Snow Falling on Cedars (47 page)

In the blue light of dusk he’d made the turn out of the harbor and run for open water. From his vantage point at the wheel of the
Islander
he saw the soft cedars of San Piedro Island, its high, rolling hills, the low mist that lay in long streamers against its beaches, the whitecaps riffling its shoreline. The moon had risen already behind the island and hung just over the big bluff at Skiff Point – a quarter moon, pale and indefinite, as ethereal and translucent as the wisps of clouds that traveled the skies, obscuring it. Kabuo, his radio on, checked his barometer; it still held steady despite talk of rough weather, cold squalls of sleet reported to the north, out of the Strait of Georgia. When he looked up again a raft of seabirds was scattering, gray silhouettes off the chop a hundred yards out, rising and then skimming over the surface of the waves in the manner of surf scoters, though there were too many to be surf scoters – he didn’t know what they might be, maybe murres, he couldn’t tell. Steering wide of Harbor Rocks, bucking the sea wind head-on at seven knots, he ran with the tide race pushing hard behind him and fell in with the
Kasilof,
the
Antarctic,
and the
Providence,
all of which were making for Ship Channel, too: half the fleet was headed there. Half the fleet was spread out before him, running hard for the fishing grounds at dusk and throwing wide silver wakes.

Kabuo drank the green tea in his thermos and ran through the radio channels. It was his habit to listen but not to speak, to gather what he could about men by the manner in which they expressed themselves, and to discern what he could about the fishing.

At full dusk or thereabouts he ate three rice balls, a slab of rock cod, and two windfall apples from a wild tree behind Bender’s Spring. The night mist hovered on the water already, so he backed the throttle down and ran with his spotlight broadcasting over the waves. The prospect of a blind fog, as always, concerned him. A fisherman could become so lost in a blind fog he’d set his own net in a circle without knowing it or
end up working the middle of the shipping lane where the big freighters ran toward Seattle. It was better in such conditions to fish Elliot Head, since the head by far from the shipping lane and well to the lee side of Elliot Island, out of the big water breezes.

But by eight-thirty he’d idled his engine at the bank and stood in the cockpit beside the net drum, listening, with the fog settling all around him. From the lighthouse station far to the east he could hear the low, steady intonation of the fog signal diaphone. It was the sound he associated with blind nights at sea – lonely, familiar, hushed, and so melancholy he could never listen without emptiness. Tonight, he knew, was what old-timers called
ghost time,
with fog as immobile and dense as buttermilk. A man could run his hands through such a fog, separating it into tendrils and streamers that gathered themselves languidly once more into the whole and disappeared seamlessly, without a trace. Drifting on the tide, a gill-netter moved through it as though it composed its own netherworld medium halfway between air and water. It was possible on such a night to become as disoriented as a man without a torch in a cave. Kabuo knew that other fishermen were out there, drifting as he was and peering into the fog, blindly gliding across the bank in the hope of establishing their locations. The shipping lane boundaries were marked by numbered buoys, and the hope was to stumble across one fortuitously so as to orient oneself.

Kabuo, giving up, propped a buoy bag between the stern fairleads and lit a kerosene lantern with a wooden kitchen match. He waited until the wick held strong, pumped in some air, adjusted the fuel, then set the lantern carefully in its life ring and bent down over the
Islander’s,
transom to place the buoy bag on the water. With his face so close to the surface of the sea he imagined he could smell the salmon running. He shut his eyes, put a hand in the water, and in his own manner he prayed to the gods of the sea to assist him by bringing fish his way. He asked for good luck, for a respite from the fog; he prayed that the gods would clear the fog away and keep him safe from the
freighters in the shipping lane. Then he stood again in the stern of the
Islander,
square-knotted his buoy bag line to his net line, and released the brake on the net drum.

