Feb 20, 2018 6 min read

The story so far: Aaron awakes at dawn to the sound of gunshots thundering and echoing between the islands.

• Chapter 6

”Gooey Duck” divers

Dad and I looked at each other. His eyes were puffy from sleep, and his hollow cheeks were shadowed by three days’ growth. We both crawled toward the tent flap at the same time and poked our heads out into a rosy dawn.

Roger and Willie were already outside, squatting around the fire ring from last night and rubbing their hands.

“Poachers, I bet,” Willie said, snapping a thick stick with his bare hands and preparing to build a fire. “There’s Sitka black-tailed deer out here, and no law.”

“Could be crazies,” Roger said, “firing off at seabirds just for fun.” He fired a match, held it to a twist of dry moss, and breathed softly on it before pushing it beneath a small tipi of kindling.

“Or commercial fishermen,” Willie said. “They’ll shoot seals and sea lions – otters, too – ’cause they compete for the fish and abalone.”

I thought of the man with the yellow sunglasses.

“Heck,” Willie said, “it could be anybody. Neptune’s grandmother!”

“Whoever it is,” Dad said, “I think we should move out now. Put some space between us and them.” He nervously scratched his chin.

Cassidy came crawling out of his tent like a sleepy bear and said, “Dreamt I heard shots. BAM!” and he fired an imaginary pistol with his fingers, right between my eyes.

An hour later we were nosing into the crisp current of the straights with a strong wind out of the east at our backs. The gale lulled for a while after our break for lunch, and we floated, silent as feathers, by a raft of sea otters wrapped in kelp, catching their afternoon nap.

Peace came over us amid the pristine islands, and I’d almost forgotten about the gunshots when we glided around a point and there, in the center of a small group of islands – like a meadow surrounded by forest – floated the fishing boat we’d seen a couple of days before. Its anchor was dropped, and the man with the yellow sunglasses was standing in the bow, watching our approach. The sun glinted off his reflective sunglasses, and again I was reminded of the eyes of a wolf.

“Hello the boat!” Roger called, drifting up toward his bow.

The man just stood there and stared. A rifle leaned against the cabin behind him. That might account for the gunshots, I thought. Then I noticed for the first time the name on the hull: Sea Wolf.

We clustered near the bow, shipped our paddles, and gazed back up at him in an uncomfortable silence.

Finally Willie spoke. “Out here fishin’?” he said. The brow of his hat threw his face into shadow.

“Nope.” The man bit the word off, like a mobster snipping the end off a Havana cigar. “Geoduck diving.” (I thought for a long time it was spelled “gooey duck,” because that’s how it sounds.)

“Any luck?”

“We’ll see, won’t we?” the man said. He turned his gaze away and trained it down into the dark water off his prow, where two columns of bubbles were rising to the surface.

Suddenly the water boiled up before us, and the masked head of a scuba diver popped up. He looked at us and lifted up the biggest clam I’d ever seen. It must have weighed nine or ten pounds.

“Wong!” growled the man on the bow. “Get your butt in here, ya dim-witted Chinaman.”

Cassidy chuckled, but nothing was funny.

Wong lowered the giant clam, then pulled up his mask and said, “Hi!” He smiled brightly. “You like geoduck? I get for my brutha in Chinatown. Vancouver. He have very good restaurant. You want, I give you one. Good to eat!”

“Two Wongs don’t make a white,” the man in the sunglasses sniggered. “I told you to get your butt in here.”

A bruised silence filled the air around us.

“Thanks, pard,” Willie said to the diver, “but we gotta be going now.”

We were paddling away when we heard a loud thump against the hull of the Sea Wolf and a muffled, heartrending cry from within.

“What was that all about?” Dad asked when we met up later while Roger and Willie consulted their sea charts. A gull screamed and swooped overhead.

“Which?” Willie said, not lifting his eyes from the plastic-sheathed chart. “The geoduck diver or that cry from their boat?”

“Both.”

“I never even heard of geoducks,” I said.

“The Chinese consider them delicacies. They’re chopped up for a seafood chowder. Chinese restaurants pay a small fortune for ’em. A geoduck diver can earn $400 a day harvesting them.”

“So why was the captain so ornery?” Dad said. “He shoulda been happy.”

“For one thing,” Willie said, “I doubt he had a license. Big fine if you’re caught without one. And I’m not sure that’s all they were doing. It might just be a front.”

“A front? For what?” A puff of wind buffeted our kayaks, and one of the sea charts almost sailed away. Willie wrestled it back down.

“There’s not only good money for geoducks,” he said. “There’s plenty of good money in smuggling, too. Illegal immigrants from China have shelled out lots of moollah to get away and join their relatives in Vancouver.”

Dad scratched his gray stubble. “So you think that’s what we heard in their boat-illegals?”

“Could be, pard,” Willie said. “Could be.”

“So we’re talkin’ smugglers,” Dad said. His sunken cheeks gathered dark shadows.

Willie didn’t say anything, but his silence was like a slowly burning fuse.

NEXT WEEK: Pirates