The River Killers (2 page)

Fergie was concentrating on the sockeye. They were no longer swimming like tame little piggies toward the middle of the net. They'd turned and were coming our way, threatening to escape around the end of the net. Fergie started banging on the skiff and I found some rocks and hurled them into the water. The banging and splashing had an effect and the fish turned again toward the middle of the net.

The
Maple Leaf C
had started the turn. Heeled hard over, she shuddered and strained as she towed her end of the net around in the beginnings of a circle. Soon she was pulling straight toward us, and I could see Billy standing by the drum, frantically popping the plunger in and out of the water to scare the fish from swimming out his end. The winch was screaming as Christine wound in the slack in the running line. I watched Mark on the bridge. He was motionless, almost rigid at the wheel. He knew what we all knew. This was a big one, maybe a whole season's worth of fish in one set.

As the big old seine boat slowly pulled closer to us, dragging one end of the net with her, we all felt the tension build. There was the realization that a valuable catch was almost, but not quite, within our grasp. For me, there was the additional tension of hoping but not knowing if the beach knot would release when it was supposed to. Because if it didn't, I would have to cut the strap, and I was hoping not to have to get anywhere near a rope straining that close to the breaking point. It was quivering with a pent up force that could kill when unleashed. And it was my job to unleash it.

As a small boy, I'd taken immense pleasure in hunting flies with an elastic band. As they bumbled and buzzed against the windowpane, I'd pull the elastic tight, aim, and then let it snap. The result was almost always a messily squashed fly. It was too much fun to feel guilty about then, but now I was subject to an occasional foreboding of karmic justice. I was now the fly, the beach line was the elastic band, and I half feared some malign insect spirit seeking retribution.

There had been too many beach men snapped into oblivion by beach lines breaking, beach lines whip-lashing free of a hang-up, or beach lines coming tight at the wrong time. And whenever that happened, another green kid squashed like a fly, the big fishing companies that owned most of the seine boats would send to town for another box of beach men. Expendability was an unfortunate fact of our profession. But what the hell. Me? I was nineteen years old and bulletproof. Occasional intimations of mortality were brushed aside as signs of weakness. Not me. Not me.

I shrugged involuntarily as I dismissed these unpleasant musings. Only the immediate reality was important. And that reality was that we were on the verge of completing a really big set. The big boat was only one hundred feet from us now and my mind emptied, focusing only on Mark, waiting for the signal to release the beach line.

Two years earlier, we'd had an incident that was laughable (after the fact) as a result of mixed-up signals. At the time, the signal to release had been a simple wave of the hand. But on one occasion, Mark had been beset by a wasp. As he frantically tried to brush it away, I'd mistaken his gesticulations for
the
signal
, and I'd let the beach line go prematurely. Ejaculations ensued. And so it was that
the signal
was changed to a wave of the hat.

So when I noticed that Mark wasn't wearing his hat, I felt a pang of unease. But seine boat skippers are nothing if not cool and resourceful. As I watched, Mark carefully and slowly reached down to the shelf under the controls, grabbed his hat, and put it on his head. Then he immediately pulled it off and began waving it frantically. I picked up the end of the beach line, braced myself carefully, and gave a sharp pull. The knot was supposed to unravel and come undone. It didn't.

I felt a sinking sensation in my stomach, but I set my feet farther apart, took a firmer grip on the rope, and pulled for all I was worth. There was a loud crack and the line simply disappeared. When it reappeared, it was floating flaccidly in the water, one end still attached to the net.

My specific job, the role of the beach man, had now been successfully completed. Relief energized me as I scrambled down the cliff and leapt into the skiff. “Giv'er,” I yelled and Fergie rowed hard, not to where the big boat was but to where we knew she would be as she closed the circle of net.

As the skiff surged through the water, I grabbed the free end of the beach line and pulled the slack into the skiff. When all the slack was out of the rope, I kept pulling, which served to aid Fergie's rowing. Speed was important as we were needed back on deck. In about one minute and thirty seconds, the combination of the
Maple Leaf
towing on one end of the net and the deck winch pulling on the end that we had just released would result in closure of the circle trap.

