The River Killers

by Bruce Burrows

  We saw the brass purse rings appearing out of the depths. “Coming up,” I yelled, picking up the hairpin. Billy stopped the drum and ran the spoolers all the way over to our side. Christine slowed the pursing winch. The purse line had formed a “V” down into the water. But as the last of the slack was pulled out of it, the “V” was stretched into a straight line with the purse rings pulled neatly into a bunch. At this point, I yelled, “Whoa!” and Christine stopped the winch. I rammed the hairpin through the rings, threading them like rings on a crooked finger.

  “Going up,” I yelled and Christine activated the boom winch, which wound in the cable attached to the hairpin. We lifted it so that the hairpin and rings were suspended about two feet above the cap rail.

  “By Christ, we’ve got ’em now,” Mark yelled. And we did. Barring accidents such as tears in the net or the cork line sinking, the fish were trapped. And it looked like there were lots of them.

  “Drum slow,” ordered Mark. “Get the skiff around and pull some corks.”

  Fergie and I jumped back into the skiff and pulled it around to the other side of the Maple Leaf. We started pulling corks into the skiff, so the net wouldn’t drift around the bow of the big boat, which would make impossible drumming in more net. As Billy continued to drum slowly, the circle of net drew ever smaller. The fish were concentrated in a smaller and smaller bag. They began to boil in the net like a single writhing creature. I’d never before seen a set this big.

  The weight of the fish was threatening to sink the net so we tied the corkline to the skiff. The fabric of the net was rigid with strain. The tons of fish in the net were threatening to rip the mesh. “Hold ’er!” Mark yelled. “We’ll never pull this over. Let’s braille ’em.”

  Fergie and I leapt back out of the skiff again and onto the deck of the Maple Leaf. I was beginning to feel like a sand flea, leaping from one warm body to another. But I might have become a very rich sand flea. Getting a set so big that you had to braille was rare. And getting that big a set of sockeye, the money fish, was like winning the lottery. There were only a couple more moves to complete and then we could start hauling them aboard.

  There were still six rings suspended on the hairpin. We needed to use that winch line, so we dropped the hairpin and tied off the six rings to the cleat by the drum. Then, after detaching the hairpin, we strapped the net and, with Billy using the spoolers to pull slack off the drum, we pulled one end of the bag high into the air.

  God, that felt good. The net pulled up to the boom was like a flag signal to the rest of the fleet: “We’ve got a big one. Eee hah!!” And we began drying up.

  Drying up entailed pulling up all the slack web in the net so as to concentrate the fish into a brailleable mass. And concentrate us as well, for visions of sugarplums were threatening to disrupt our careful moves. But by God, there wasn’t much slack. Our net formed a bag almost one hundred feet deep. And the only reason we couldn’t pull up slack web was because there wasn’t any. The whole damn bag was solid with fish. This was so good it was scary.

  So we strapped the bight of the net we’d pulled up with the single fall, secured it to a cleat, and then dropped the line. And attached that line to the brailler. “Okay, guys. Let’s start dipping them.”

  And we did. Using the brailler, a dip net raised and lowered by the single fall, we repeatedly scooped into the bag of fish we’d gathered by the side of the boat. Again and again, we lifted braillers quivering with sockeye out of the water and into our hatch. There they fell into an ice and water slush that would keep them fresh and palatable and occasionally alive until the point of delivery. And we counted the scoops. We were, after all, mercenaries.

  Each brailler held, conservatively, seventy-five fish at a six-pound average. In those days, we were getting a buck eighty a pound for sockeye. So by the time we’d dumped fifty braillers into our hatch, we’d reached a gross value of forty thousand five hundred dollars. The standard crew share, a union agreement from fifty years before, was seven/elevenths of the value of the catch after fuel and grub were deducted. There were five of us so our individual split worked out to almost thirteen percent of the gross. Already I’d made over five grand and there were still lots of fish in the net. I’d be able to pay my entire tuition at Simon Fraser University in the fall and maybe not have to work in the campus cafeteria.

