Devour (2 page)

Something unimaginable was behind the spray of ice and seawater, suspended vertically in front of him. Its mouth was closed, the nostrils smashed back from breaking through the thick ice. Its striped hide was crusted with gray barnacles. It hung in the sky fifteen, twenty feet above him, eclipsing the low-riding sun.

And that’s just the head
, Joe thought. His mind spun around and around that single fact: What he was seeing was
only the head
.

It sank slowly, jaws still pointed toward the sky, and for a moment Joe thought perhaps it was a whale, some abomination of a whale, for nothing else could compare to the size of this monstrosity. Then the jaws parted slightly, revealing yellow teeth larger than a man could put his arms around. The eye on Joe’s side opened, and he was amazed to see it was a brilliant green, a sharp emerald inside the hooded eye socket. The nostrils flared, sucking in fresh air. The abomination’s eye seemed to fix on Joe, marking him, and then it submerged. A wave rolled over the fractured ice, the displaced water stopping just short of Joe’s boots.

“Darm!” Joe shouted. “Nuqtak! Paarvu!”

He heard a garbled sound from the jumble of ice in front of him. He moved forward carefully, using the chunks of ice to check his progress. There! Darm was clinging tightly to a small floe. Joe knew he had only moments to get his sister’s husband out of the water. Inuit were notoriously poor swimmers, and a wet floe was impossible to hold on to for long. The other two hunters had already disappeared.

He rummaged into the small hunting pack he carried and pulled out a long cord, which had a lead weight and large treble hook at the end—the same tool he used to retrieve his harvested seals. He glanced up, estimated Darm was fifteen feet away, and peeled off loops of cord. An old saying from the Sunday school he had briefly attended flitted across his mind:
I will become a fisher of men
.

He threw the weighted hook underhand. It passed over Darm, the cord falling on his shoulder. Joe quickly pulled in line, felt tension, and reared back hard on the cord. Darm yelped in pain and Joe retreated backwards, playing out line until he was behind a large block of ice. He sat down and planted his boots against it.

He began to pull, ignoring Darm’s cries of pain. Joe’s eyes were squeezed almost shut with exertion, his muscles straining as he sluiced his brother-in-law toward safety.

* * *

* * *

“Pull yourself up on the ice!”

Joe could feel the panic setting its claws in him now, climbing out of his throat, flooding his brain. Darm was at the edge of the shattered ice, still on the floe, unable to lift himself onto the main ice sheet. And Joe could not go to him—the wet ice was far too slippery.

Joe took a deep breath, wrapped his hand around the cord, and pulled as hard as he could. Something popped in his lower back, hot and painful. His vision began to swim and still he leaned back, knowing the cord might break. Part of him was actually wishing waiting it would break, because his desire to get away from this place was now almost as strong as his desire to save his best friend. Darm let out a strangled cry and suddenly the tension changed on the cord, becoming manageable. Joe kept pulling until Darm was on the other side of the ice chunk, moaning, half-drowned, but still alive.

Joe stood, blinking to clear the swimming black and green dots that filled his vision. “Come on,” he said to Darm, pulling him to his feet. He pointed toward the land-fast ice, a realm where no creature that swam could penetrate. “We need to run, Darm. Can you run?”

Darm wiped a shaky hand across his face, where ice had already begun to form on his eyelashes. The hook was embedded into the big muscles of his shoulder, and a thin red stream of blood, diluted with seawater, ran from his clothes down to the ice. “Bet your ass I can run,” he said.

They sprinted toward the distant ice ridges, boots thudding on the thick ice.

* * *

* * *

One moment Joe was running, and the next he was half-submerged, draped over a small, triangular floe. The beast had exploded through the pack ice again, directly under their feet.

He looked around blearily, a warm trickle spreading from his head down the side of his face. Darm was nowhere in sight, and when Joe shifted position to look around there was a searing pain in his right leg. He could see the bulge of his broken femur through his leggings, pressing against the big muscles in his thigh.

Joe Inupiat floated alone in a smashed circle of ice, thirty feet in diameter. So many times in these past few years he had lain in bed, thinking about what the elders said about this new life. Technology and constant streams of information could be good, they said. Such things could make life in this hard world a bit easier. But it could also make you nearsighted, turn you snow-blind in the soul. A man could lose his feel for the tundra, for the sea, would lose whatever magic was left in this life. And Joe had felt the magic ebbing these past years, unsure if it was changes in the world that brought it on, or changes from living through so many seasons here at the frozen top of the world. So he hunted and he waited for something unexplainable, something to strum that live wire deep in his chest, something to bring back the magic.