The skiff bounced off the bow of the big boat, and I grabbed the line that had been rigged from bow to midships. As Fergie stowed his oars and pulled the oarlocks, I held on as the big boat continued to move ahead and the skiff slid back. When we reached the center cleat, I swung aboard and secured the skiff. Fergie was right behind me and went immediately to the port-side davit. I leapt back into the skiff and began coiling the beach line in readiness for the next set. Another hard-won safety lesson came into play here. Even though the skiff was rocking in the swell of boats roaring by, I was careful not to grab the side of the skiff for balance. Fingers caught between the skiff and the big boat would be squished like bananas between bulldozers.

While I was coiling the line, Christine and Fergie were completing a crucial segment of the set. Ever since we'd released our end of the net by undoing the beach line, Christine had been pulling it in toward the boat via the running line and the deck winch. She was good at this and always managed to pull hard enough to get the end in quickly without pulling too hard and breaking the running line. Fishing is ever so much the fine balance between “as hard as possible” and not “too hard.”

As the end of the net was pulled up to the boat, Christine slowed and then stopped the winch. Fergie leaned over the railing, grabbed the safety strap, and, careful to get it on the right side of the running line, draped it over the purpose-built cleat. He yelled, “Down!” and Christine reversed the winch. As the running line came slack, Fergie pulled the blondie, releasing the metal link that attached running line to pursing line.

Christine then popped the winch into neutral and began pulling slack off the winch, so that Fergie could pull the line sternward about fifteen feet and feed it into the pursing block. He closed the block, yelled an okay, and Christine put the winch into forward so we could begin pursing up. We'd enclosed the fish by pulling the net into a circle, but they could still swim out the bottom. When the pursing process was completed, we would have closed that hole like closing a drawstring purse and the fish would have nowhere to escape.

Meanwhile, Billy had started to wind the net onto the drum. As the drum pulled in the rope that led to the end of the net, the wire cable that had served as the tow cable for the net came slack. While the net continued to wrap onto the drum, Billy carefully disengaged the big steel hook on the end of the tow cable and threw it free. He had to do it in such a way that neither he nor the cable became caught up in the net and wound onto the drum. This was another potential screwup that could not only ruin the set but ruin a drum man too. And we didn't want to see Billy wrapped onto the drum because, humanitarian considerations aside, he was the most important guy on the boat now. It was his skill at winding the net properly onto the drum, picking up the right amount of lead line, and making the corner after the rings came up that was now crucial for the success of the set.

As Billy wound in the net, using the spoolers to pile the net evenly, with the wraps tight to one another and no lead line rolling over the cork line, the circle of net shrank inexorably. Simultaneously, Christine wound in the purse line/drawstring at just the right speed. Fergie strained to pull the slack out of the end line, which gathered up the bunt end of the net, and I ran over to help him. Taking up my station by the drum, I saw a sockeye jump along the cork line, then another. “Inside!” I yelled. Mark had come down off the bridge and was trying hard not to look anxious. “Maybe we got 'em this time,” he said.

With over half the net wound onto the drum, the purse line was tight and vibrating. As we peered over the side, watching for the shiny brass rings of our big drawstring purse to be pulled up to the surface, we saw bubbles forming in the water. “Holy shit,” said Mark. “We might have to braille this one.”

The bubbles told us there were a hell of a lot of fish in the net, their collective exhalations forming bubbles of carbon dioxide. We didn't have a stern ramp, so if there were too many fish to pull over the stern, anything over about fifteen hundred, we'd have to dip them out with individual scoops of the brailler, a dip net that could pick up a hundred or so fish at a time.

We saw the brass purse rings appearing out of the depths. “Coming up,” I yelled, picking up the hairpin. Billy stopped the drum and ran the spoolers all the way over to our side. Christine slowed the pursing winch. The purse line had formed a “V” down into the water. But as the last of the slack was pulled out of it, the “V” was stretched into a straight line with the purse rings pulled neatly into a bunch. At this point, I yelled, “Whoa!” and Christine stopped the winch. I rammed the hairpin through the rings, threading them like rings on a crooked finger.

