The Darkening Archipelago

THE DARKENING ARCHIPELAGO

N
E
W
EST
P
RESS

the
DARKENING
ARCHIPELAGO

A COLE BLACKWATER MYSTERY

STEPHEN LEGAULT

Copyright © 2010
STEPHEN LEGAULT

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law. In the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying of the material, a licence must be obtained from Access Copyright before proceeding.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Legault, Stephen, 1971–
             The darkening archipelago [electronic resource] /
Stephen Legault.

ISBN 978-1-897126-66-0

             I. Title.

PS8623.E46633D37 2010    C813'.6    C2009-906233-X

Editor for the Board: Don Kerr
Cover and interior design: Natalie Olsen, Kisscut Design
Cover image: Alexandra Morton, Raincoast Research Society
Author photo: Dan Anthon
Copy editing: NJ Brown

NeWest Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Edmonton Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

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No bison were harmed in the making of this book.
We are committed to protecting the environment and to the responsible use of natural resources. This book was printed on 100% post-consumer recycled paper.

1 2 3 4 5 13 12 11 10
printed and bound in Canada

This book, like everything else in my life, is for Jenn, Rio, and Silas.

And with love and gratitude to Bob, Sharon, and Mabel.

The Darkening Archipelago
is a work of fiction. While the Broughton Archipelago, Alert Bay, and Port McNeill are real localities, the communities of Port Lostcoast and Parish Island, and the characters who populate them, are fictional, and any resemblance to actual places and people is purely coincidental. Likewise, the North Salish First Nation is fictional; while the author has drawn from historical records that depict real cultural practices of First Nations who have lived in the Broughton Archipelago area for millennia, any resemblance to actual First Nations is accidental.

Contents

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Epilogue

Acknowledgement

1

The rain began suddenly. From the west, skipping like a flat stone over the broad waters separating Vancouver Island from the convoluted knot of smaller islands at the mouth of Knight Inlet, the storm raced toward the steep slopes of the Coast Mountains. When it reached them, it ricocheted up their flanks and back and forth across the narrow passage at the mouth of the fjord. With the rain came wind that moulded the water into small waves, churning it into ten-foot swells within an hour. The sky pressed down and pounded the water with machine gun volleys of driving rain. The tops of the densely forested mountains rising from the inlet disappeared as a tattered blackness settled against the sea.

Archie Ravenwing felt the storm approaching before he saw it, before it soaked him through. He could feel it coming on for most of the day. Maybe someone had done the weather dance last night, their blankets twisting as they moved back and forth to the chorus of voices, to the beating of drums. Maybe he should have paid closer attention to that morning's marine weather forecast.

He felt the storm in his hands. Twisted and corded like the ropes he had spent his sixty years working with, his joints always ached when a storm loomed. From November to March, and sometimes well into April, his hands always seemed to ache. There was no denying it — he was well past his prime. But he still had work to do.

Ravenwing had set off from Port Lostcoast on the
Inlet Dancer
before dawn. On the north shore of Parish Island, Port Lostcoast was where he was born and where he had spent most of his life working as a fisherman. But he wasn't fishing today. The salmon season wasn't set to open for another two months, if it opened at all. For thousands of years, people along the wild, ragged coast of British Columbia had guided their boats through the heaving waters of the Pacific, harvesting the fish for food and ceremony. Among the tribes of the West Coast, salmon was the most important animal in the world. Life turned on salmon seasons. But in the last twenty years, so much had changed. Ravenwing thought of this as he powered up the inlet that morning, intent on his destination but aware of the shifting weather around him.

Salmon smolts had been running for nearly two weeks, and Ravenwing had spent every day on the water since they started. These silvery darts spent as many as three years living in the tiny headwater tributaries of Knight Inlet. Most of the salmon born there were eaten or died of natural causes. Only ten percent survived to grow large enough to migrate down river and out into the salty water at the mouth of the creeks and then into the Inlet itself.

The morning had been bright enough, with nothing more menacing than a few clouds hanging over the mountains of Vancouver Island, far to the west. But now Ravenwing suspected that by day's end there would be rain. He flexed his thick, burled hands as he lightly played the wheel of his thirty-two-foot troller, heading east up the inlet.

By the time the day started to warm, Ravenwing had reached Minstrel Island and the narrow mouth to Clio Channel, the ideal place for a couple hours of dip-net sampling before he turned his attention to the small bays and coves that marked the jigsaw puzzle shore. Archie shut down the
Inlet Dancer
's powerful Cummins 130-horsepower inboard motor and let the silence of the morning wash over him. He stepped from the wheelhouse onto the aft deck with a Thermos of coffee, stretching and yawning. Thermos in hand, he deftly walked the high, narrow gunwale and sat on the raised fish box, which doubled as a table. He unscrewed the cap of the Thermos and closed his eyes to savour the scent of hot, rich coffee. The smell mingled with the tang of the ocean, salty and spiced with the yin and yang of coastal life and decay, and the pungent fragrance of the thick Sitka spruce and red cedar forest rising up along the towering cliffs just a hundred metres off his port side. Archie Ravenwing smiled broadly as he drew these fragrances deeply into his lungs.

He poured coffee into the Thermos cap and blew on it gently, squinting at the steam that swirled up and disappeared on the breeze. Later, Archie guessed, that breeze would turn into a squall. But for the moment the morning was warm and gentle, and he savoured it. He sipped his coffee and looked around him.

Born into the Lostcoast band of the North Salish First Nation, Archie Ravenwing had been fishing, guiding, hunting, and exploring the coastal estuaries, inlets, reaches, and straits from as far away as Puget Sound to the Queen Charlotte Islands since he was old enough to manage a bowlegged stance in a boat. As he let his eyes roll over the massive sweep of land and water and sky before him that morning, he was happy that this reach of the Broughton Archipelago had remained unchanged for generations. The hills jutted steeply from the rich waters, their shoulders cloaked in spruce and fir. Beneath those giant trees, tangles of salmonberries and alders gripped the soil. And between them walked another totem species for the Lostcoast people — the grizzly bear. Bears and salmon and the ancient forests that surrounded them were a holy trinity for Archie and his people. Grizzly bears fed on the salmon as the fish bashed their way up through the ankle-deep waters of the tiny tributaries to their spawning grounds each fall. The grizzly bears grew fat, often eating only the fish brains, rich in the nutrients they would need for their winter hibernation. The dead fish, left to rot in the woods, nourished the stalwart trees, which in turn held the entire ecosystem together with their wide, spreading roots. The trees sheltered and cooled the salmon rivers and fed the many smaller creatures that made their homes among them. When the trees fell into the streams, downed logs created places for the spawning salmon to hide and rest as, exhausted and crazed, they struggled back to their source of life.

Archie sipped his coffee, thinking about this cycle of existence. He pushed back the sadness that approached whenever he thought this way. There was some question as to whether there would be enough wild salmon in this year's run to allow for a commercial fishery. Talk in Victoria, the provincial capital, and among senior federal officials responsible for the fishery, suggested that a complete ban might be necessary to allow decimated salmon runs to recover.