Now the sea had granted his wish. He turned over on the floe and crawled forward so he could peer down into the depths. He could see his damned magic down there, impossibly long and thick, only forty feet below him. It was tiger-striped along its back, the tail lined with sharp scutes that reminded him of the rough saws the elders used to carve blocks of snow for traditional
igluit
.

Joe fought for consciousness, for strength. There was no hope of reaching shore, no hope of even getting off this floe. Blood dripped steadily from his head into the water. He thought of his daughters, and for a moment he felt their soft hands in his own, could feel the weight of them in his arms as he carried them to their beds.

He pulled cold air deep into his lungs, warmed it, savored it. “Come on,” he shouted, slapping at the water. “Come on and finish it!”

The predator turned its gaze upward, green eyes gleaming.

* * *

 

S
omething very large was suspended directly underneath the
Tangled Blue
.

Gilly Blanchard tapped the buttons on the Furuno sonar display, zooming in on the large half-moon arc just below their baits, which showed up as small fingernails on the sonar. The other two baits were positioned below bright orange floats, roughly thirty yards off each corner of the Grady-White’s stern. The floats were barely visible in the thick fog.

He turned back to the console, glancing at the readout from the FishHawk sensor, suspended on a lead ball weight twelve fathoms deep. The temperature at seventy feet down was only forty-three degrees, with a subsurface current of just over three knots. Overhead, hundreds of shearwater petrels swooped low over the water, their black-edged wings the only relief in an otherwise gray universe.

“You believe this, Cap?” Gilly called over his shoulder. “We got another looker.”

Brian Hawkins looked up from his chum board. He was cutting long strips of herring into chunks, using the side of the blade to carefully scrape away the long, bloody kidneys. Gilly liked to kid him about how careful he was with the bait, how fastidious he was in general, especially compared to how he could be the rest of the time. It didn’t bother Brian; he knew what he knew. Blood brought in sharks, and sharks were a pain in the ass. And this day, so far, had been remarkably free of pains in the ass.

“She gonna?” Brian said, chopping the rest of the herring fillet into three-inch chunks. He was careful in his speed, timing his cuts with the motion of the boat. Blades, waves, and fingers, he thought. Mix those three for any length of time, and eventually your gloves are going to have empty spaces in them.

“Dunno,” Gilly said. “Cruising for now. She’s a big one.”

Brian dropped a few more chunks overboard, then slid the rest of the chum into an ice cream bucket. He straightened, groaning at the pain in his lower back. He’d been meaning to build a little chumming station at chest level for years. He only seriously considered it after cutting bait, when his backbone felt like it had been pressed in a vise. By the time they got back to port, and the little workshop in the marina garage, his mind was nowhere close to bait cutting. It was set on that first drink—the best one of the day, as Hemingway used to say—or maybe just a warm bed.

“Getting old, Cap,” Gilly said.

“Experienced,” Brian said, rolling his shoulders. “Seasoned.”

He was forty-two, still able to put in a full day in the ship, and sometimes a full night in the bar. Maybe a little softer than he wanted to be around the middle, but hell. It was always that way at the beginning of the season, all those long winter nights in front of the tube, or parked in front of the bar at the Riff-Raff. The weight would come off, it always did. His short beard was still dark brown, with only a few rogue whites in the mix.

“You need a little pick-me-up?” Gilly asked.

Brian glanced at his first mate. When a man bought a boat, part of the process was negotiating over the gear included in the deal. Did the price include the outriggers? Fishing gear? Some men wanted to keep the existing electronics; others were only interested in buying the hull and would add their own equipment later. When Brian sat down with old Denny Blanchard that day in the back booth of the Riff-Raff, he had been prepared to haggle over all sorts of details, some he was prepared to give in to, others that were absolutes. He certainly sure hadn’t been expecting to get a first mate out of the deal, especially one with three DWIs, two stints in county for distribution of a controlled substance, and a gimpy leg from rolling his daddy’s diesel truck on I-95 at three in the morning.

“Prescriptions,” Brian said. “For every damn pill you have on board.” He motioned out to the gray wall of fog that encircled the boat. “I mean it, Gil. The Coast Guard comes up on us in this crap and—”

Gilly held a hand up. “First,” he said. “I’m keepin’ eyes on the radar, dude. I’m not blind. Ain’t no pings within ten miles.”

