The River Killers

by Bruce Burrows

  “Okay,” I said, “maybe tonight we should put the fleet on forty-eight-hour notice.” George and Pete both nodded. “Congratulations gentlemen, we have formulated a plan.”

  Dinner that night was an impromptu experience that only fishermen and us parasitic bureaucrats could ever experience. We started with the crabs I’d caught, then got into a bucket of clams that someone had dropped off. George brought out some sockeye that he’d smoked last summer, and we finished with grilled halibut donated by one of the company scout boats, obviously trying to curry favor.

  After genuflecting before Alex, the cook, I headed to my stateroom with the intention of perusing Alistair’s computer. I realized I’d need a monitor and turned toward the wheelhouse. George was there, picking his teeth. “How much you figure that meal would have cost downtown?”

  “You couldn’t have got it downtown,” I said. “Not that good. I need to borrow a computer monitor. Do you mind?”

  “Take the one off the GPS. It’s the best one.”

  “Thanks. I’ll have it back in a couple of hours.” I performed a quick lobotomy and lugged the monitor into my stateroom. In no time, I had it hooked up to its new brain, and powered up Alistair’s computer. As I’d feared, though, the computer asked for a password. I tried to bypass it but Alistair had been much too canny for that. Prawns? No. Hmmm. Shrimp? Crustacean? Wait a minute. Latin. What the hell was the Latin for prawn? That didn’t work either. Shit! A flash of memory: Chimera. Bingo! I was in.

  The password allowed me access to the desktop. I looked at the array of program icons and clicked on Excel, and then “open.” The drop-down menu showed a list of files and I opened the first one. I was now looking at a database like the ones pasted in the journal. I opened more files. More of the same and I still couldn’t make heads nor tails out of it. I closed Excel and considered the other program icons. There was Word, Access, Adobe, Eudora, Internet Explorer, Photoshop, and all the assorted junk stuff that no one ever uses. I opened Eudora, knowing there wouldn’t be much because he didn’t have a phone line. His inbox, surprisingly, ran to seven hundred and thirty-eight messages, courtesy presumably of landlines in Bella Bella. Most were of the “Cheaper prescription drugs from your best friendly guys in Nigeria” or “Drive your women crazy in bed” variety. There were a few messages from colleagues, invitations to conferences, and family updates from a daughter in Ontario, but nothing to interest me.

  I opened Word. There were three files and every one of them was gobbledegook. Alistair had encrypted them. Ergo, they were really important. Ergo, I had to read them. Ergo, I’d have to enlist someone more computer literate than me. Maybe this was a problem for Super Bette, girl computer whiz.

  There was a rap on the door. “The conference starts in five minutes.”

  “Okay, be right there.”

  I shut everything down, disconnected the monitor, and took it back to the bridge. Alex handed me up a coffee and I took a sip as I looked around. The usual suspects were gathered and all five radios were crackling away. I turned all of them off except for the VHF tuned to channel 78A, and picked up the mike.

  “Attention, the roe herring fleet. This is the James Sinclair. Stand by for an announcement.” I released the mike key and looked at Pete and George.

  Pete shrugged. “Go ahead and put them on forty-eight hours’ standby. Then we’ll get down to the details.”

  George raised a finger. “Forty-eight hours takes us to Monday night, which is a bad time to open a fishery. Make it thirty-six hours and they’ll be ready to go Monday morning if necessary.”

  I nodded and keyed the mike button again. “Attention, the roe herring fleet. We are giving notice that the fleet is now on thirty-six hours’ notice with the earliest possible fishery on Monday morning at eight, but with an anticipated fishery on Wednesday at 0800 hours. Here are the results of today’s test fishery.”

  I then read off two pages of numbers: tonnages, percentages, male/female ratios, number of slinks, amount of spot spawn, and all the other arcane data that, taken together with a healthy amount of pure intuition, would allow us to pinpoint the optimum time for the fishery. I finished with, “Please come back to the James Sinclair with any questions.”

  “James Sinclair, Dawn Dancer.”

  One of my favorite boat names. “Go ahead, Dawn Dancer.”

