Leaving Protection (3 page)

W
E PULLED OUT OF
C
RAIG
at six the next evening. I sat on the aft deck, on the big hatch lid over the fish hold, watching the harbor recede. The houses on the hill grew smaller and the clearcuts on Sunnahae Mountain grew large. After a fast-moving rain, everything was golden in the evening light.

There was no telling how long I might be out on the ocean. If king season stayed open for two weeks, Tor wasn't going to lose time resupplying in the middle of it. The galley pantry was stocked to the gills with canned goods, plus we had four milk crates overflowing with refrigerated stuff. Like the
Chimes,
the
Storm Petrel
had no refrigerator. The fish hold was one big icebox. Push back the hatch lid and the
milk crates were right there, on a tray spanning the pit.

Torsen wove his way among the outer islands for several hours. It was obvious he knew these waters as well as any local skipper. He dropped anchor in Pigeon Pass. The anchorage was in the lee of Baker Island, out of reach of the swells coming off the open ocean. My highliner lay down on his bunk behind the wheel just after nine. A couple of minutes, no more, and he was sawing logs. I hung out on the deck listening to the spouting of nearby whales, rehearsing what it would be like to run the power gurdies.

The sea swallowed the sun around ten. It was after eleven before the lights atop the masts of the surrounding trollers were shining bright. Summer days in Alaska, how they linger. Locals like me hate to waste precious daylight. Sleep is for winter, when you're not missing anything but darkness.

Come morning, my family would be fishing in the Sumner Strait, without me. After all these years, that was going to be strange for all of us. One thing we'd agreed on—especially since we couldn't be in touch: No worrying!

It was nearly dark as I made my way past Torsen's bunk and eased down the ladder to my own bed in the nose of the troller, the fo'c'sle. As I got horizontal, images from the last two days played across my mind until I was picturing the metal plate, the old plaque or whatever it was, I had been handling when Tor surprised me in the cockpit. Before the double-headed
eagle even came into focus, I fell into a chasm of sleep.

Next thing I knew, the engine was rumbling to life.

A troller's motor firing up will get your attention when you're sleeping a few yards away from it, but the anchor being pulled jars you on a whole other scale. Picture being crammed in a small metal garbage can being beaten on by lunatics with tire irons. That's the effect of the anchor chain passing through its roller on the bow just a few feet above your head.

Before my mind switched on, I assumed I was on my family's boat. But the engine was more powerful and the rattle of the chain wasn't the same. The dark shape on the opposite bunk was my duffel bag and not my sister. Then I remembered. I had taken a job on a troller called the
Storm Petrel,
and my first shot at king season was about to begin.

I threw on my clothes and my rubber boots, grabbed my jacket and wool cap, and raced up the ladder. Torsen had returned from the bow and was lowering the trolling pole on the starboard side to its fishing position, at a forty-five-degree angle. The
Storm Petrel
's poles were about forty feet long. Not waiting to be told, I lowered the port pole, then dropped the port stabilizer into the water a few seconds after he'd dropped his. It was a quarter to four, and dawn was already under way over the mountains of the islands between us and Prince of Wales. By the dim light, I could see some of the other captains pulling anchor.

In Torsen's wake, I returned to the warmth of the wheelhouse. For a big man and an old-timer, Tor
moved fast. In seconds he fixed himself a mug of instant coffee, gave it a good stir, jammed a powdered donut into his mouth, and slid into his captain's chair behind the wheel. With his free hand he put the
Storm Petrel
in gear and we were rolling. “Leth's guh fithing,” he said through his donut. He motioned with his chin for me to help myself to the open box.

Just like on the
Chimes,
the galley stove was set to 350 degrees around the clock, which was how the wheelhouse stayed warm and the ever-present pot of water stayed hot. As I might have guessed, Torsen didn't fool with brewing coffee when he was fishing. He'd bought eight tins of presweetened instant, and had started in on the mocha. I thought about hot chocolate but went with the mocha coffee. I wished I hadn't stayed up late. It wasn't so smart to be starting out with a major sleep deficit.

At the table, I drowsily dunked donuts and slurped coffee as I looked over the bow at the swells we were approaching. During the brief dark hours, a front had kicked in from the southwest. To the east, the dawn was cloud-riddled and promising to be spectacular. The times I had been on the outside waters with my family—I could count them on one hand—were during freakish periods of flat calm. We would never have ventured out on a day like this with our smaller boat.

When the
Petrel
hit the first swells, its bow began to rise dramatically and I could feel them rolling under the length of the boat. It was a rush, especially when I
thought about the seas that might lie ahead in the coming hours and days.

It wasn't like I'd never seen swells or bad weather, or gone through any scrapes on the inside water. It's just that once you're outside, the stakes are a lot higher. There are no islands out there to knock down the power of the sea. There's nothing to hide behind. You ride it out or you run for cover.

