Poor Man's Rock

by Bertrand W. Sinclair

"Four thousand salmon that shot," Dave Mullen said, the same Mullen who had talked to MacRae in Squitty one night. "Say, why should we stand for that? We can get salmon that way too."

He spoke directly to MacRae.

"What's sauce for the goose ought to be sauce for the gander," MacRae replied. "I'll take the fish if you get them."

"You aren't afraid of getting in wrong yourself?" the man asked him.

MacRae shook his head. He did not lean to lawlessness. But the cannery men had framed this law. They cried loudly and continually for its strict enforcement. And they violated it flagrantly themselves, or winked at its violation when that meant an added number of cases to their pack. Not alone in the Jew's Mouth; all along the British Columbia coast the purse seiners forgot the law when the salmon swarmed in a stream mouth and they could make a killing. Only canneries could hold a purse-seine license. If the big men would not honor their own law, why should the lesser? So MacRae felt and said.

The men in the half-dozen boats about his stern had dealt all the season with MacRae. They trusted him. They neither liked nor trusted Folly Bay. Folly Bay was not only breaking the law in the Jew's Mouth, but in breaking the law they were making it hard for these men to earn a dollar legitimately. Superior equipment, special privilege, cold-blooded violation of law because it was safe and profitable, gave the purse seiner an unfair advantage. The men gathered in a little knot on the deck of one boat. They put their heads together and lowered their voices. MacRae knew they were angry, that they had reached the point of fighting fire with fire. And he smiled to himself. He did not know what they were planning, but he could guess. It would not be the first time the individual fishermen had kicked over the traces and beaten the purse seiners at their own game. They did not include him in their council. He was a buyer. It was not his function to inquire how they took their fish. If they could take salmon which otherwise the No. 5 would take, so much the worse for Folly Bay,—and so much the better for the fishermen, who earned their living precariously at best.

It was dusk when the purse seiner finished loading her catch and stowed the great net in a dripping heap on the turntable aft. At daylight or before, a cannery tender would empty her, and she would sweep the Jew's Mouth bare of salmon again.

With dusk also the fishermen were busy over their nets, still riding to the Blackbird's stern. Then they moved off in the dark. MacRae could hear nets paying out. He saw lanterns set to mark the outer end of each net. Silence fell on the bay. A single riding light glowed at the No. 5's masthead. Her cabin lights blinked out. Her crew sprawled in their bunks, sound asleep.

Under cover of the night the fishermen took pattern from the seiner's example. A gill net is nine hundred feet long, approximately twenty feet deep. They stripped the cork floats off one and hung it to the lead-line of another. Thus with a web forty feet deep they went stealthily up to the mouth of the Solomon. With a four-oared skiff manning each end of the nine hundred-foot length they swept their net around the Jew's Mouth, closed it like a purse seine, and hauled it out into the shallows of a small beach. They stood in the shallow water with sea boots on and forked the salmon into their rowboats and laid the rowboats alongside the Blackbird to deliver,—all in the dark without a lantern flicker, with muffled oarlocks and hushed voices. Three times they swept the bay.

At five in the morning, before it was lightening in the east, the Blackbird rode four inches below her load water line with a mixed cargo of coho and dog salmon, the heaviest cargo ever stowed under her hatches,—and eight fishermen divided two thousand dollars share and share alike for their night's work.