“
Dude?
” Brian said. “Denny’d roll over in his grave hearing you talk like that. You’re forty-seven, not seventeen.”

“Then I’m sure he’s twisted up like a mummy by now,” Gilly said. “If he cares enough to pay attention to me when he’s dead. He sure didn’t when he was still kicking.” Gilly grinned. “Second, you know the lamedick Coasties are scattered all over hell and gone. There’s been what, three sinkings up by Fundy, another down by—”

He was interrupted by the sound of the rod banging off the port side, followed by the scream of the drag on the big Penn reel. Brian slipped on his gloves and moved quickly to the corner rod, a nine-foot Fin-Nor, bent over nearly double. The 200-pound test monofilament was flying off the reel, the line counter flashing past a hundred, a hundred fifty, then over two hundred in the span of seconds.

“Big one,” Brian said, wrapping his hands carefully around the rod handle. He needed to wait until the run was over before removing the rod from the rod holder. On smaller fish that wasn’t always the case, but today the fish were running large. Running huge, actually. They didn’t use stand-up gear on the
Tangled Blue
, and if one of these behemoths yanked the rod out of his grip Brian would be out close to two grand. It was better than being strapped to the bastard when it went over, but it still wasn’t good. A different kind of hurt.

Gilly limped to the other corner of the boat, flipped the reel on the other rig to high gear ratio, and started cranking in line. He got the float in, unsnapped it, and rolled it toward the bow. By the time the float bounced down the stairs and into the cuddy he had the line out of the water, the live herring wiggling in the air with the big 11-ought hook through its nose. Gilly flipped the herring off the hook and stowed the rod, then moved on to the other two lines. Brian barely noticed. The first mate of the
Tangled Blue
had his faults, as did her captain. But there wasn’t a man in Gloucester who could clear a deck as fast as Gilly Blanchard.

Two minutes later the gear was stowed and Gilly fired up the twin 350s, then activated the automatic retrieve on the windlass anchor. The fish had pulled out four hundred feet of line and was cutting hard to the port side, still pulling drag at a relentless pace. Brian shook his head and took a deep breath, waiting for the brief lull when he could pop the rod free.

A good day on the water was one fish. Two-fish days happened rarely. Three-fish days—a one-man limit—were epic, the kind of day where you almost cringed, thinking of the hangover that would result from that night’s celebration. Many boats never raised three fish in a day, and more than half never saw two in the hold in a season.

The pitch of the drag changed, and the tip of the Fin-Nor rod came up a fraction of a degree. Brian slid the rod out of the holder and pulled back steadily. This would be their sixth hookup, perhaps their fifth fish of the day. And all of their fish had been caught off a little underwater hump at the edge of this icy, food-rich current streaming down from the north.

“Take it ten degrees starboard,” he called out over his shoulder. The big 350s rumbled under his feet as Gilly positioned the boat so the line was straight out the back. Brian watched the spool grow steadily smaller. He was down to the backing now, braided Dacron line that made a slight sizzling sound as it coursed through the roller guides.

“Out four thirty,” Brian said, just loud enough to hear over the rumble of the engines. “Five hundred, five twenty-five.” He shook his head as the numbers on the counter whirred past. “She’s out six and still going strong.”

Gilly whistled, lit a cigarette. Six-fifty was the magic number.

“We chasing?” Gilly hollered.

The line counter went past six hundred and fifty feet, with no signs of slowing. “We’re chasing,” Brian yelled, and despite the sore muscles in his shoulders and back, despite the black thoughts that had once again begun to circle his mind, he offered up a tight-lipped smile to the foggy world, to the shearwaters who chirred and darted above them. Nothing in the world could compare to the thrill of hooking into something stronger than yourself and trying to make it your own.

* * *

It came up slowly, the rod quivering slightly from Brian’s aching shoulders. He’d been fighting for a little over two hours, gaining a few inches here, a foot there. They were a half mile from the original hookup, and he had only started to gain serious amounts of line in the past ten minutes. The tendons in his left hand, which he used to pull in line while reeling with his right, were ready to cramp.

Gilly moved up next to him, held up a plastic water bottle to his mouth. Brian drank quickly, eyes trained on the line stretched tight in front of him. The fish was starting to cut to the side, and angling up and out. Moving slowly but surely, like the good ones inevitably did. The other fish they had caught that day were large—giants, by definition—but none of them were in this league. An epic fish for an epic day.