All my life I knew I would go to sea one day, with all its dangers. And here I was.

I went out onto the deck with my mug and donut and watched the dawn unfold. Gulls and kittiwakes were diving and screaming in the
Petrel's
wake. The face of every ripple on the sea was lit with a brush stroke of vermilion. The other boats from Pigeon Pass fell in behind us, single file, trolling poles at the ready.

Back inside the wheelhouse, I watched the instrument monitors as the captain steered around a rocky point and started south. We entered Veta Bay along the fifty-fathom contour, which meant we were three hundred feet off the bottom. Underwater pinnacles, marked by stars on the GPS monitor, had to be avoided. Drag your fishing gear over them, you lose the gear.

“Whales port and starboard,” I said.

My highliner nodded gravely. “Good indicators. They're feeding on herring and needlefish, same as our kings. Lots of birds around, too. Look, a couple miles ahead—they're swarming over a big patch of feed.”

I had to squint to make out the swarm. “Is the
weather building?” I asked. I wasn't ready to be tested with big water this soon.

“Not necessarily.”

The skipper switched to autopilot, then reached for his heavy rubberized rain bottoms. I started pulling my own on. This didn't mean rain from the sky. It meant, if we were lucky, blood and slime from the sea.

The bib-type bottoms reach to your chest and fasten with suspenders. Torsen threw me a pair of blue rubber gloves from the cabinet above the fire extinguisher, then pulled on a pair of his own. “This is it,” he said. “You wait all year for this.”

“I've waited my whole life.”

“So let's get after 'em, kid!”

I followed Tor past the fish-hold hatch. We parted company at the hayrack, the assembly of galvanized pipe that horseshoed around the machinery and instruments at the rear center of the boat. The hayrack is about five feet above the deck and a good thing to hang on to when you're moving around the back of the troller.

When I saw Tor was headed left, I swung right. Hand on the hayrack, I stepped through the cleaning bin and dropped into the cockpit, the waist-high well along the very back of the boat where the work of the fishing is done. I couldn't help taking a quick glance around, hoping to spot the plaque with the double-headed eagle, but it was nowhere to be seen.

Tor had the spreads at the ready in the tray underneath the hardwood rail around the stern. There were
eleven for each of the two trolling lines on my side of the boat. Each of the spreads was a dozen or so feet of hundred-pound-test monofilament leader with the lure on the business end. On the other end was a snap for attaching the leader to the fishing line, which was made of braided stainless steel wire.

I ran the two lines down on my side, he ran his down, and then we waited. Once the thin steel fishing lines were spooled off the gurdy reels, we ran them out to be supported by the trolling poles. We were fishing down to thirty-two fathoms, at a trolling speed of 3.2 knots, a little less than four miles an hour. Keeping a close eye on the cockpit Fathometer and making small adjustments with the cockpit autopilot, the skipper was steering a course over a forty-three-fathom bottom.

Behind us, we were trailing forty-four lures. A third were big brass spoons and two-thirds were hootchies, plastic squid with waving tentacles kind of like hula skirts. The spreads with hootchies were rigged with a big orange flasher three feet up from the lure. The flashers, orange with a reflecting strip down the middle, have a crazy action in the water. With thirty doing their thing, the effect is like a marching band. Hey there, come to the parade, tasty snacks everywhere you look!

We might have waited two minutes, no more than it took for me to be distracted by a whale off the port side.

“Tip!” exclaimed Tor. My eyes shot to the line that
attached to the tip of his trolling pole. Nothing was going on. Then it occurred to me to look at my own pole. My tip line was jerking frantically. This was definitely a king.

“You tell me when,” I cried.

“Give it about one minute,” Tor replied. “Some of his friends might get jealous.”

The heavy, the closer line that was weighed down by the heavier cannonball, was jerking, too. So, I noticed, were both of the skipper's lines.

“The bite is on!” Tor declared. “Bring 'em up, Robbie!”

I
HURRIED TO RETRIEVE THE
upper spreads on my outside line. I snapped four of them onto the wire in the gear tray, slapping the flashers or spoons along the waist-high rail on my side of the back of the boat.

Right hand on the gurdy lever, I brought the line up some more. I could see into the depths only as far as two more empty hooks, one a spoon and one a hootchie behind a flasher. Then suddenly there came a flash of silver, a large twisting king salmon on the seventh spread.

As I got the sixth spread out of the way, my first king leaped clean out of the ocean. It was not only a king, it was a
big
king.

“Yes sir!” Tor called. Nothing like fish, I thought, to make a highliner sing. I caught the motion of the big man on my left swinging his gaff, and I heard a dull thud as it connected. A king salmon, in a blurred arc, flew out of the ocean and into the cleaning bin on his side of the stern.

