Top Dog
Some ten days later the Bluebird swung at anchor in the kelp just clear of Poor Man's Rock. From a speck on the horizon the Blanco grew to full shape, flaring bow and pilot house, walking up the Gulf with a bone in her teeth. She bore down upon her consort, sidled alongside and made fast with lines to the bitts fore and aft. Vin Ferrara threw back his hatch covers. His helper forked up salmon with a picaroon. Vin tossed them across into the Blanco's hold. At the same time the larger carrier's short, stout boom swung back and forth, dumping into the Bluebird's fish pens at each trip a hundred pounds of cracked ice. Presently this work was done, the Bluebird's salmon transferred to the Blanco, the Bluebird's pens replenished with four tons of ice.
Vin checked his tabs with the count of fish. The other men slushed decks clean with buckets of sea water.
"Twenty-seven hundred," MacRae said. "Big morning. Every troller in the Gulf must be here."
"No, I have to go to Folly Bay and Siwash Islands to-night," Vin told him. "There's about twenty boats working there and at Jenkins Pass. Salmon everywhere."
They sat in the shade of the Blanco's pilot house. The sun beat mercilessly, a dog-day sun blazing upon glassy waters, reflected upward in eye-straining shafts. The heat seared. Within a radius of a mile outside the Rock the trollers chug-chugged here and there, driving straight ahead, doubling short, wheeling in slow circles, working the eddies. They stood in the small cockpit aft, the short tiller between their legs, leaving their hands free to work the gear. They stood out in the hot sun without shade or cover, stripped to undershirt and duck trousers, many of them barefooted, brown arms bare, wet lines gleaming. Wherever a man looked some fisherman hauled a line. And everywhere the mirror of the sea was broken by leaping salmon, silver crescents flashing in the sun.
"Say, what do you know about it?" Vin smiled at MacRae. "Old Gower is trolling."
"Trolling!"
"Rowboat. Plugging around the Rock. He was at it when daylight came. He sold me fifteen fish. Think of it. Old H.A. rowboat trolling. Selling his fish to you."
Vincent chuckled. His eyes rested curiously on Jack's face.