They trundled down to the end of the runway, waited for an Alaska Airlines 737 to land, and followed the DC-3 into the air. As always, Liam clutched when he felt the reluctant earth let go of their wheels. The good news was that, once in the air, the tail came up and he could see over Wy’s head out the windshield. He rummaged around for his water bottle, drank deeply, and didn’t feel much better, the water sloshing around in his stomach like a sea working up to a storm. There was an airsickness bag in the pocket of Wy’s seat back. He devoutly hoped he would not have to make use of it.
The Cub’s engine was loud and rattled the fillings in his teeth. The seat cushion was thin and the aluminum frame beneath hard on back and behind. At least Liam, sweating with a steady frisson of fear, had the comfort of knowing that the slow-flying Piper Super Cub was the quintessential Bush plane, and that if they did run into trouble Wy had a good chance of putting them down safely almost anywhere.
He wouldn’t have gotten in the plane at all if Wy hadn’t been on the stick. She was a natural pilot: good, steady hands, an encyclopedic knowledge of the limits of her aircraft, twenty-ten vision, and an uncanny instinct for weather. He remembered one day she was supposed to fly him out to Nizina. When she met him at the airstrip she had a frown on her face. She pointed into the southwest. He’d looked, and hadn’t seen anything but a light haze lying low on the horizon. He’d told her so, and she’d shook her head. “I don’t like the look of it,” she had told him. They hadn’t flown that day, and that night a storm blew into the interior from the Gulf of Alaska that toppled trees and blew off roofs—and wrecked planes—from Cape Yakataga to Copper Center.
He comforted himself that he was in the best possible plane in the best possible hands and nerved himself to look around.
He hated to admit it, but the view was superb. There are few places to look at more beautiful than the coast of Alaska, and few places better to look at it from than the window of a small plane. To the south, Bristol Bay rolled out like a plush green carpet, sunlight caught like gold dust in the nap. To the north was the immense body of the mainland, what the Aleuts used to call alyeska, or great land, to distinguish it from the Aleutian Islands. Coastal lowlands rose slowly into mountain ranges, the ranges marching irregularly up the interior like soldiers shouldering angular blue-white packs. One range ran into another with barely a river or a lake or a valley between, the Wood River Mountains, the Ahklun Mountains, the Eek Mountains, the Kilbuck and Taylor and Kuskokwim Mountains. Soldiers wasn’t a bad simile, he thought. The mountains were the last line of defense against the encroachment of settlement. They would be a harsh trial, as well, sorting out in swift order the quick and the dead.
Below them the Nushagak Peninsula curved southeast, and to the west he could glimpse the enormity of the Bering Sea beyond. It was a breathtaking sight, and he could tell Wy knew it by the smile in her voice. “Enough mountains for you, Liam?”
For one halcyon moment he forgot that his ass was hanging out a thousand feet up in the air and laughed for the sheer joy of it. “I guess so, after all,” he admitted.
A few minutes later she spoke again. “Okay, we’re here.”
He tore his eyes from the distant mountains and looked down, catching his breath sharply when she put the Cub into a shallow descent, banking right in a wide, gentle circle.
“They call it Riggins Bay,” Wy said. “I heard after the surveyor that worked this coast. You know, this coast wasn’t charted even in the Coastal Pilot, not in any well-defined way, until the late seventies.”
“And they fished it anyway?”
“They fished it anyway. They’ve been fishing it since before the turn of the century. For a long time they fished it in sailboats.”
“Sailboats? You mean like with no engines?”
“Yeah, they weren’t allowed to fish motorized vessels in Bristol Bay until 1951.”
Riggins Bay was one of the many lesser bays that formed the coastline of Bristol Bay, but it was big enough for Liam. It had a curving beach that looked at least twenty miles long to Liam’s less than experienced eye, the inner arc of which faced southeast. Each end sported prominent rocky towers and shoals, and the incoming tide was caught in the act of covering up a nice collection of boulders covered in dark green seaweed that waved gently in the ebb and flow of the water.