Kabuo laid his net out north to south by motoring away from it on a true blind heading as slowly as was possible. It seemed to him the lane lay to the north, though he couldn’t be certain about that. The tidal drift, running east, would keep his net taut, but only if he laid it on the right bearing; if he quartered to the current, even slightly, on the other hand, he’d end up having to tow all night just to keep his net from collapsing. There was no way of knowing in dense fog how true a net lay; he couldn’t see twenty corks down his line and would have to run it every hour or so with his spotlight seeking it out. Kabuo could not see the surface of the sea more than five yards beyond the bow of his boat from his place at the wheel in his cabin. The
Islander,
in fact, divided the fog, the bow literally peeling it open. The fog was dense enough to make him ponder running for Elliot Head before long; for all he knew he was setting his net in the Seattle-bound shipping lane. Besides, he had to hope no one had set due south, particularly at an angle to his own set. In this fog he’d no doubt miss the man’s jacklight and twist his net up in the
Islander’s
prop, a long diversion from the night’s fishing. Any number of things could go amiss.

In the stern the net slipped free from the drum and rolled over the fairleads easily toward the sea until at last the whole of it was out of the boat, three hundred fathoms long. Kabuo went back and hosed the net gurry out the scupper holes. When he was done he shut the engine down and stood on the hatch with his back against the cabin, listening for the blasts of passing freighters. Nothing, though – there was no sound now but lapping water and the distant sound from the lighthouse. The tidal current carried him gently east, just as he’d predicted. He felt better about things with his net in. He could not be certain he was not in the shipping lane, but he knew he was drifting at the same speed as every other gill-netter fishing these fogbound waters. He imagined there were thirty or more boats out there, all hidden
and silent in the dense sea fog, moving to the same tidal rhythm that moved under him, keeping everyone equi-distant. Kabuo went in and flicked his mast light on: red over white, the sign of a man night fishing, not that it did any good. Not that the light was worth anything. But on the other hand he’d done all he could about matters. He’d set his net as well as possible. There was nothing to do now but be patient.

Kabuo brought his thermos into the cockpit, then sat on the port gunnel and sipped green tea, listening into the fog uneasily. Farther south he could hear someone idling, the sound of net unraveling from a drum, a boat under way at a crawl. There was an occasional dim crackle from his radio set, but other than that nothing. In the silence he sipped tea and waited for the salmon: as on other nights he imagined them in motion, swift in pursuit of the waters they’d sprung from, waters that held both past and future for them, their children and their children’s children and their deaths. When he picked his net and held them pinched at the gills he felt in their silence how desperate their sojourn was, and he was moved in the manner a fisherman is moved, quietly, without words. Their rich silver flanks would feed his dreams and for this he was thankful and sorrowful. There was something tragic in the wall of invisible mesh he’d hung to choke the life from them while they traveled to the rhythm of an urging they could not deny. He imagined them slamming against his net in astonishment at this invisible thing that finished their lives in the last days of an urgent journey. Sometimes, hauling net, he came across a fish thrashing hard enough to elicit a cracking
thump
when it banged off the
Islander’s
transom. Like all the others, it went into the hold to die over the course of hours.

Kabuo put his thermos together and took it into the cabin. Once again he flipped through the radio channels, and this time he caught a voice – Dale Middleton’s – chattering away in a slow island drawl: ‘I done just got the bug out of my squelch,’ it said, and then someone answered, ‘What for?’ Dale replied he’d had just about enough of setting by the shipping lane in soup fog for a dozen silvers, a few dogfish, a couple of hake, and what’s
more taking flack off his radio. ‘I near can’t see my own hands,’ he said. ‘I near can’t see the nose on my own face.’ Somebody, a third party, agreed the fishing had gone sour, the bank seemed all dried up real sudden, he’d been thinking on fishing at Elliot Head, couldn’t tell but maybe things was better there. ‘Leastwise off this shipping lane,’ replied Dale. ‘One good swing I got laid out now, that’ll do it for me here. Hey, Leonard, your net coming up clear? Mine here’s lookin’ like a oil rag. Damn thing’s darker ’n burnt toast.’

The fishermen on the radio discussed this for a while, Leonard saying his net was fairly clean, Dale asking him if he’d greased it lately, Leonard claiming to have seen a buoy marker, number 57, off to port. He’d worked off it for a half hour or so but never came on to 58 or 56, never fixed himself properly. Far as he was concerned he was lost in the fog and intended to stay that way – leastwise ’til his net was up, then he’d think about matters. Dale asked him if he’d picked once yet, and Leonard sounded disappointed. Dale described the fog again and said he guessed it was as thick as it gets, and Leonard, agreeing, said he remembered one last year at Elliot Head in rougher seas – a bad scene, he’d added. ‘The Head’d be good about now,’ replied Dale. ‘Let’s fog-run our way on down there.’