As I unsnapped the leader with my prize only twelve feet away, it streaked back and forth, down and up, and then, like a torpedo, charged underneath the boat. For my money there's not a more elegantly designed swimmer in the sea than the king salmon, a.k.a. chinook, a.k.a. tyee—a native term of honor that means “chief.” I only hoped this beauty didn't twist the leader around our rudder.

No, the king was back, and I was still in business. I snapped the leader onto the wire in the gear tray and reached with my right hand for my gaff. I took the hundred-pound-test in my gloved hands and began to pull hand over hand. For traction, I pressed the monofilament tight against the wooden shaft of the gaff with my right hand as my left drew in more and more leader.

Suddenly the big fish broke the surface again, thrashing up a frenzy of white water and whipping its head back and forth. It failed to shake the hook.

Just don't give him any slack, I thought.

I braced and pulled with my back as well as my arms. This was one powerful fish! I drew the chinook in close, almost close enough to club, and then I
remembered.
First fish goes back into the sea.
It was a Daniels family tradition to shake the first one loose.

But this is a fifty-pound king, I told myself as I gripped the end of the flasher that was toward the fish. Bent over the back of the boat, I made ready with the gaff poised high in the air. Then I froze.

I looked in the highliner's direction. He had just landed another and was looking at me with a big question mark above his head. His eyes were asking,
What in the world are you waiting for?

Do it,
I told myself, and I came down hard with the gaff, clubbing the big king squarely on the top of the head. With no further hesitation, I spun the gaff in my right hand and swung with a shorter swing, this time sinking the gaff hook deep through the cheek plate at the side of its head. Both hands on the gaff, I threw my body weight back, the big tyee filling up the sky as I swung it over my right shoulder and into the cleaning bin.

The clouds that had seemed so threatening had all sped by. The golden morning light fell on the gasping fish, for the time being lying still. In its first half minute out of the ocean, a king salmon's iridescence distills all the beauty of the earth and the stars. That's what my mother says, and she's an artist. My own eyes tell me she has it right. Beneath its dark sea green back, there's a swath of red-violet, then a brilliant band of metallic copper-gold. In the lower half of the fish, each silver scale sparkles like a diamond prism, refracting
light into every color of the rainbow.

As the king's life drains away so does its color, and its magic, until all you have left is a dying fish thrashing in the bin, smearing itself in blood and slime and spattering you with the same.

At that moment, I had no time to dwell on the tragedy of every salmon pulled from the sea. From way back to my toddler days on the family boat, I was used to the slaughter. When the bite is on, you don't stop to think. You jerk the lure from the fish's mouth with the gaff hook and you slap the flasher on the rail, letting its lure swing free over the back of the boat. Then you reach for the gurdy lever as fast as you can to bring up the next spread.

A glance over the stern, and I saw that I had a king on the next one, and the next one. This was fishing. It was the first hour of the season—this school had never seen the gear before and they were going crazy over it.

Torsen was in constant motion on his side of the cockpit, whacking kings and hauling them aboard. “Yes sir!” I shouted.

I pulled three more kings from my tip line, then began snapping the spreads back onto the line and sending it back down. As soon as I had run it down thirty-two fathoms, I started in on the heavy and pulled two kings from it for a total of six, then returned its eleven lures to duty. Meanwhile, my tip line had been rattling for several minutes. It was time to pull it up again. It produced two cohos—silver
salmon—and three more kings, including two over thirty pounds. I had only dreamed it could be like this.

By the time I pulled my heavy again, the salmon on its spreads had been hooked long enough to attract some bad company. One of the three I brought up had fresh wounds, two rows of tooth marks about four inches apart. “Shark,” Tor said. “That fish won't sell; we'll call it dinner.”

Our bins were close to full, and the bite was finally slowing. The skipper had me start cleaning while he worked all four lines. I reached for the next fish and the next, and the next. Don't cut your finger, I reminded myself. A rubber glove is no protection against a razor-sharp cleaning knife. I switched to cleaning the fish in the opposite bin whenever the captain came over to pull fish on my side. I kept the gaff for each side hosed clean of slippery slime and lying in the bottom of the cleaning cradle exactly where he would expect it at the moment he reached for it—one signal among many to show him he hadn't hired a greenhorn.

Tor made a slow U-turn to head back over the school. We headed north, in the direction we had come, with a couple hundred yards separating us from the line of trollers still heading south.

In a few minutes we were over the salmon again, and Tor was landing fish steady as before. The trollers were making the turn where the highliner had, falling in behind us. I cleaned fish as fast as I was able. One by one I sprayed them clean with salt water from the deck
hose, then heaved them forward into the big white rinse tubs.

From blood vessels finer than the eye can see, the salmon gradually turn the rinse water bright red. Tor wanted them rinsing no longer than fifteen minutes. Otherwise they'd start to drop scales, and the man at the fish plant would call them number twos and pay us much less per pound.

