Far Cry, page 7
I nodded. For anything larger than that, I still had my .32.
The Coot felt even more like a one-man vessel by the time I had everything stowed. Two decades after I had dragged my father’s reska down the sand, I rowed again into a life I could not know.
* * *
—
Reading over this last passage, I see the hole I left in my list of supplies. The storekeeper had whiskey in stock, but my money went further on Hudson’s Bay rum in the jug. After those lost days in the city, I had a plan of rationing in mind. I wrapped the jugs in my blanket like newborn triplets come into my care.
There was a lightness to pushing off in my little boat. Island to island I rowed across the strait. From Echo Bay I crept north along the mainland coast to where the top of Vancouver Island gives way to the Pacific in all its force. Rounding Cape Caution, I felt the drag in my bad shoulder. I had gone just about far enough.
I made camp in a cove some way up Smith Inlet. It gave fair shelter from the worst of the storms, which is to say the wind never quite lifted me off my feet. I thought I knew rain from the city—running down the windows and beating on the roof, the drop, drop, drop of it coming in—but that November I learned to long for snow. I suppose you never think of it, Kit, having been born to the rainforest. The roar of it. It made an animal of me, backed me into my lean-to beneath the trees.
When the sea allowed, I rowed out to drop a line down into the kelp. Not every fish is a welcome catch, you know that. Back home, only the poorest of men dropped his hook into a school of mackerel. They are marked, you see—a skeleton on the back to show they have eaten the drowned. Foolishness, my mother said, but when I hauled one up by accident as a boy, my father worked it from the hook in seconds and flung it back.
Along this coast, a man can always bring up a rockfish or a kelp greenling. Ling cod, too—not a true cod, I could not help thinking whenever I swung one over the gunwale, not skrei. Early one morning I dragged up a greenling that a ling cod had taken as bait. The moment I lifted the doubled catch from the sea, the ling cod let go. In my surprise I let the wide-eyed greenling drop and dangle on the line, only to see the hole of the ling cod’s mouth rush up from below and bite again. This time I got the gaff into it before letting it feel the air.
A big fish like that could go half to waste that time of year. The sun never cut through long enough to dry the flesh. I tried and failed at my mother’s method—opening each body like a butterfly and tying it by the tail to a pole. I can see her skrei now, wings hanging down to lift a little in the wind. In the end I fixed strips to pointed sticks and smoked them in a cedar-branch hut. Some of the flesh still spoiled, but it spoiled more slowly. Most of the time I had enough.
You know what winter is in these parts. There were days, weeks, when the wind raged up the inlet, and I dragged my reska into the brush where the tide could not snatch it away. The rain became a second lashing sea, turning the branches into great green fins. On heavy nights, I crawled beneath the Coot’s overturned hull to sleep. Neville’s dictionary stayed wrapped in its square of oilskin. By then I had a proper habit of muttering, remembering my English to myself.
A man needs shelter. I had noticed the ruin of a sawmill near the inlet’s mouth. On the first clear day, I rowed back to scavenge boards. Salmonberry and salal had grown in over the place—I tied up to a tilting remnant of dock and hacked a path in. It was worth the work, some decent planks to be found among the rot. A zinc washtub caught my eye, but when I took it up by the handles, I found the bottom had rusted through. A man in company would have cast it aside. I held it up like a picture frame and looked out through the crusted circle to sea.
They are lonely, those places where men have lived and left their wreckage behind. I had spent a month or more on the inlet with ravens for company, watching the tall fins of the blackfish as they passed the cove. Coming back from that old sawmill marked the first time I drank over my daily share.
That night I held a parley with myself, ask and answer by the spitting fire.
Well, Anders, you have come to this place.
I have.
And will you stay?
I will.
Alone?
A pause while the questioned man drinks. How else?
The fire was dying, the rain starting in the branches high above. I closed my eyes and gazed on him. Lo Yim.