“Going up,” I yelled and Christine activated the boom winch, which wound in the cable attached to the hairpin. We lifted it so that the hairpin and rings were suspended about two feet above the cap rail.

“By Christ, we've got 'em now,” Mark yelled. And we did. Barring accidents such as tears in the net or the cork line sinking, the fish were trapped. And it looked like there were lots of them.

“Drum slow,” ordered Mark. “Get the skiff around and pull some corks.”

Fergie and I jumped back into the skiff and pulled it around to the other side of the
Maple Leaf
. We started pulling corks into the skiff, so the net wouldn't drift around the bow of the big boat, which would make impossible drumming in more net. As Billy continued to drum slowly, the circle of net drew ever smaller. The fish were concentrated in a smaller and smaller bag. They began to boil in the net like a single writhing creature. I'd never before seen a set this big.

The weight of the fish was threatening to sink the net so we tied the corkline to the skiff. The fabric of the net was rigid with strain. The tons of fish in the net were threatening to rip the mesh. “Hold 'er!” Mark yelled. “We'll never pull this over. Let's braille 'em.”

Fergie and I leapt back out of the skiff again and onto the deck of the
Maple Leaf
. I was beginning to feel like a sand flea, leaping from one warm body to another. But I might have become a very rich sand flea. Getting a set so big that you had to braille was rare. And getting that big a set of sockeye, the money fish, was like winning the lottery. There were only a couple more moves to complete and then we could start hauling them aboard.

There were still six rings suspended on the hairpin. We needed to use that winch line, so we dropped the hairpin and tied off the six rings to the cleat by the drum. Then, after detaching the hairpin, we strapped the net and, with Billy using the spoolers to pull slack off the drum, we pulled one end of the bag high into the air.

God, that felt good. The net pulled up to the boom was like a flag signal to the rest of the fleet: “We've got a big one. Eee hah!!” And we began drying up.

Drying up entailed pulling up all the slack web in the net so as to concentrate the fish into a brailleable mass. And concentrate us as well, for visions of sugarplums were threatening to disrupt our careful moves. But by God, there wasn't much slack. Our net formed a bag almost one hundred feet deep. And the only reason we couldn't pull up slack web was because there wasn't any. The whole damn bag was solid with fish. This was so good it was scary.

So we strapped the bight of the net we'd pulled up with the single fall, secured it to a cleat, and then dropped the line. And attached that line to the brailler. “Okay, guys. Let's start dipping them.”

And we did. Using the brailler, a dip net raised and lowered by the single fall, we repeatedly scooped into the bag of fish we'd gathered by the side of the boat. Again and again, we lifted braillers quivering with sockeye out of the water and into our hatch. There they fell into an ice and water slush that would keep them fresh and palatable and occasionally alive until the point of delivery. And we counted the scoops. We were, after all, mercenaries.

Each brailler held, conservatively, seventy-five fish at a six-pound average. In those days, we were getting a buck eighty a pound for sockeye. So by the time we'd dumped fifty braillers into our hatch, we'd reached a gross value of forty thousand five hundred dollars. The standard crew share, a union agreement from fifty years before, was seven/elevenths of the value of the catch after fuel and grub were deducted. There were five of us so our individual split worked out to almost thirteen percent of the gross. Already I'd made over five grand and there were still lots of fish in the net. I'd be able to pay my entire tuition at Simon Fraser University in the fall and maybe not have to work in the campus cafeteria.

Not bad for what was now approaching two hours of work. But it was this conception of huge amounts of money for short periods of work that underlay much of the animosity that the public held for commercial fishermen. Never mind that we'd already fished for almost three months and had made next to nothing. And there were the previous months of network and boat work in preparation for the season. Theoretically that should have been paid work, but the reality was that it often became a condition of keeping your job. So I didn't feel guilty in the least that we'd finally, finally cashed a winning lotto ticket. In fact, I felt pretty damn good.