Fifteen minutes by my watch, and I climbed out of the cockpit, slid the heavy lid of the fish hold a couple feet back, and dropped the rinsed fish onto the chipped ice on the floor of the hold below. I tried to drop the heavy ones as gently as I could. Keeping separate count of kings and cohos, I raced into the wheelhouse and marked the numbers in Tor's notebook. We were catching three kings for every coho, which is what you want: they're not only bigger, they pay three times as much per pound.

Back out on the deck, I spilled the bloody water from the rinse tubs, but no faster than the scupper slots could drain the mess back into the ocean—otherwise, it would have spilled all over the deck.

Leaning over the side with the pickle barrel, I scooped up three gallons or so of seawater at a time, careful not to let it get so full that it would break my back or pull me into the ocean. The bulwark was less than knee-high. I had to watch the swells or I would lose my balance.

“Do that from your knees,” Tor barked. “I don't want you going overboard.”

“Me neither,” I said, and kept working. I thought I might have been due for a compliment, and his warning stung. Still, I should have known better. At least he seemed concerned about my safety.

The rinse bin on each side refreshed, I climbed down into the fish hold and began the stoop work I was hired for. I was set to begin stowing our treasure. Troll-caught are the finest restaurant-quality wild salmon, the most expensive on account of being the most labor intensive—cleaned and bled within minutes of being caught, iced a few degrees above freezing, then rushed to market by jet.

I began by bedding the forward right section of the hold with a few inches of ice. Then I returned to the central floor where I'd thrown the salmon. I lifted that fifty-pounder with both arms, duck-walked it forward, used the aluminum scoop to fill its body and gill cavity with ice, then laid it gently off to the right. Extra-large were paying $1.21 a pound. I was looking at a sixty-dollar fish. My share…nine dollars. Not bad!

One fish at a time, I repeated the process. I laid them out neatly and bedded them with ice when I was ready to start a new layer. I slid one of the cedar bin boards into position to contain the fish in that compartment.

My back was already fit to breaking. Hours of bending over the stern to gaff the fish, bending over the cleaning bin, and stooping in the hold were taking their toll. It felt like a fish knife was planted deep
between my shoulder blades.

Last fish stowed, I returned to the central floor of the hold but stood up too soon. My skull met the framing under the plywood tray that supported our refrigerated groceries. I saw stars, and had a grim laugh at myself. Focus, Robbie!

I hoisted myself out of the fish hold onto the deck. Sliding the heavy cover back over the hatch, then blinking in the bright light, teeth clenched against the pain still ripping through my skull, I straightened my back and flexed my numb fingers. The chipped ice had a way of sliding inside the rubber gloves.

The wind had picked up and the
Petrel
was rolling in the slop. I nearly got pitched off balance, then braced just in time. Torsen was looking at me like I was a greenhorn.

“Take your side again,” the captain hollered. “We gotta bring 'em in faster. The sea lions are onto us.”

I looked to our wake but couldn't see any sea lions. As I swung into the cockpit and started to pull the port tip line, the skipper reached for the hayrack and pulled himself out of the cockpit. He braced his way across the rolling deck and disappeared into the wheelhouse. This was my chance to look around more carefully, with Tor away, to see if I could find where his mysterious metal plaque had gotten off to.

No luck. It wasn't anywhere to be found. I looked up as the captain appeared at the wheelhouse door. He had a pocket lighter in one hand and what looked like
a small stick of dynamite in the other. His face was contorted into a hard angry knot. Muttering darkly, he lit the bomb and tossed it over the side. A second after hitting the water, it exploded. At the back of our wake, two startled sea lions leaped halfway out of the water.

Our raiders with the big bearlike heads were Steller's sea lions. Some of the bulls are bigger than the biggest bears in Alaska.

For the time being, they let us be. Maybe they dropped back to pursue a free lunch from the boat behind us on the drag.

The captain stayed sour even though we were catching salmon hand over fist. If his mood was the result of his back aching, I wished he would take some more Tylenol. His disposition was giving me some pains of my own, so I tried to cheer him up. “I never dreamed it could be like this!” I yelled after landing yet another one as long as my arm. Its head was three times the size of my fist.

Torsen looked startled, almost like he'd forgotten I was there. “It seldom is,” he replied, his weathered face slowly breaking into a smile as he watched me work my lines. “Doesn't get any better than this.”

The bite finally tailed off in the early afternoon. The tide had ebbed, Tor explained, pulling the feed farther out to sea and the predator kings with it. We cleaned fish until one-thirty. “What do you say we fix some eggs,” he said finally.

After nine hours of work, it was time for breakfast.

“What's the count?” Tor grunted from the galley as he washed his hands in the sink.

“A hundred and three kings, thirty-seven cohos.”

“That's not half bad,” he said with a grin. “Not bad for a morning's work.”