* * *
—
The light was grey when I woke with a jay calling shooka-shooka overhead. Morning? Midday? My head lay on a sopping sponge of moss, red roots snaking round. A man could die, letting himself lie through a winter’s night in wet clothes. I got myself upright, leaned on the shaggy bulk of a cedar until the sparks cleared from my eyes. It was not far to my camp. A thinking man would have dug out the less-wet wood and started a fire to get warm. Instead, I stumbled down to the beach.
The tide was falling, the cove iron-coloured with a swaying swell. A fair chop on the inlet. I dropped the weight of my coat on the stones, worked out of my boots and trousers, dragged the wet sweater over my head. Fumbling at the buttons of my long underwear, I peeled the mess away. The wind cut into me as I walked into the surf. I dove as soon as I had the depth. Soon I could feel my heart, the circling beat of my blood. It wakes you up.
Out past the headland I met the inlet’s sweep, out to sea, out to sea. I stroked along, slipping inside its pull. Swimming is not walking, Kit. To stop is to begin to let go. What was there to lose—the cove? The camp? But the body would have its way. Warm now with trying, it turned into the current and came clawing back.
* * *
Kit’s arms are burning, her shoulders howling with every turn of the oars. She heads for quiet water, her skiff loaded with an impressive catch. Wednesday morning, the week only half-done. No complaints—she wanted to be out on the grounds, and now she is. Of course, the dream had never been to do it alone. Sons went out as young as fifteen, boatpullers on paper, but fishing alongside their fathers all the same. Why not a girl?
The war opened the door a crack for her. There were fewer fishermen about—her father one of many who had gone—and the price was up for any salmon you could catch. Mr. Knox came into the store as he often did mid-week. Uncle Anders closed his order book, but Kit noticed he didn’t reach for his stool. If you get too comfortable, they will too.
She was in the lead with the broom, her mother following with the mop and pail. The manager gave a sigh. His wife was poorly—well, come to that, when was she not? Kit stole a look at his face: part have-a-laugh, part poor-old-me.
Bobbie dunked the mop, plunging it up and down. “I’ll look in on her when I finish up here.”
“You’re a gem, Mrs. Starratt.” Mr. Knox wiped his thin hair back. “Isn’t she a gem.”
“She is,” Uncle Anders said.
Bobbie bent to twist the water from the mop.
“And a hard worker to boot.”
Uncle Anders gave a nod.
“Not like these buggers I have to deal with. Beg pardon, Missus.”
Her mother smiled. “Don’t mind me.”
“Only, they wear a man out. This one little— Thompson, his name is. He tells me he’s worked as a pitcher before—Oh yes, Mr. Knox, I got experience—but you should see him. Jabs his pew into the fish any old where. I tell him, the meat’s no good to me full of holes.”
Kit stood still. Could Bobbie feel it? The wish in Kit’s hands—gripping the broom handle but feeling the haft of the pew. Their eyes met, and her mother spoke.
“You ought to give Kit a try. She’s a demon with the pew.”
Kit looked down at the broom head.
“A little young, isn’t she?” said Mr. Knox.
“She’s fourteen,” Bobbie said, a lie of one year—something the manager might easily have worked out himself. “Older than some you got working down there.”
“On the floor, maybe,” he said. “Pitching’s skilled work.”
“I’m telling you, she’s a demon.”
“It is true,” Uncle Anders said. “You will not find better.”
And so Thompson was demoted to the cannery floor—cleaning round the feet of the slitters, catching the empty cans that rolled down the chute and lugging them to the packing line—and Kit got her chance.
There was a trick to pitching—stick and fling, a kind of flying figure eight. You had to stay calm to keep your footing knee-deep in fish. The pew had a single tooth, and you knew by feel when it slipped and bit into the good red flesh—something Kit hadn’t felt for a long time. Frank had taught her when she was seven or eight, letting her pitch the catch ashore every time they went out—even if it was only a few greenlings or a single weighty spring. You had to trust the pew. Her father never said that. He said, “Head’s good, or the tail. Just look where you want it to go.”
