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Bella Bella: Chapter Seven

6 min read
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The story so far: Aaron and his fellow kayakers hear a muffled, heartrending cry coming from within the Sea Wolf. Could the none-too-friendly captain be smuggling Chinese immigrants?

Pirates

“So then, they’re like modern-day pirates, sort of?” I said. I suddenly felt foolish. A whitecap slapped our hull.

“Dude. Pirates?” Cassidy began to sing, “‘Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest- ‘”

“‘Yo-ho-ho and a barrel o’ rum!'” Roger joined in, and they both cracked up.

“It might not be so funny if they come after us,” Willie said, which wiped the smiles off everybody’s faces.

“Come after us?” Dad swung our kayak around to face the wind. A cormorant flew by.

“The man you call the captain ain’t dumb,” said Willie. “He was trying to silence the man he called Wong before he spilled too much, and he knows we heard that cry coming from his boat. He’ll figure we might put two and two together, and he may do the same thing. He can’t afford to be reported. If he’s runnin’ illegals, he’s playin’ for big stakes.”

“But maybe we should report them to the Coast Guard,” Dad said.

“Hold it now, mates,” Roger said. “This is all just speculation.”

“Don’t you think we should, like, get moving?” I said. “If they are smugglers, we’re just sitting ducks here.”

“I’m scared, Dad,” Lisa said. Last year, while white-water rafting, Lisa never showed fear. But now it was as if the unknown had been given a face: the face of the man with the eyes of a wolf.

Terns, auklets, murres, black oystercatchers-Roger named each bird as it winged and darted and dove in the watery world around us. Then, as we slid along a rocky island rimmed with stunted spruce right down to the shoreline, we scanned with our binocs for a good place to camp.

Nothing. We’d been lucky finding good spots to camp – and we’d been lucky with the weather, too. Now, as we punched into the wind, there was no place in sight. Tomorrow we’d make the run across Tide Rip Pass to Goose Island, out in the open Pacific. Tonight we needed a good night’s rest.

We ducked into a tiny hidden inlet and found a place to pull in. The tide was out, and we had to haul our kayaks a long way over sharp stones. My feet kept slipping in my wet sandals, and I wished I was wearing boots, like the others.

We tied off and went scouting for places to camp. The dwarf forest was so dense that we had to fight our way around. But we came upon some big cedars, and there at their feet were what we were looking for: flat beds of soft needles.

Even from here we could hear the barnacles in the tide pools clicking and hissing. Or was it our stomachs?

“I’m starved,” I said.

“The sea is your garden,” Roger said. “What are you waiting for?”

We all scrambled down over the rocks and started rummaging around. Willie pulled out his bowie knife and tugged limpet snails off the beach rocks by slipping his blade between shell and rock. He scooped out small chunks of white meat and popped them into his mouth. “Sea popcorn!” he said with a hearty laugh.

“Escargot,” Roger said, scooping one into his mouth. “Snails seasoned with sea salt. Nothin’ better.”

“Dude, let’s start a fire and cook up some real food,” Cassidy snarled.

Lisa laughed. “The he-man doesn’t eat at the sushi bar, hey?” She held out her hand for a couple of chunks of raw snail from Roger and tossed one into her mouth. “Deee-lish,” she said. “Won’t you try one?”

“Dude,” said Cassidy, and went scouting down in a tide pool.

“I’ll try one,” I said.

But Lisa, teasing me, popped it into her mouth and chewed slowly, like it was the best food in the world.

Why is she doing this? I wondered.

I fished out my Swiss Army knife and plucked my own snail. Gulped raw, it was like chewing a gritty oyster.

After dinner we sat around the fire as the first stars came out, like pinpricks of doubt. I kept thinking about the “pirates,” and who might be stowed in the hold of their boat.

In our small town in California, migrant workers stood on street corners in the morning, trying to get work. Dad hired them when we needed help doing heavy work on our property. It was known that most of them had crossed the border from Mexico illegally.

“So the illegal immigrants from China,” I said out of the blue, “they’re like the illegal Mexican workers in California?”

“I don’t know much about the Chinese in Canada,” Dad said. “Just that there’s a big Chinatown in Vancouver, where they hope to find a better life.”

“I’ve read about migrants,” Lisa said, “paying so-called ‘coyotes’ to sneak them across the border from Mexico.”

“Yeah,” Cassidy cut in. “I saw that on TV once. Sometimes the coyotes run off with the money and abandon ’em, locked in the backs of trucks. U.S. border guards find a truck in the desert. Open the door and there’s a pile of dead bodies.” He seemed to relish the story.

“That’s terrible,” Lisa said, hugging her knees.

The image of those bodies burned in my mind. Were there Chinese immigrants trapped in the bottom of that fishing boat?

“Listen,” Willie said suddenly.

“What?” Cassidy said.

“Quiet!”

Then we all heard it – the sound of something splashing through the shallows, coming our way. Willie pulled a high-powered flashlight from the canvas sack at his feet, flicked it on, and stood up.

NEXT WEEK: Tide Rip Pass

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