by David Giblin
We passed the point and could see the line of whirlpools between Big Bay and us. They spun and writhed, opening forty to fifty feet across. The pressure of the water between them caused calm, flat spots that were higher than the surrounding water. You couldn’t see what was on the other side, but if you hit them going fast enough you would fly into the air and it wouldn’t matter if another whirlpool were waiting—you could fly right over it and look down into its vortex. These calm spots developed a distance below the point, and you had to wait for the right timing. At the same time Carol watched the raging currents ahead getting closer and closer. The timing was critical: the boat had to hit the opening just perfectly. The water had to be smooth. If it was all foam and air bubbles, the propeller on the outboard would spin uselessly. We would lose power and risk dropping into a whirlpool. Carol kept glancing ahead to where the water was a confusion of sucking whirlpools, pressure waves, and boils.
“Now, Carol!” I yelled as loudly as I could against the roar of the water exploding all around us. I gestured with my chin toward an opening between two huge holes.
Carol screamed and gunned the engine. She aimed the bow for the clear space. The boat hit the pressure ridge and flew into the air. We looked down into the open mouth of a whirlpool big enough to swallow the boat with indifference. Then, just as suddenly, it was behind us. The boat splashed down in a cloud of spray and foam, and Carol was soaked as a sheet of water enveloped the stern. Her scream changed as, like one of those madmen flying down the face of a snow-covered cliff face, she tilted her head back and let out a whoop of joy. We were through the rip and riding the calmer water of Big Bay.
“That was kind of fun,” she yelled. She added more thoughtfully, “What are you going to do with the bird when you get it back to the house? Do you have anything you can use to hold it until they come pick it up? I mean, you can’t wrestle the poor thing the whole time.”
“I’ve got something in mind that should work perfectly.”
I left Carol to tie up the boat.
The bird struggled and flapped with its good wing. I still held the beak in my left hand, the body of the bird nestled against my chest and pinned by my right arm. The sun shone down on us and I couldn’t help notice the strange shadow the two of us cast on the float. It was the elongated shadow of a mythical half-man half-bird, the product of a bad dream. The shadow, the bird, and I walked up the float toward the house where Vop was still asleep on the couch dreaming the vivid, fitful dreams of the sleep deprived.
thirty STRANGE KARMA FOR THE FRENCH PETTY NOBILITY
“IT ISN’T FAIR, I tell you, it just isn’t fair! That men of our station and rank in life should be subjected to such an unseemly rabble, to be scuffed and manhandled in so undignified a fashion. Why, my finest coat is a shabby ruin! This is no way for gentlemen like you and me to be treated. Someone shall pay for this when they let me out of here, of that you can be sure. I have friends in high places. I am a man of standing at Court.
“And just when things were going so well for me there, along comes this wretched business with these peasants. Well, is it any wonder that a man of refined and delicate sensibilities such as myself should be reduced to such a nervous disposition? Who in my circumstances would be able to think clearly and remain calm? Ordered about like a servant . . . Does this rabble really believe they can order the affairs of state? Why, they could hardly order a state dinner! What? What’s that? Well, yes, I can well understand how it is possible to lose one’s sense of humour in times like these.
“As I was saying . . . impudent the lot of them. Parading about on the streets refusing to give way to their betters. When I condescended to address them in a vain attempt to redress their behaviour, well, they returned my good manners by laying hands on me! Indeed, they did, sir, though it passes all understanding. They taunted and used me most cruelly! My fine clothes were torn and soiled, soiled to a ruin. A well-fitted jacket or the best of cloth means nothing to these people! I was thrown into this dank and stinking cell with you. Now they’ve even threatened me with the chopping block—don’t they know who I am?
“What? What’s a guillotine? My good sir, now it is you who makes jests that lack wit. I couldn’t think of anything more distasteful, and in front of a screaming mob of these creatures? This has to be a horrible nightmare from which I shall soon awake!”
After a few weeks in the cramped cell the French gentleman was led out, much to the relief of his cellmate. He blinked in the unfamiliar daylight. His fine clothes were reduced to tattered rags and his wig sat askew on his matted hair. He was loaded into a hay cart and paraded through the streets, which were lined with a laughing and jeering crowd. He was hauled to the square where the new invention, the guillotine, stood to receive him.
He was taken down off the cart and led up a set of stairs. The device had been erected on the top of a platform. The hay strewn about was already wet with blood. Pale and silent now, our French gentleman was strapped to a vertical board and pitched forward, his head thrust between two railings. A wooden collar was clamped around his neck and he found himself looking down into a basket. Two freshly severed heads lay in its bottom. The eyelid of one still quivered, as if giving him a ghastly wink. He heard a whistling sound and he closed his eyes. He didn’t even feel the blade that sliced his head neatly from his shoulders.
When he opened his eyes again it was as if he was suspended among the lights and crystals of a chandelier—flashing and shimmering lights, great flecks of them against a blue-green void, surrounded him. He blinked and looked closer. It was hard to believe, but he was looking at a school of small fish. He was floating in the midst of them underwater. He gasped involuntarily, but instead of choking on seawater he found he could breathe quite naturally.
