Читать книгу Spawn of the North - Barrett Willoughby - Страница 8

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Far up the sun-glittered channel Dian's destination lay—Ketchikan, fish village, water-front town, salmon capital of the world, with a spawning stream rushing through the center of its business district.

Serenely piscatory it flourished in the heart of the wilderness oblivious of other Northern cities that boasted their fur and their gold and derisively labeled Ketchikan's pioneer cannerymen like Eagle Turlon, 'the salmon aristocracy.' Yet it was Turlon and his kind who had built an Indian fish camp into a city which was the industrial queen of southeastern Alaska. Here fish was currency. Fish was prosperity. Fish was life.

Despite the fact that more salmon was packed in and about Ketchikan than in any other place on the globe, it was singularly free from industrial ugliness. There was an Old-World quaintness in the way its houses clung to the crags that formed the instep of a mountain—a blend of grey and white with red splashes marking the roofs of salmon barons' mansions high on Tyee Hill. From its back door the green forests rose to snow-capped crests. In front silver waterways serpentined between the timbered islands that protected it from the sea. At its feet a line of the most modern and efficient canneries edged the channel that mirrored the lofty beauty of its peaks.

Ketchikan's great fishing fleet lay moored to the water-front floats, two thousand trim gasboats that sent up a criss-cross thicket of masts and fishing gear: ivory antennæ of salmon trollers folded up against yellow spars; deep-green web brailers hung with silver chains. Orange and brown lateen sails drying in the sun. Multicolored washing flapping in the rigging amid the swirl of breakfast smoke from galley stoves. And on the after-decks of seiners heaps of cork-studded nets stained sienna and jade, on top of which bareheaded fishermen lounged and smoked in idleness.

The fishing fleet was at rest this morning and the big cool canneries silent. Yet theirs was a pause of expectancy. Back of the seeming inertia lay months of intense preparation which had geared these units of the great packing industry for instant action.

Ketchikan, like an eagle, perched on its crags awaiting the salmon run and the legal opening of the fishing season now seven days away.