Читать книгу Spawn of the North - Barrett Willoughby - Страница 5

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She brought the Golden Hind back on its course.

She should, of course, turn and go back home where she had left her house guest, Eve Galliard, fast asleep. But something—was it the hope of coming upon the offending Who Cares in distress?—impelled her to go on. She was running close to shore now, past boulders hung with bronze and gold rockweed; past pendent-boughed hemlocks; silver-blue spruce. The channel swung ahead, an enticing silver lane in the warm light. Distant mountains below their snows were blue as larkspur, soft as plush. Mist hung low in the valleys. She had been aware of all this before, yet of a sudden it seemed to have taken on a new glamour.

In a flash of exuberance she leaned from the door of the pilot-house and called a greeting to an eagle sunning itself on a high tree-top.

The great bird somersaulted from its perch and headed into the wind with slow beats of its powerful wings. Watching its easy flight gave Dian a fine feeling of freedom. She, too, was going to be gloriously free during these two weeks of Alaskan summer that were hers. After that she would be quite content to go back to the States, marry Alan, and make his charming, easeful life her own.

Two weeks ... fourteen days.... The time, all at once, seemed very short, very precious. There were so many beloved places and things to which she must say good-bye. The Golden Hind, for instance, named after the regal privateer of Sir Francis Drake. True, after she was married, Alan would get her a smart motor yacht if she wanted one; but no other craft, however splendid, could take the place in her heart occupied by this little cream-colored cruiser which had been her vacation delight ever since she was eighteen.

With a swift poignancy compounded of affection and farewell her mind embraced everything about the Golden Hind, even the old phonograph whose music had made sunset waters so enchanting during bygone summers. This morning the ripple at the prow and the steady, muffled throb of the engine made melody enough for her ears. She ran supple hands over the wheel to feel again that sense of restrained power that always came to her from the contact.

A love of keels and salt-water things had been Dian Turlon's all her twenty-four years; at least, ever since her baby feet had taken their first wavering steps along the deck of the Star of Alaska. Her mother's father, the tawny-bearded old Viking, Nils Nilsson, was master of that lofty-sparred square-rigger which each spring led the Alaska Packers' salmon fleet out through the Golden Gate. Dian would never forget those trips of her childhood—the bark, gallant and romantic: her stately spread of canvas, her gleaming, holystoned deck, the proud lift of her figurehead, the Golden Flying Lady, as she bore away into the North Pacific, her cavernous hold filled with cannery supplies and crews for the far-flung fishing grounds of Bering Sea.

Dian's father, keen young Irishman, was superintendent then for the Packers' Cannery at the mouth of the Karluk River, the greatest salmon stream in the world. Each season he took his family with him on the Star's April sailing out of San Francisco—her mother, her little brother Ivor, and herself. And in September when the salmon run was over, he brought them back to the States again with his crew.

After he left the Packers, he became an independent canner in southeastern Alaska. Some ten years ago he had built the big Turlon home in Ketchikan where his family lived during the summers and occasionally during a winter. He had also bought the Star of Alaska, the fastest packet in the white-winged salmon fleet.

His friends laughed at him for that, because steam and gasoline had already sounded the knell of sailing ships. But her father was always a law unto himself, Dian recalled proudly. There was something swift and strong in him that attained his ends. That was why everyone called him 'Eagle' Turlon, instead of his given name, Patrick. At any rate, the Star of Alaska was at this moment lying at the dock of the big Turlon cannery at Sunny Cove, some fifty miles down the coast from Ketchikan. This spring, as always, it had transported his cannery crew and supplies from Seattle.

Only a man as rich as her father could afford such a gesture; for he kept the great ship waiting at Sunny Cove until the season's pack was ready to be taken South in the autumn. That was the way it had waited in those early and more leisurely days when Eagle Turlon was 'high man' for the Packers, and Dian's mother was alive.

She knew why he kept the old bark in commission. It was aboard the Star that he had met and instantly fallen in love with the daughter of Nils Nilsson. The skipper had raved like a madman when he found that Irish Eagle Turlon had run off with his Swedish Elna and married her at the nearest Russian mission at the height of the salmon run! Dian smiled to herself recalling her father's way of bellowing at her when he disapproved of her: 'Tis the combination of "harp" and "ski jumper" in you, my girl, that makes you so damned disturbing!'

Certainly he would disapprove of her now if he knew she had come back to Ketchikan in his absence. Though she adored him, she felt a keen satisfaction touched with a certain humor, as she thought of him well on his way to Siberia seeking to extend his packing operations to that distant coast.

It was because of the uncertainty of the run in Alaska, a fact which her father never admitted outside his family, that he had sold three of his canneries. He retained only Sunny Cove, his pride. Sunny Cove, the largest, most modern plant in southeastern Alaska, with its twelve great salmon traps, its fleet of cannery tugs and seine-boats. This he was holding for eighteen-year-old Ivor whom he had bullied into studying ichthyology at the University of Washington. Ivor, who wanted to be a musician!

Ironically, Dian was the one who loved everything connected with the fish run. But women had no place in this fascinating game that had held her father in thrall for more than thirty-five years. Dian had been able to do little more than snatch at that romance which endures wherever sturdy bronzed men garner the world's food from the sea.

Romance.... For some reason the thought brought a vision of the slim, dark young man looking at her from the pilot-house of the seiner, Who Cares. Yet he hadn't quite the look of a fisherman. Who was he? Where had he gone? She smiled to herself, remembering the rope trailing precariously in his wake; and her gaze swung searching the sun-bright empty waters ahead.

Her attention was arrested by one of the Turlon fish traps across a small bay that opened to her left. It lay on the water off Kemerlee Head in readiness for the legal opening of the fishing season a week hence. She put her wheel over and headed for it.

Abreast the floating trap she shut off her engine and drifted along the criss-cross pattern of logs, large as the foundation of an office building. At one end was a tiny shack with a small window in each wall through which a man might watch the approach of strange craft or shoot at trespassers. Here, during the run, a watchman would live to protect the catch from depredations of fish pirates.

Floating traps had always interested Dian more than the larger pile-driven kind used on the open coast. This Kemerlee Head floater was anchored some distance from the shore. Its heavy timbers held suspended the labyrinth of webbing that formed the 'pot,' the 'heart,' the 'spiller,' net-enclosed compartments that glimmered fathoms down in the clear depths. About it all was the cool, clean tang of salt water against spruce wood.

It was peaceful here in the sun; a tranquil inlet surrounded by forested hills and blue mountains crowned with dimming snows. Quiet, too, except for the lapping of water against the logs. Yet in the very hush there was a strange expectancy. The great trap swung above its anchors ... waiting. Dian thought of the hundreds of like devices placed at every strategic point, in every deep-cut fiord of southeastern Alaska ... each one waiting for that mighty silver host now cleaving northward through the green coastal waters.

She hoped fervently that the run would be good this year and that it would begin before she had to return to the States. 'Maybe this will help——' she said to herself; and half in play, half in earnest, she spread wide her arms, lifted her face, and with eyes closed chanted in the manner of an Indian supplicating the Alaskan Mother of All Salmon:

'O Fog Woman! Call your North-born children home!'