  “Yeah, well, so how come if you’re thinking about opening on Wednesday, you’re putting us on standby for Monday?”

  George rolled his eyes. “Jesus, who’s running that boat this year? Must be a goddamn rookie.”

  I made sure George was finished expostulating before I transmitted a reply. In a carefully neutral voice, “Skipper, all our information points to a probable Wednesday fishery, but the fish have fooled us before. We don’t want to see a panic on Monday morning if a major spawn does start then.”

  There were more questions but everyone seemed fairly comfortable with the idea. Fortunately, weather was not a major part of the equation for this particular fishery. Spiller Channel was a fairly sheltered area and these were the seine boats, the big boys. Thank God I wasn’t running a gillnet fishery somewhere off the west coast. That could be a real high-wire act. One slipup and you’d lose more than the Flying Wallendas.

  When the last query had been queried, and the last reply replied, I bade goodnight to my fellow inmates and returned to my stateroom. I hadn’t learned much from Alistair’s computer but thought I might be able to glean a clue from his logbook. Many fishermen keep a ship’s log and a separate fishing log. Alistair combined the two. A typical entry would look like this:

  April 3

  0500: left base

  0630: set one string, Blarney Rock

  0715: set one string, Mulcher’s reef

  0820: set two strings, 80 fm hole.

  1230: picked 1st string—63 lbs large

  1345: picked 2nd string—52 lbs large, 15 jumbo

  1430: picked strings 3 & 4—115 lbs large, 42 jumbo, bycatch—two China rockfish

  1435: left for Shearwater

  1730: arrived Shearwater, delivered

  1900: fueled up—84 gal.

  1930: tied up

  The log covered the last four years. A quick skim-through showed that almost all entries followed the same format. Sometimes entries referred to a simple cruise without all the set data, but other than that, there was nothing even remotely unusual. For lack of anything intelligent to do, I took the logbook to the copier and spent fifteen minutes copying every page. Then I placed the book in the inside pocket of my floater jacket so I could give it to Louise and get back to first base, or at least line up to get tickets to the ballpark.

  Seven

  The next morning, the main engines remained silent. There was only the comforting hum of the auxiliary engine as it powered the generator. But I was up early anyway and greeted George at the galley table. Sitting across from him, I sipped my coffee. Rain pattered on the roof. We could hear the weather station on one of the wheelhouse radios. Southeast winds, strong to storm force, two-meter swells at Idol Point, barometer falling; outlook—winds rising to gale force and continuing overnight.

  I looked at George and grimaced slightly. He nodded. Definitely a harbor day.

  “I think I’ll go visiting, George. Okay if I take the Zodiac?” He shrugged and got up to pour us both another coffee. We sat for awhile. Finally, tired of the constant chatter, I got up, donned rain gear and life jacket, and jumped into the Zodiac.

  I revved up to full speed but the rain stung my eyes. Not wanting to proceed at full throttle with my eyes shut, I slowed down and idled over to the Coastal Provider. As I tied up, my salivary glands leapt into action at the smell of frying bacon. Feeling like Pavlov’s dog, I opened the galley door and stepped inside.

  Mark and his crew were sitting at the table, just about to tuck into copious amounts of bacon, eggs, and real hash browns. “Hey Danny, grab a plate and help yourself.” Graciously acquiescent, I filled my plate and joined t
hem at the table. “Gentlemen, this is an old friend of mine, Danny Swanson. Danny, that’s Randy, Johnny Jr., Sid, and Jarrod.” As he went around the table, I nodded hello and hoped I’d remember their names.

  We concentrated on the food for awhile, and then, because I had the only seat not blocked by the table, I got up and poured a round of coffee. As the piles of food dwindled, conversation swelled. Many comments on the weather and how it boded for the fishery, much speculation about the timing of the fishery and speculating about the myriad ways that DFO could screw it up. Mark hurriedly interjected that I was in fact a DFO employee, but because of my past was not a “real DFO guy.” I tried to look reassuring and the talk continued. At the first lull, I told the story of SPLAG, the Special Policy for Licensing Abalone Group, and their stellar work on matters of complete irrelevance. There were a few chuckles at that, and then the devil took control of my mind. “You know,” I said, “their website is interactive and anyone can post policy ideas. We should post something completely off the wall and see how they react to it.”