Kabuo left his radio on; he wanted to hear about it if a freighter came down the strait and put in a call to the lighthouse. He slid the cabin door open and stood listening, and in time came the air blasts, both muted and melancholy, of boats moving off the fishing grounds, the fog whistles of gill-netters running blindly east, farther off all the time and so less audible. It was time to pick, he decided, and then if necessary to make his own fog run to the fishing grounds off Elliot Head – a run he preferred to make alone. The boats out there now were moving on blind bearings, and he didn’t necessarily trust their skippers. He’d wait an hour more, then pick and run if he came up short on fish.

At ten-thirty he stood on the beaver paddle in the cockpit, picking his net and stopping now and then to throw strands of kelp into the water. The net, under tension, rained seawater onto
the deck along with sticks and kelp. He was happy to find there were salmon coming up as well, big silvers mostly over ten and eleven pounds, a half-dozen ten-pound chums, too, even three resident black-mouth. Some dropped to the deck coming over the transom, others he deftly maneuvered free. He was good at this part of things. His hands found their way through the folds of the net to the long flanks of dead and dying salmon. Kabuo lofted them into the hold along with three hake and three pale dogfish he intended to take home to his family. There were fifty-eight salmon, he counted, for this first set, and he felt grateful about them. Kneeling for a moment beside the hold, he looked down at them with satisfaction and calculated their worth at the cannery. He thought of the journey they’d made to him and how their fives, perhaps, would buy his farm back.

Kabuo watched for one long moment – an occasional fish flaring at the gills or jerking – then pulled the hatch cover over them and sprayed sea slime out the scupper holes. It was a good haul for a first set, enough to keep him fishing the bank – there was no reason for him to go elsewhere. Chances were that, fog and all, he’d made his drift dead center by happenstance; he’d had the luck he’d prayed for earlier. So far everything had gone right.

It was close to eleven-thirty, if his watch was right, the last of the flood still carrying him east, and he decided to motor west again in order to fish the tide turn. On the turn the salmon would pile up, milling on the bank by the hundreds, in schools, and some to the east would back in on the ebb so that his net would load up going both ways. He hoped for another hundred fish from his next set; it seemed a reasonable prospect. He was glad to have stuck it out in the fog and felt vindicated somehow. He’d made his drift successfully. There were fish in his hold, more to be had, and small competition to get them. He guessed more than two-thirds of the fishermen in the area had made the fog run for Elliot Head with their horns sounding across the water.

Kabuo stood at the wheel in his cabin with a cup of green tea
on the table behind him and flipped once more through the radio channels. There was no talk now. All the men who couldn’t help talking had moved on, it appeared. Out of habit he checked his engine gauges and took a reading from his compass. Then he throttled up, turned tight, and motored west, adjusting to the north less than five degrees in the hope of stumbling across a buoy marker.

The bow of the
Islander
cut through the fog for ten minutes or more. One eye on the binnacle, the other on the spotlighted water before his bow, Kabuo inched forward on blind faith. He was, he knew, motoring against the grain of boats drifting down the bank. The protocol among gill-netters in such conditions was to lay on one’s foghorn at one-minute intervals and to keep a sharp ear turned toward the fog on the chance of receiving a reply. Kabuo, moving into the tidal drift, had signaled his position a half-dozen times when an air horn replied off his port bow. Whoever it was, he was close.

Kabuo backed into neutral and drifted, his heart beating hard in his chest. The other man was too near, seventy-five yards, a hundred at best, out there in the fog, his motor cut. Kabuo laid on his horn again. In the silence that followed came a reply to port – this time a man’s voice, calm and tactual, a voice he recognized. ‘I’m over here,’ it called across the water. ‘I’m dead in the water, drifting.’

And this was how he had found Carl Heine, his batteries dead, adrift at midnight, in need of another man’s assistance. There Carl stood in the
Islander’s
spotlight, a big man in bib overalls poised in his boat’s bow, a kerosene lantern clutched in one hand and an air horn dangling from the other. He’d raised his lantern and stood there like that, his bearded chin set, expressionless. ‘I’m dead in the water,’ he’d said again, when Kabuo pulled up against his starboard side and tossed him a mooring line. ‘My batteries are drawed down. Both of them.’