Steller's Orchid by Thomas McGuire

Author:Thomas McGuire
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Published: 2019-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

The room was completely dark. Someone was moving. I spluttered a question and a cool hand covered my mouth. I could tell it was Natasha from the scent of her hair. She took my arm and beckoned me to the window. Nothing was visible but very faintly I heard a squeal of metal, the working of a rusty cable on a drum. After a moment I could make out the shadowy outline of a boat tied alongside the pound at the end of the trap.

“They’re brailing fish out of the trap,” Natasha whispered and headed for the door. I grabbed my trousers, struggled into them, and followed her through the dark kitchen. She very cautiously opened the outside door and we crept down the stairway and partway along the deck. A wind had come up out of the southwest and small waves lapped against the barge. The boards felt slick and cold beneath my bare feet.

There was a faint blush of light to the north where the sun hid beneath the horizon but the trap lay deep in a pool of shadow. The dark seemed to eddy around us with the gusts of wind; nonetheless I could make out the shape of a fishing boat with a small wheelhouse. The trap’s spiller had been lifted to concentrate the fish and the boom of the fishing boat swung outward as we watched. There was a brief explosion of, if not light, then an almost phosphorescent darkness as the brailer dropped in amongst the fish. We could hear the faint mutter of the boat’s engine and the splashing of the fish. The brailer lifted and swung inboard, the fish dropped in the hold and then the net bag again dropped into the pen—variations in the dark like shadows dancing.

Natasha touched my arm and led me back to the stairway. Once inside the kitchen she lit one of the kerosene lamps and placed it where the faint light would not be visible through the window. She then opened the firebox of the cook stove, stirred the coals, and added a stick of wood.

“It’s cold,” she said. “They’ll want something warm when they come in.”

“Shouldn’t we go back to bed and pretend we didn’t see it? Then we can report it when we get to False Pass.”

“Report what?”

“Why, robbing a fish trap. They can’t do that.”

Natasha was looking in the cupboard for Clyde’s five-pound tin of coffee. Over her shoulder she said, “All the traps get robbed, usually by bribing the watchman. Nobody cares. They all belong to a bunch of rich outsiders.”

“Everybody doing it doesn’t make it right.” Having been raised in a cannery family, my sympathies were definitely not with trap robbers.

“But I thought you said they were fishing illegally anyway with those jiggers.”

“That’s just fisheries’ regulations. Theft is theft. What kind of ethics did they teach you at that Methodist college?”

Natasha turned around and looked at me, holding the red coffee can against her shirt. “How would you have painted

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