He looked around himself, stunned that he could breathe underwater, but he could see neither arms nor legs. He did notice something very strange: when he looked around he could see all the other fish look around as well. And he could see what they saw as they did so. He was not one of these fish—he was all of them. His consciousness, such as it was, spread through the entire school. It moved as one being. He saw what it saw from hundreds of vantage points. He felt what it felt from hundreds of tiny nervous systems. He thought what it thought, which wasn’t much. His consciousness, singular and self-important to begin with, didn’t go very far when spread out among so many individual beings. There wasn’t much left over to wonder why he had suddenly become a school of herring.
There was so much that distracted him from thinking about what had happened to him. His many stomachs were constantly hungry. The school roamed ceaselessly looking for something to eat; the more it roamed, the more hungry it became.
As if so much hunger wasn’t enough, all the other beings he came across were trying to eat him. His separate parts were in constant terror of being eaten alive. They kept up a constant, fussy complaining.
“Oh my goodness, keep moving everyone, keep moving. Don’t bunch up. Keep away from those rocks! How many times do I have to tell you that’s where the rock cod wait for us. Now please, keep moving . . . My God, what was that? A ling cod! A ling cod! Oh please, keep swimming up front there! It’s eating us in the back!”
He felt it every time one of him was eaten—the pain of the needle-like teeth of the rock cod or the tearing of the jagged teeth of the ling cod—he felt it all, but there was always more of him to be eaten.
“Come now, let’s hurry! We’re getting close to that kelp bed. Oh dear, what was that?”
A silver blur streaked past the bottom of the school, eating three stragglers as it went.
“A salmon! A salmon!”
A nervous dithering cry went rippling through the length of the school. Where there was one salmon there were often many more, and they herded and terrified the herring like no other fish.
A school of herring is a nervous, darting entity. It turns and moves through the water as if it were one animal. When the whole school bunches up into
a ball it acts as a kind of self-defence mechanism. The school uses so much oxygen from the water that a bigger fish, a diving bird, even a seal would lose consciousness inside the ball. Predators have learned to limit themselves to feeding on herring on the outside of the school.
However, the same thing happens to the herring if they spend too much time in the safety of the centre. They too lose consciousness and drop out at the bottom. The whole group of herring, therefore, swirls in constant motion. The herring in the centre move to the outside and trade places with those on the way back to the centre. The ones that stay too long sink to the bottom, twisting and jerking in the throes of death by suffocation. These movements are what the guides try to emulate with their cut-plugs.
Hunger brings herring closer to the surface at night. They feed on small shrimp found close to the surface after the sun goes down.
This particular evening the school rose to the surface in front of Big Bay Marina. Of course, they had no way of knowing that they were adjacent to the marina. They were simply looking for something to eat.
Troutbreath watched them come toward the spot where he and some of the guides waited, skiff and net at the ready. He tracked the movement by the gas bubbles they gave off as they rose to the surface. He waited until the whole school was in range of the net. Then he chose just the right moment to row the skiff around it while another guide dropped the net off the stern. A dim sense of panic swept through the school as the net dropped around it.
“What’s this? I can’t swim any farther! There’s something in the way! Hey, you in the back—don’t push like that! Go back, you idiots, go back!”
The school was trapped and the net was pulled closed at the bottom. The wooden pens were brought up beside the seething mass of herring and they were dipped out into them. A blizzard of herring scales filled the water (no matter how carefully they were treated, the net, the brailer, and the wooden sides of the pens always knocked off scales). Some of the herring panicked and swam straight into the side of the pens, bloodying their noses and adding to the general panic.
The nervous chatter continued through the school. There were many new things to worry about.
“Look at my coat of scales! It’s a ragged mess! They’ve ruined me, that’s what they’ve done, they’ve ruined me! I can’t believe this treatment. It’s not fair, I tell you, it’s not fair! Being eaten by a Cod Fish is bad enough, but this is intolerable! Say, when do we eat around here?”
The herring have to settle before they can be sold as bait. They slowly calm down and begin swimming in an endless circle inside the box. They are allowed to “harden”; not being able to eat, they lose fat. The scales cling to them better and are not so easily knocked off when they are handled.
The pens are brought out in rotation, in the order they were caught, to be sold to the guides.
“Now what was that all about? Where am I now? Why, this place is even more cramped and intolerable than that last hole! Hey, you, look, I’m speaking to you up there! I demand that you release me at once, do you hear me?”
Out in the fishing hole a guide looked down at his bait tank. All the herring were standing on their tails, their heads half out of the water. Their mouths were moving frantically, as if they were trying to speak. The guide had noticed this behaviour before.
I wonder why they do that, he thought. I suppose we’ll never know.
He chose a good-looking herring and reached into the bait tank. With the deft precision of long practice, he plucked it out by hand. The struggling fish was held down on a cutting board by its neck, trapped by the thumb and forefinger of one hand. The other hand was poised above, holding a razor-sharp knife.
thirty-one THE BIRD-FEATHERED MAN
I MADE IT to the door of the cottage, the bird still firmly in my grasp. I kicked the door open. It banged loudly against the bookcase, knocking a couple of volumes onto the floor. Vop was still asleep on the couch. His head was wedged at an awkward angle between the cushions. His feet thrashed and his mouth was moving—opening and closing like a fish starved for air. He opened his eyes sleepily.