  “Couldn’t they trace it and you’ll get into trouble?”

  “We could sign a false name, or”—I felt a surge of evil glee—“we could sign a real person’s name, like, say, Fleming Griffith.” Appreciative chuckles all around the table. “Okay, they’re talking about area licensing for worthless licenses. What can we add to that to make it even stupider?”

  Mark chimed in, “DFO says to the license holders, buy out two other licenses and we’ll give you an experimental license, sort of like send in two box tops and we’ll give you a free coupon.”

  Johnny Jr. enthusiastically joined in. “But the experimental license has to use different gear.” Abalone were harvested by divers and I couldn’t imagine any other way to do it, but Johnny Jr. could. “We’ll say they have to experiment with traps.”

  I was sipping my coffee and almost choked when he said that. Abalone were, sort of, mobile. They could cover up to ten or eleven inches a day. It would take weeks for more than one to find its way into a trap. It was just ridiculous enough to appeal to the policy gurus.

  The other guys were jumping in now. “But we must have strict trap regulations—minimum mesh size and four-inch escape holes. No more than thirty traps per boat. And traps must be constructed of North American bamboo.” Six adult males were sitting around in a very no-nonsense seine boat, giggling like children. “And the traps have to have legs so they don’t sit on the bottom and squash things.” We dressed it up in linguistic clothes of appropriate bureaucratic hue, making references to peer-reviewed monitoring methodologies and adjusted catch-per-unit effort, and presto: we had A Policy.

  This may seem ridiculous to anyone who lives in the real world, but in DFO land, truth is much, much stranger than fiction. I couldn’t help but remember the great Sointula abalone experiment. DFO had just finished one of their occasional pogroms directed against fishermen and were as usual surprised at the public outcry. Collapsing coastal communities, unemployed fishermen, bankrupt businesses, and broken families are difficult to justify as “good results.” So DFO consulted their flaks and came up with a “transition policy.” This, of course, involved throwing large lumps of money at the problem. Sointula was awarded a modest pile of money and decided to invest it in BC’s first abalone farm. DFO approved the plan but, apparently not realizing that abalone are incapable of spontaneous generation, refused to grant a license to collect some brood stock.

  Finally, the co-op armed themselves in common sense, collected twelve adult abalone, and dared DFO to charge them. Refusing to surrender to this attack of rationality, DFO did so. Charges were later dropped at trial but the co-op had to pay the legal fees. And DFO extracted a further pound of flesh by demanding that up to fifty percent of the total production be returned to the ocean to build up wild stocks.

  Abalone are slow growing and it would be at least four years before the animals were of marketable size. After two years of operational costs, the abalone co-op was broke. Volunteers kept it going for two more years. In year four, DFO approached the co-op and asked for five thousand animals to return to the wild. In return, the co-op asked for permission to sell some abalone to raise money to cover expenses. Unfortunately, by this time DFO had listed abalone as a species at risk and therefore they couldn’t be sold. Never mind that these abalone weren’t at risk because they had been raised in tanks, and never mind that if the co-op couldn’t raise money, it would fold and the primary source of abalone for transplant to the wild would be lost.

  By the time DFO sorted out its internal inconsistencies, and allowed farmed abalone to be sold, the co-op was broke. Defeat had been snatched from the jaws of victory.

  Fishermen were used to this level of thinking, if that is the right word, from DFO. That is why we were totally convinced that the nonsense that we had concocted would be accepted as rational. Mark went to the wheelhouse and typed our gibberish into his computer, signed it as Fleming Griffith, and posted it. He came back to the galley grinning. “I wonder how long before Griffith sees that and deletes it.”

  “It might be awhile,” I said. “I believe he’s in Brussels telling the Europeans not to worry about the east coast cod because they can fish our west coast cod. We’ll log on tomorrow and check the response.”

  The crew began to bicker about their own policy issue, whether or not rain gear was allowed in the galley, so Mark and I grabbed a coffee and retired to the wheelhouse. Mark settled into the swivel chair by the wheel and I lounged on the padded bench by the chart table. We stared out the window at the wind-driven rain.