She liked the work. Keeping an ear out for the collector boat, pelting down to the fish ladder to meet it, pew in hand. Mr. Knox watched her pitch, and the following year, when a spot came up on the collector, the job was hers. Now she was out in the clean air among the fleet, hopping down into skiff after skiff to pitch the fish up into the collector’s hold. When Frank returned, she would be ready to labour beside him, setting and picking the net.
That was the idea. But when the man himself finally came home, he was no use in a boat. The sea-scare, Uncle Anders called it. He said it once in his own language, and it sounded even worse.
God, she’s tired. The catch twitches about her boots. The sun is hot on her crown, blinding off the swollen waves. She can’t seem to let go of the oars.
Her father’s gone. The truth of it just about swamps her. Both of them now, gone from her days. Not from the world, though, not Bobbie. Her mother could still come back. Foolish. Kit has no idea where Bobbie is—not a word before she left and not so much as a postcard since. Uncle Anders won’t speak her name aloud; like Kit, he bowed his head whenever Frank talked poison about his faithless wife. Still, Kit lets herself picture it: Bobbie walking back to her down the Camosun’s gangplank, a mistake, Kitty-cat, all of it, a mistake.
Kit curls forward, resting her forehead on her knees. Somehow she releases her grip, letting the oars dangle in their locks. Blades trailing, the faintest drag. Where the hell is the collector? She needs to off-load her catch. She needs to row in close to shore, drop anchor and lie down.
* * *
It troubled me, that slip I had made with the rum. I tried to make up for it by cutting back, but even half an ounce under ration brought on a sick chill and shaking hands. Such careful accounts the blood keeps. I am up to double that daily measure now.
I made three trips to the abandoned sawmill all told. The last had to wait for a quiet sea. I had torn the corrugated roof off a four-seat privy—the length of it made the Coot unsure. Soft snow came dropping, dissolving. I wore my arms out rowing back, fighting the outgoing tide. A following sea could have swamped her on a single swell.
For a time my days were full—a swim when storms allowed, a trip out to the kelp beds in the rowboat, work on the shack. You know how night comes down in these fjords. More than once I found myself hammering a nail I could no longer see.
Heavy weather often kept me ashore, the surf dangerous even in my little cove. The longer I went without pulling boat or body through the waves, the heavier my limbs became. The storekeeper at Alert Bay had been right—I came to value the long wander along the creek to check my traps.
The hardware had come with advice. “Thing is to figure out where they go,” the storekeeper told me. “I used to roll a log right up to the riverbank, leave a skinny path, see, dig down in the mud for the set.” He nodded to himself. “Look out for hidey-holes under the bank or round the roots of a tree. You find one with a heap of shit full of fish scales, you’ve got your mink.”
I smoked my traps as he had suggested, laying them out beneath the dangling strips of fish. I made sure to handle them with gloves. Having rolled a log up alongside the creek, I crouched on it to make the set, leaving little sign. The first animal I took there was a good size. The trap held him by the hind leg—he had made a wallow with his thrashing and drowned. I can still see my hands turning red with cold as I washed the mud from his fur. I shook the water from his pelt, the death rigor already going out of him so he snapped like a rag.
Over time I took ten mink at that single spot. One had chewed through two of his toes and was working on a third. Standing just out of his reach, I gripped my gun by the barrel, raising the heavy butt. “Trust me,” I told him, “it will be a relief.”
Of course, I was handy with a knife—I had gutted thousands of fish, field-dressed scores of deer. The meat of a mink is slim and foul with musk. I was only hungry enough to eat it once. “Tack the skin out as soon as you can,” the storekeeper had told me. “Stretch it, sure, but only a bit. That way you keep a good dense pelt without selling yourself short.”
Nights when the rain held off, I unwrapped Neville’s dictionary and opened it by the fire. “Fire” was the igneous element. But also the passion of love and the punishment of the damned. A little way up the page, “finny” meant furnished with fins, formed for the element of water. I looked for “mink” but did not find it. I spoke the word anyway, in case one was hiding nearby, waiting to hear its name.