  Not bad for what was now approaching two hours of work. But it was this conception of huge amounts of money for short periods of work that underlay much of the animosity that the public held for commercial fishermen. Never mind that we’d already fished for almost three months and had made next to nothing. And there were the previous months of network and boat work in preparation for the season. Theoretically that should have been paid work, but the reality was that it often became a condition of keeping your job. So I didn’t feel guilty in the least that we’d finally, finally cashed a winning lotto ticket. In fact, I felt pretty damn good.

  By this time, we were all sweating from the effort of pulling the brailler through the bag of fish, lifting and swinging it over the hatch, dumping the fish, and then dragging the brailler back to dip it one more time into the writhing mass of trapped fish. We were starting to shed our hot and smelly rain gear, settling into a rhythm, and abandoning ourselves to the wet and slime. It was probably by about the seventy-fifth brailler that we noticed the strange fish. It was actually Christine who saw it, and it was purely by chance. Every once in a while when we dumped a bag of fish, some would miss the hatch and spill onto the deck. And one of those semi-escapees was the weird one. It was twice the size of a normal sockeye, and misshapen. The head and forward body looked like a deck bucket. The nether parts tapered to a serpent-like tail. The color was a dull, sickly green rather than the vibrant, healthy green of a normal sockeye. Despite the deformities, it somehow demanded recognition as a sockeye in the same way that a six-legged cow fetus is still unmistakably bovine.

  When Christine pointed it out, we all stared at it and gave our heads a collective shake. There were a few attempts at identification; most centering around improbable crosses between salmon species, or even hybrids between salmon and other fish such as wolf eels. But we quickly laid it aside to ponder over later, and went back to work.

  By the time we’d brailled all the salmon out of the net, it was ten at night, four hours after the closure of the fishery, and we were exhausted but euphoric. The Maple Leaf C was lower in the water than I’d ever seen her. Water was coming in through the scuppers rather than draining out. The other seine boats steaming by had all saluted us with congratulatory blasts on their whistles and thumbs-up from their crews, but their wakes were beginning to present a hint of danger. As low as we were in the water, it wouldn’t take much to heel us over past the point of recovery. We guessed we had more than seventeen thousand fish aboard, over one hundred thousand pounds, almost all of it from that one amazing set.

  It’s a bit strange to me now, thinking back on how tired and delirious we all were as we de-rigged and Mark slowly turned the boat toward Alert Bay, that anyone even noticed the Frankenfish, stuck in the scuppers and in danger of being washed overboard. Billy grabbed it, ran a string through its gills and tied it to the deck winch. Just so, he explained, he could show it to the other crews on the weekend. It dangled there, one bulging eye staring at us reproachfully as we took off the rest of our rain gear and crowded into the galley. As I gave it a final glance before closing the galley door, I noticed the tag. A red plastic strip was threaded through the anal fin. I looked closer and at one end of the tag I made out the characters “PC-102.” Strange. What the hell was a fish like that doing wearing a tag? I grabbed a pair of Vise-Grips off the tool shelf and clamped them onto the tag. I started to pull the tag out, then thought better of it. In this case, the tag should stay with the fish. I released the Vise-Grips and idly noted the grid of indentations they’d left on the plastic tag.

  Mark slammed a forty pounder of vodka onto the galley table and went back to the
wheelhouse. The rest of us sloshed healthy amounts into coffee mugs and grinned at each other in a wordless toast. We slumped on the bench around the table and began the traditional bantering about how many fish we had. Normally we all guessed an amount and whoever was closest would get ten or twenty bucks from the losers. This week, feeling stakey, we increased the bet to fifty dollars a head.

  When we’d all stated our guesses, we began to speculate in earnest about the weird fish, quickly named Igor, which for some reason was more prominent in our minds than the seventeen thousand sockeye in our hatch. By the time we were on our second or third vodka, the theories had crossed the line between orthodox and quasi science and had plunged deep into the twilight zone. Billy pulled us back to reality. “Hey, you know what? It must be one of those Expo fish.”