“She’s coming in,” Gilly said. “We’re gonna be weighted down something fierce, we land this sow.”

Bad luck
, Brian thought.
Never talk about size until you wrap the damn rope around its tail.
“Stick ready?”

Gilly lifted the harpoon, checked the coil of rope. “She’s ready. How long, you think?”

“Not long,” he said. “But she’ll have a hell of a boat run.”

“Nope,” Gilly said. “She’ll turn on her side, I’ll stick her, and then you and I ain’t gonna see this side of sober for a week.”

Brian had to grin. He hadn’t been on a legitimate bender for a while, and partying with Gilly usually left him half-paralyzed and wondering about liver transplants. But if they did land this fish, a good old-fashioned drunk was obligatory. Even without it, they had close to thirty thousand dollars of catch in the hold. If the meat was especially fatty, they might get another ten or twenty percent. Add in this one, and—

The rod went suddenly limp in his hand and he reeled in furiously, flipping to high gear retrieve with the pad of his thumb. It was gone, the fish of his lifetime was gone because he had let himself get distracted, had let the goddamn thought of money enter into the equation of man and fish—

Tension surged back into the line, and the drag screamed again. Brian watched as the fish stripped another hundred feet off the reel, reversing the past twenty minutes’ worth of work. The fish had simply made a run toward the boat, something he hadn’t expected at this point in the battle. He switched the gear ratio back to low, checked the drag. “She’s a funny one,” he said to Gilly, who had moved back to the wheel to reposition them. “Flipped direction like a skipjack.”

“Something down there,” Gilly said, tapping on the sonar screen. “Must’ve spooked it.”

“Shark?”

“Nah, looks like a humpie or a blue. Weird hook for a whale, but that’s all it can be. Gone now.” He tapped the menu button, switching to a wider transducer angle, and pointed at a large orange arc at the very edge of the screen. “There it is, leaving the scene. Fuckin’ blubberhead.”

The last run seemed to have exhausted the fish. It came in steadily after the last surge. The braided line came back up the guides, and the mono began to fill the spool. Gilly picked up the harpoon and stood to Brian’s left, looking over the side.

“Oh my Jesus Christ,” Gilly said. “It’s a half-tonner.”

The giant bluefin tuna came in slowly, an indigo-and-silver behemoth. It was hooked well in the corner of the mouth, the barb of the big hook clearly visible below its softball-sized eyeball. Its rear dorsal and anterior fins curved back like scimitars, the large dark tail moving slowly through the water.

Easily a half-tonner
, Brian thought, temporarily forgetting his own jinxes on guessing weights before the fish was in the boat.
Hell, it might beat Fraser’s record.
He had been fishing for a living for six years, and catching fish regularly for the last four. He had never seen, nor heard of, a bluefin nearly this large.

“You miss this goddamn thing—”

“I miss that fish,” Gilly said, hefting the harpoon, “you take me to the charity house for the blind and retarded. It’s as big as a goddamn house.”

The bluefin, only twenty yards from the boat, started to turn sideways. It was a long throw for even a good stick man, but Gilly was right—it would be hard to miss. Gilly brought the harpoon to his shoulder, and as he did the tuna seemed to see him, or sense his intentions. It turned away and swam hard down to the depths, pulling more drag off the reel, but slowed after only about seventy feet. Brian carefully applied pressure to turn it around.

He cranked down slowly, steadily. The hook had been in the fish for two hours now, long enough to wear a hole in the fish’s mouth. Every turn, every run enlarged that hole, and made it easier for the hook to pull out. A fish like this was not only epic, it had the potential to be worth six figures—or more. A recent bluefin tuna of exceptional quality had just sold to a Japanese fish broker for $1.7 million. For a guy eighty grand in debt, they were numbers hard to put of mind.

“Hit it as soon as you can,” Brian said. “Stick her hard.”

“Yeah, Cap,” Gilly said. “I got her.” He was serious for once, Brian saw, even a bit nervous. Probably thinking of all the tail and blow he could score with his first mate’s share of today’s catch.

The tuna made another short, hard run just out of sight of the boat. The rod bounced hard twice, three times, then stopped, became deadweight. Brian pulled back on the tip slowly, feeling the fish out—was it dogging him, swimming away just hard enough to create a stalemate? It didn’t feel like it was even moving. The weight on the other end was solid, unmovable.