* * *
—
By the end of January I had baled up a few dozen pelts, enough to be thinking of a trip to the Fortunes’ floathouse store. And yes, I was thinking about those Hudson’s Bay jugs, the last one making a hollow sound now when I tipped it to pour. I had suffered no more slips since the first—I was making myself steady, a man at his own helm. There was a pride in it, work and weather, measured reward.
Tom and Grace Fortune. If the man in Alert Bay had set some unknown compass in me, pointing the way to the storekeeper’s life, then the Fortunes tapped on its housing, bringing the needle true. I thought I had lost all taste for company, but when they offered supper and a bunk, some part of me I had hoped I was rid of sat up eager as a dog.
Grace was a big woman, but she skimmed around their kitchen, each hand on its own errand, so she seemed to be both cook and kitchen maid. A good-looking woman, I suppose, a great mass of rust-coloured hair tied back, a light in her eye whenever she glanced at Tom.
While she cooked, Tom got out his board and cards. Cribbage is a baffling game to begin, but he was a patient teacher. If you have ever minded the hours your father and I spent playing, you have Tom Fortune to blame.
He was older than his wife by a decade or more, with a cured look to his skin that I recognized. After months of rum, the first shot of whiskey was a happy breath of fire. The smoky taste followed to soothe the tongue. Grace cut her rye with cordial, but she kept up well enough once she had the loaf in the oven and the stew simmering on top.
Later, when we had wiped our bowls clean with that good, dense bread, I found myself talking without end. Grace nodded from her post at the washing-up basin, Tom looking past his grip on the glass into the lamp’s bright flame. The sawed-off nails in the cribbage board glinted, Tom’s well ahead.
It was about the mink, my sermon, and about myself. How the mink hunted and fished, and I hunted and fished, using the fish I had caught for bait. Did it stay in the flesh, all that fish? In my flesh and the mink’s? “Flesh” was a slippery word, one Neville’s dictionary had afforded several lines. Animal nature. Near relation. The body distinguished from the soul.
“I never thought,” Grace said. “What do you reckon, Tom?”
“Couldn’t say.”
They were being kind—I could see it, looking in on the three of us floating there. How many solitary trappers, handliners and handloggers had they welcomed and let babble on? Surely there was no shame in it. Even so, when I woke in my clothes on the stockroom cot, I sat up sweating like a man disgraced.
I was as quiet as a half-sober man can be, feeling his way out through a home he doesn’t know. On the dock I found the dark beginning to thin. The rain was steady, almost gentle, the sea no threat. Tom had lined up my gallon jugs and other supplies just inside the shop door. The pelts had covered my bill with credit besides—all the same, I crept back and forth to the Coot like a thief, stowing everything under my oilskin. No sign of life in the floathouse as I pushed off. They would wake to find their home returned to them. I do not know if the relief I imagined was theirs or my own.
* * *
—
It was not as though I never saw another soul. Indians travelled the inlet—not Oweekeenos but another group Tom and Grace called Gwasalas. You saw them rowing or paddling, the odd one-lunger putt-putting through the fog. Like the blackfish, they passed the mouth of the cove but did not trouble to turn toward shore. I suppose they knew the beach was too steep for clamming, and the rocks hid only small, sinewy crabs. Or perhaps they had lived a lesson or two in how white men make friends.
In late spring the fresh-fish collectors steamed through to buy up the piecemeal catch, and by summer the lone cannery on the inlet was sending a boat around. The fair-weather handliners rowed out from whatever town they had been haunting during the winter months. I raised a hand to any man I passed on the inlet. Those who strayed into the cove I greeted with crossed arms.
As ever, the Fortunes’ store was only a day’s row away. I needed supplies like any man, and they often had a copy of the World. The news was weeks old but fresh to me—an orphan girl’s suicide, Chinese exclusion renewed in the US. Reading in my little shack on the cove was not so different from turning the pages in a room at Mrs. McClintock’s, or back at the old bachelor’s shed. Even in a city coming up like mushrooms, I had been a man on his own.