Framed by the doorway and a halo of sunlight was a strange man-bird creature. It was making hideous, muffled squawks. It started across the rug toward him. It was about to eat him as he lay there. He flailed his arms and legs. He flipped himself backwards over the arm of the couch. He peered fearfully over it as he crouched on the floor.
A disembodied voice shouted at him.
“Hey, Vop, wake up, man, there’s no time for fooling around. I need that box you keep those old outboard parts in. Can you clean it out for me, quick!”
From behind the arm of the couch Vop blinked up at me, trying to grasp what was being said to him.
“Now is the time for those engine parts . . .” the voice was yelling at him. His brain couldn’t understand what this nightmare could possibly want with his old used engine parts.
Carol came in the door behind me.
“Oh, Vop, why do you always have to play around?”
She went out to the boatshed herself and returned with the box. It was tall and narrow. It had once held a small trolling motor, purchased new. Cleaned out, and with an old blanket on the bottom, it kept the bird calm and quiet, unable to move and damage its wing further.
We placed a call to the shelter and another to the airline. The plane was soon landing in front of the house.
The last time we saw the bird, the pilot was carrying it down the dock in the box. It thumped and squawked alarmingly. The poor man carried it like a bomb that was about to go off.
When Carol and I returned to the house Vop was awake enough to begin taking credit for the rescue.
“Well, it’s a good thing I kept those engine parts all this time. That box would have been burned a long time ago if I hadn’t. I get mocked, but it’s the kind of foresight that . . .”
The image of the man-bird creature coming at him from out of the sun would disturb Vop’s dreams for some time to come.
thirty-two IF A TREE FALLS
BUTE INLET IS a forty-five-mile-long finger of water pointed at the heart of British Columbia’s interior. The mountains at its mouth are relatively low, most of them around 3,500 feet. The inlet cuts through the Pacific Coast Range, and the mountains rise steadily in height as you travel its length. At its head they tower straight out of the water to a height of 10,000 feet, so that even in the middle of the summer they are still covered with snow. On the backs of the highest are the remains of the glaciers that carved out the inlet. They have been in retreat for thousands of years, and these mountains are their last strongholds, a castle keep for fading giants. Their breath is still strong enough to chill the hot summer air.
The water that fills the inlet reaches a depth of 2,500 feet. Strange ethereal creatures, some never seen by humans, live in the inky blackness. They inhabit a realm too deep for the salmon and other predators from the shallows above. They glow, a pale spectral colour of their own making. They have their own life-and-death struggles, their own predators and prey. It is a world that exists for us only in the corners of our imagination.
Shrimp and squid occupy a transitional zone, and sometimes salmon come to feed on them at a depth of 800 or 900 feet. The water above 300 feet teams with life more familiar to us, except where the fresh water of the mountain streams sits on the surface. Fresh water is like a poison to most saltwater fish. The streams that empty into the inlet turn it a bright jade green from the silt carried down due to the glaciers and the icefields. Where these creeks empty, a soft white sand is deposited along the shore.
Vop’s guide boat skimmed its way across the surface of green water. The huge mountains loomed above; below, the water sank to unimaginable depths. Vop and Carol, their hair streaming in the wind, outboard at full throttle, cruised that thin line, the transition between sky and water. They were a small, insignificant presence caught up in their small concerns.
Vop’s nerves were frayed. His dream of strange karma for some
member of the French petty nobility, followed by his sleepy encounter with the man-bird creature, had ruined the rest he’d been trying to find. He and Carol took a day off together and decided to spend it relaxing on one of the beaches up the inlet. Carol packed a picnic lunch and Vop talked Troutbreath out of a good bottle of wine. As Vop steered the boat for the distant beach he was looking forward to spending some uninterrupted time with Carol. Finding time alone was hard on a small island, and there were things he wanted to be able to discuss with her at length.
“I get the feeling that we make her nervous sometimes,” he confided in me the day before.
“Vop, you can hardly blame her. She can’t even go check the mail without it becoming a life-and-death adventure.”
“Well, yeah, but it’s even more complicated than that. We get together and things just seem to happen. Hard-to-explain stuff. She doesn’t deal very well with trips into the unknown. I’m sure she thinks it’s me, but I can’t explain it either. Stuff just happens, man, it’s kind of spooky.”
“Stuff happens to you all the time and I can’t explain it either.”
“You’re not helping here,” Vop sounded a little hurt. “Well, I’m going to make sure nothing happens tomorrow. We’re going to a beach, maybe drink a little wine. If we get a sunburn that will be the worst that happens, I swear.”
They left in the late morning and did a bit of fishing on the way. They trolled leisurely down the western shore of the inlet as far as the waterfall below Mount Estero. They conversed casually and enjoyed the scenery. The gnarled trees hanging onto the sheer cliffs looked like bonsai. A slight morning mist, still clinging to the trees, gave the scene the look of a Japanese brush painting.