And the bay was simply boiling with boats. “Jesus, Wy! How many boats are down there?”
He immediately regretted asking, because Wy banked left to get a good look at the armada. “I’d say about two hundred, right around the same amount we had at the last opener. Not everybody who has a permit fishes it, you know.”
Liam didn’t know, and if he understood her implication, it meant that there could be even more boats out there than there already were, but for the life of him he wouldn’t have known where to put them all.
“Some of them are rerigged gillnetters, some of them are purse seiners,” she told him.
“Where are ours?”
“I’m looking.” They flew around for a few moments, always turning left, Liam noticed. “Look for an orange buoy in the crow’s nest.”
Liam looked. “They’ve all got orange buoys in their crow’s nests, Wy.”
She sighed, heavily enough to be heard over the headphones. “You know, this would be such a great business, if it weren’t for the fishermen.”
She pulled out of the pattern and proceeded toward the beach. “We were about a hundred miles south of here day before yesterday,” she told him over the earphones.
“Why not go back there?”
“Because the herring have moved since then, up the coast. We’re following them.”
“Why do they move up?”
“They’re looking for kelp to spawn on,” she said, and nodded out the window at the enormous beds of kelp, one after another, that lined the coast offshore. “The egg sacs adhere to the kelp, and hang on until hatching.”
“The roe is what sells the herring, right?”
“Yes.”
“Why not just wait for the herring to spawn and harvest the kelp then?”
“Some do. Others go for the fish, by purse seine or gillnet. It’s a matter of what the Japanese buyers want more, plain roe or on kelp, and a matter of quotas—each method has a quota in tons. Fish and Game projected this year’s biomass at a hundred twenty-five thousand tons, about seven percent below last year’s.”
Liam knew nothing about herring, but he knew just enough about salmon, Alaska’s leading industry before the discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay, to ask, “How much of that can you catch?”
“All the fleet, all together? Twenty-five thousand.”
“Tons?”
“Tons.”
Liam did some quick figuring. “Fifty thousand pounds. Doesn’t seem like very much.”
“I’d agree with you.” She tossed him a quick, tight grin over one shoulder. “If we weren’t getting fourteen hundred a ton.”
“Fourteen hundred?” Liam’s voice scaled up in disbelief. “Dollars? Fourteen hundred dollars per ton?” She nodded, and the dark blond braid bobbed with emphasis. “Jesus H. Christ on a crutch,” he said, stunned.
“Best price we’ve ever had,” she agreed. “We usually average around a thousand a ton, but I guess the Japanese are hungry for roe this spring.”
Liam tried to do some more figuring, but too many zeros kept coming up on the ends of all the numbers. “How much in an average catch?”
“There is no average catch. You get what you can.”
“Well, okay, how much do you want to catch?”
“All of it,” she replied promptly. He heard a faint chuckle over the muffs. “But I’d settle for, oh, I don’t know, two hundred tons.” Suddenly wistful, she added, “Two hundred tons would be one hell of a haul.”
“Two hundred for one boat?”
“Yes.”
Liam blinked. Two hundred tons at $1,400 a ton was $280,000. “And you’re spotting for how many boats?”
<
br /> “Three.”
“And you get fifteen percent of each boat’s catch?”
“Yup.”
Liam’s heart sank. Fifteen percent of $280,000 was $42,000.
For that kind of money, Wy could buy herself a dozen kids, and a judge to give them to her.
Especially if she didn’t have to share it.
“Uh, Wy?”
“What?”
“How much do I get for riding back here?”
Wy’s voice was mocking, reminding him irresistibly of the tone that big bastard of a raven used whenever he was in Liam’s vicinity. “Why, Liam, and here I thought you were suffering through this all for love of me. Hold on to your tonsils.”
“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 du
mp 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 twenty-ninth, 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.”
Fire and Ice Page 18