  “Hey,” I nudged Mark’s chair with my foot, “how’s the vow of celibacy holding up?”

  “Nothing to it, as long as there’s no actual female within visual range. It gets a little tough if I have to tell them about it, because then they’re all over me, like it’s a challenge or something. Actually, it’s the ultimate pickup line. I wish I’d thought of it in junior high.”

  I laughed. “As I remember it, there wasn’t an overwhelming need for a vow of celibacy because you were already under a sentence of celibacy.”

  “Well, you were in the same jail I was.”

  “Yeah, but I was pardoned sooner. Good behavior and all.”

  He snorted. “Good behavior? You used to leave trails of drool up and down the halls. My mongrel dog showed more dignity than you did.” We lapsed into silence as we remembered the “difficult years”; sexual arousal as a state of being.

  The voices from the galley were getting louder. “Fifteen two, fifteen four, a pair is six, and a run is nine.”

  “Stinkhole!”

  “We’re not playing stinkhole!”

  “We always play stinkhole north of Cape Caution.”

  “You lie like a hairy egg. Shut up and deal.”

  The rain was easing. Mark stood up. “Let’s go for a ride. There’s a couple of herring punts in Bella Bella I want to look at.”

  We grabbed our rain gear and went out on deck.

  The Zodiac was a lot faster than Mark’s power skiff so we used it. Mark wanted to go to the fishermen’s wharf where most of the boats were tied up, rather than the government dock downtown. As we got close to the dock, we could see Native guys in rain gear hanging herring gill nets. “Native guys” was my internal terminology. Publicly, I attempted to use the terminology of the day: Aboriginals or First Nations or whatever. Normal Native guy terminology for Native guys was “Indian.”

  Bella Bella, a village of about fourteen hundred people, was home to the mighty Heiltsuk Nation. At one time, they had a pretty fair-sized fleet. That was before Fleming Griffith conned the Fisheries Minister of the hour, an ego in a suit named Fred Mifflin, into decimating the salmon fleet. Actually, decimate isn’t a strong enough word. How about “triagimate,” since a third rather than a tenth of the fleet was killed off.

  As we tied up, we could see close to a hundred boats of all shapes and sizes. Mark wanted to look at herring skiffs, which were
used for gillnetting herring rather than seining them. You couldn’t catch as many gillnetting as seining, but the fish were of better quality, there were a higher percentage of females, and therefore more roe, so you got a better price.

  As we wandered down the dock, we ran into an old buddy. Cecil Brown was a Native guy from Metlakatla, up north. We knew him because he used to run a packer for JS MacMillan Fisheries and we would offload our salmon onto his boat.

  He smiled under his Sou’wester. “Mark, Danny, good to see you. Hey Danny, if Mark sets early, are you going to bust him?” He laughed and wiped rain from his face.

  “Actually, I’m here to bust you because you’re way out of your territory.”

  He winked. “It’s okay. I’ve got cousins here so I’m legit. And you know what? I’ve got cousins everywhere so you can’t give me a hard time. C’mon, I’ll buy you a coffee.” He led the way to his boat, a fifty-two-foot packer that at one time had been the largest fiberglass boat built in BC. The Waterfowl was well maintained and gave no hint of its long and arduous history. The boat had probably transported more fish over the years than any other packer still working. And because Cecil considered any wind under forty knots a summer breeze, the boat had probably had as much green water over the bow as under it.

  We doffed our rain gear and entered the cozy galley. The oil stove radiated a pleasant warmth. The coffeepot was full and there were bannock and smoked salmon set on the table. “Make yourself at home, guys.” He placed three mugs on the table, poured extremely black coffee into each of them, and pointed at the sugar and can of condensed milk.

  We settled around the table and customized our coffees. “So Danny, how’s Ottawa? You look like you’re still halfway sane anyway.”

  “Ottawa is Ottawa, unfortunately. It sure feels good to be back out here.”

  “Yeah, well you sure earn your money. I wouldn’t work back there for anything. So how come you guys got brave enough to leave Shearwater and sneak into Heiltsuk territory?”