwest Passage in 1778. They knew that another English captain, Vancouver, had charted all these islands and waters in the early 1790s.”
“Vancouver named Port Protection,” I said. “He ducked in there to ride out a storm.”
Tor nodded gruffly at my interruption, then plowed ahead. “The Russians were eager to take possession of as much of the sea otter habitat as they could before the U.S., England, or Spain did. They made twenty of these plaques, and planted them along the northwest coast, in order to stake their claim.”
“If the plaques were buried, how would the other countries know that the land had been claimed?”
Torsen laughed. “You have to get into their mindset. Spain and some of the other colonial powers had been doing the same thing for centuries. Theoretically, it was so they could trump some Johnny-come-lately. Let’s say a ship’s captain was about to claim the area for his own country. They could dig up the plaque for him and say, ‘Look here, fellow, we’ve been here since way back.’”
“But there’s no date on this thing.”
“My guess is, the Russians left that out on purpose.”
“Because the plaques were made after the Spanish, the English, and the Americans were already in the area?”
“That’s what I’m thinking.”
“You found Number 13 and Number 15. How?
With a sly smile, he said, “An antique dealer I know put me on to them. He has a warehouse in Port Angeles. It’s small, but he moves a lot of stuff through it. He hits every garage sale and antique auction within a hundred miles. A couple of years back, in Port Townsend, he came by an old sea chest with
the imperial eagle of czarist Russia on its clasp.”
“I’ll bet that was valuable.”
Torsen shrugged. “Not like you might think. It had to be restored; some fool had kept it in a leaky woodshed. On account of the rusty Russian eagle, it was appraised at three hundred dollars. The owner wanted four hundred. The antique dealer bought it for three fifty. By the time he got it home, he was thinking it was heavier than it appeared, and he was wondering why that was.”
“Two of the plaques were hidden inside?”
“No, but something else was, in a false bottom.”
Timing being everything to a fisherman, Torsen paused, then set the hook. “The trunk’s false bottom concealed a journal, a very old journal from Russian America. A journal that records where the plaques were hidden.”
I couldn’t believe it. “This is amazing. And now you’ve got the journal?”
“I’ve got the journal,” Tor said gravely.
“You must have had to pay through the nose for it.”
“Not at all,” Tor said with a grin. “You see, I’m that antique dealer. That’s what I do with my winters down in Port Angeles. I sold Number 15 already.”
“For how much?”
Torsen laughed. “More money than you’ve ever seen, but less than this one’ll bring, and the next one.”
“The next one?”
“That’s where you come in, Robbie. In addition to the fishing, of course. Are you up for a little adventure? These plaques aren’t so easy to locate, and you could help, especially if my back goes out on me. I found this Number 13 a couple of weeks ago. Number 15, I found that last year. Now listen carefully. If we find another one, I’ll double whatever you make fishing. That’s why you don’t want to quit me and go home to your mother.”
There was more going on here than I could figure out. I held back, despite the pull of the plaque and the money.
Torsen took offense. “Well?” he demanded. “What kind of fool are you? Aren’t you trying to make as much money as you can?”