  It made sense. As part of the international exposition held in Vancouver in 1986, a whole bunch of salmon, mostly coho, had been raised and released. They were tagged and when caught by sports fishermen would win him a large cash prize. Commercial fishermen weren’t supposed to be part of the picture, but no one had told the fish. This one, probably second- or third-generation, had strayed out of the sportsfishing preserve that was the Strait of Georgia, and had ventured into our territory, Johnstone Strait.

  “Jeez,” Fergie said. “I know they were trying to breed them especially big but they must have produced some mutants. I wonder if our ugly little bastard will still qualify for a prize.”

  “Bonus!” said Billy. “I’ll take it down to Vancouver and tell ’em I caught it using sport tackle. If they ask me what kind of gear, I’ll tell ’em a number two black wall of death. Wait’ll the papers get photos of it. Maybe it’ll win the ugly fish award. When I come back, we’ll split the cash.”

  He was burbling like a happy kid. He could hardly wait to get to Vancouver and return triumphantly with the prize.

  But he never came back. He left for Vancouver after network the next day, and fell off the face of the earth. Christine, who was cat-sitting for him, had tried to phone Billy a few hours after he left but couldn’t get him. Presumably he was in the wireless dead zone between Port McNeill and Campbell River. The unfortunate message she was forced to leave was that Billy’s cat had died, suddenly and strangely, of convulsions. As time passed, and it became evident that we wouldn’t have the chance to commiserate with him, the minor detail of his cat’s death faded from memory.

  When the cops suggested Billy had taken the prize money and run, we just stared at them. Not possible. Billy was our crewmate. More likely he’d been in full party mode and had fallen in with some bad people. And, as we found out, there’d been no prize money. Billy had been seen on the Vancouver ferry by other fishermen, and presumably his first stop would have been the Department of Fisheries and Oceans lab in West Vancouver, where they’d produced the Expo fish. But there was no record at the DFO lab of either Billy or Igor. And besides, they claimed they’d never produced any mutant sockeye, just ordinary everyday coho.

  Billy disappeared eight years ago, and there had been absolutely no trace of him since.

  Until now.

  Two

  The money from our big set financed another year at university for me. That was the last decent money I ever earned fishing. Although we didn’t know it at the time, the salmon fleet had been targeted for “rationalization,” also known as “downsizing” or “reducing capacity,” or just “getting rid of the fuckers.” To this day, I don’t see anything “rational” about it, but the result was that within three years all the participants that had gloried in that big set, including the Maple Leaf C, were no longer fishing salmon. Sometimes I felt sadder for her than for us.

  I loved that big old boat. She was the best seaboat I ever worked on. She was spacious and wooden; none of the clanging noisiness of steel, none of the cork-on-the-wave bounciness of aluminum, and none of the interior coldness of fiberglass. Years later, I met a guy who had deckhanded on her after I did, and he was a little more equivocal. “A comfortable ride, but the good news was that she had an excellent pumping system. The bad news was that she needed it.” A tale of neglect that bothered me more than was sensible. Because she’d never betrayed our trust, had delivered us from the worst attacks of Hecate Strait. And we’d abandoned her to the ravages of time. Just one more quantum of guilt to add to my overall total, one more specific sin added to my generic Homo sapiens rap sheet of omission, commission, and submission.

  For I had landed on my feet, after all. A degree in marine biology had led me to my present exalted station, working for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in Ottawa. Current project: health, salmonids—an overview. What do we know and how reliable is our information? Not bloody much and very bloody little.

  I felt like a bit of a turncoat, working for The Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Fishermen called it DFO, dropping the definite article because the department defined indefiniteness. But amid the fuzz and haze of bureaucracy, the Wizard of Oz façade, and Mad Hatter twaddle, there lurked the odd rare soul who cared about fish and their environment. I hoped to find them and establish communication.

  Mark had gotten into the one really stable fishery on the BC coast: halibut. Fergie was pounding nails instead of shooters and actually had a couple of guys working for him. Christine had run her own gillnetter for a few years but had finally acquiesced to the inevitable and sold it. Not wanting to leave the water, she had joined the Coast Guard and had managed to survive the cutbacks there.

  It felt strange to relive those memories now. I was so far away from the where of it and the when of it, and even the who of it. The nineteen-year-old kid who had lived that one glorious day in an orgasm of sweat and blood was now me, an adult bureaucrat, not so much living as surviving, dreary day after distinctly unorgasmic day.

  Even stranger was that in this of all places, I should come across any connection to those long ago events. It stared at me from my computer screen, as ugly as ever, with bulging baleful eyes. It was a harsh flat-light mug shot of Igor the Frankenfish, of whom DFO had denied any knowledge. Yet here it was in a DFO data bank. The high-resolution jpeg format permitted a detailed view of the fish. It was somewhat mutilated, looking like something had chewed a chunk off the tail. But I could make out the red tag, marked PC-102, and the pattern of indentations left by the Vise-Grips I’d wielded eight years earlier.

  Memories segued into thoughts. We had been told the fish was never delivered to the DFO lab. So who took its picture and entered it into a DFO data bank? Why was there no record of the delivery of the fish, or Billy, the person who had delivered it?

  Billy, Billy, what happened to you? You left Sointula on Wednesday morning. I know you were hungover. By the time you got on the ferry at Nanaimo, you’d probably had a few beers at the pub next to the terminal. Smug and Snuffy off the Island Gale told me that you sat in their van and had a few more beers on the voyage to Vancouver. And had lied seriously about our catch. Like all commercial fishermen, you downgraded our catch so the competitors wouldn’t find out we had loaded up at spot X. As if they didn’t know.

  But Billy, pal, you couldn’t have been seriously drunk when you drove your almost-new-but-badly-battered Camaro off the ferry at Horseshoe Bay. And there’s not much trouble you could have gotten into between there and the DFO lab in West Vancouver. So it looks like you got to the lab, otherwise no picture of the fish. But why no records, and where the hell did you go afterwards?

  I stared at the computer screen and then began banging on the keys. DFO search engine. Google. Every customized academic search engine I knew. Nothing.

  Christ! This is supposed to be the most sophisticated fisheries database in the world. This is the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Of bloody Canada. And I’m doing a simple project on salmonid health and when I find a certain entry I can’t source it? What the fuck?

  The dull Ottawa sky was dimming into dusk. A metaphor for the entire soulless city and my life in it. I pushed my chair back and thought.
Hard. If there was any chance of tracing the source of that jpeg entry, I would have to talk to the data lords, the geeks and trolls who controlled the information that was the foundation, according to them, of everything the department did.

  I was irritated by the prospect of that. The internal politics of DFO had increasingly come to favor the keepers of the data. Information is power. And the lower-order beings who now found themselves in possession of that power tended to gibber and posture like monkeys with a shiny stone. Or so I thought. But there was one who had crossed over, left the data kingdom, and ascended to the transcendental plane of “Policy.” The problem was, she didn’t owe me any favors and I had nothing on her. She was just a co-worker with whom I’d been friendly when we were both DFO rookies, doing lobster surveys in the Bay of Fundy. And in the power-centered interactions that typified most relationships within DFO, I didn’t know if simple friendship would count for anything. But maybe she’d be at the staff party scheduled for that afternoon. Bette Connelly. She’d been out east, with most of her department, trying to smooth over “The Cod Problem.”

  That was a misnomer, in my opinion; the cod weren’t the problem. People were. And the people who had caused the problem weren’t the people suffering from it. Maybe this should be number one on my list of “Reasons Our Bureaucracy Keeps Screwing Things Up.”

  But I’d heard Bette was back. The party—reception, actually, according to the embossed invitations that were scattered about the building—was something we’d both normally skip; an announcement of cutbacks and layoffs spun as “gains in efficiency.” But there was usually decent food, drinkable wine, and the odd old friend you could BS with.