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Steelhead and Grizzlies

We worked at North West Safari’s camp (later Buck’s Camp) again the following spring. This time it was steelhead season in April and May. The lodge floats were again towed to the head of the inlet to be closer to the Chuckwalla River where the steelhead would be spawning then heading back out to the ocean. Unlike salmon, which die after they spawn, not all steelhead die, and they can head back out to sea and sometimes make it back to spawn another year. Once again we were working our asses off with so much to do and long, long hours. It was harder to work for someone else like this after we had spent the winter in the wilderness, relying on ourselves to get through the days safely, as well as working to keep ourselves warm and fed. George and I felt that we were such a strong unit after surviving the cold, the dark, the loneliness and each other. But we had told John that we would help with the steelhead season and here we were.

Once again, I was cooking and cleaning and George was spending the days outside, running guests up the river and dropping them off to fish at different spots along the banks. At times, it was very cold outside with sleet flying horizontally into his face as he stood at the wheel of the open riverboat. April at the head of the inlet was still affected by the snowpack and quite a bit cooler here than where our rented cottage was at the other end of the inlet. I packed thermoses of hot soup and hot coffee in an attempt to keep George and the guests warm. There were days when everyone returned to the lodge soaking wet and completely frozen. I had to question the sanity of the guests paying a lot of money for this abuse. Some days I was happy that I was inside cooking and cleaning.

One night at the end of steelhead season, George and I went with John Buck in his flat-bottomed riverboat, across the bay to the logging camp to visit some of the staff that we had met during the summer. It was a warm evening in May, and the weather looked like it would stay calm for the next few hours at least. We had a fun evening with our new friends, but I noticed as the evening went along that I could hear wind rattling their windows. By the time we were leaving, there was a gale blowing and I was already feeling sick at the thought of getting into that low-floating, flat-bottomed boat. Both George and John cajoled me into getting into the boat and, in the pitch dark and the blowing gale, we headed away from the dock. It was only several hundred yards across the bay but we were not making any headway against the wind and waves. The tops of the waves were flying off and drenching us with freezing cold water, and the front of the boat was lifting way too high with each gust. We were only about thirty feet from shore when I had had enough and begged the men to take me back to the dock. I knew the boat would flip in that wind and I would die out there in the wild, dark water. They finally relented and, after angrily mocking my foolishness (though I think they realized that I was right), carefully turned the boat between gusts and headed back to the dock. We spent an uncomfortable night on couches and the floor, but I felt like I was cradled in the lap of luxury and happy to still be alive to see another day.

A few days later, George and I took a skiff up the Chuckwalla River. He knew a good spot to pull the boat up onto a sandy riffle where we could get out and walk a little and explore the shore. On the beach, I bent over and watched a giant footprint in the sand fill with water. A grizzly had just left the beach. The bushes were twenty feet away and our little boat was pulled up on the shore twenty feet away in the other direction. As I straightened, I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck standing up, a good indication that I should get the heck out of there.

We were two miles up the Chuckwalla River and, at this point, the river is about eighty feet wide and lined with salal, huckleberry and salmonberry bushes with lots of alder trees in behind. There were worn-out carcasses of fish washed up on the beach and tired steelhead half swimming and half drifting in the gentle clear pools at the side of the river. I looked up and stared hard into the bushes. Nothing was moving except George, who was backing up to where I stood frozen to the spot. Even the birds seemed to have stopped their chittering as if holding their breath with us. George moved his head slightly, and I followed his gaze to a spot just under an alder log that had one end in the water and the other stretched across the beach with its branches mingling with the bushes. I stared harder and finally saw the two yellow eyes looking in my direction. It was a cougar, and it must have been waiting for the grizzly to leave before coming out to feed on the fish carcasses.

I could only imagine that it was not very happy when we showed up. George reached for my hand and we slowly backed down to where the boat was beached. My mind was racing trying to think of what we could use to protect ourselves if the cougar decided to attack. We both still had our life jackets on which might provide a bit of extra protection, and if we could reach the boat we could grab the paddles. We were almost there when the cougar burst out of the bushes and dove down toward us. We leaped at the boat, pushing it back into the water as we jumped aboard. With my back to the cougar I felt my heart pounding in my chest. As soon as the boat was free of the sand, it started drifting away and down the river. We both seized paddles and paddled as fast as we could away from the beach. When I looked back, the cougar was turning away toward the bushes with a great chunk of fish in its mouth. There is a tiny possibility that the cougar hadn’t even noticed us on the beach—it was so set on steelhead for dinner!

We finished the end-of-season cleanup at the lodge and let John now that we would be working elsewhere for the summer season. We had both applied for and gotten jobs looking after the sport-fish float for the federal Department of Fisheries for the summer. We would both be issuing permits in an area at the head of Rivers Inlet called the “permit area.” The permit area had a boundary line that kept fishermen from fishing too close to the mouth of the Wannock River, where the trophy chinook were heading to spawn. Fishermen were required to bring their chinook catch back to the float, where we would weigh the fish, take scale samples and record the information under each permit. We made a quick trip to Vancouver to pick up food and supplies since we would be on our own but living in the Fisheries cabin at the head of the inlet from early July until September.

We stayed with George’s mom and dad at Lake Cowichan and while we were there, I happened to pass the animal shelter. There was a sweet little dog that seemed to be a cross between a border collie and an Australian shepherd. After much wheedling and cajoling, I was finally able to convince George that it would be a good thing for me to have company during the endless hours that I was alone. We brought little Tuki, named after my Icelandic mom’s term of endearment, home to Sunshine Bay with us in our next boat, which George found through the Vancouver Island Buy and Sell newspaper.

The boat was old, eighteen feet long and had a hardtop over the front seats, a 110-horsepower engine on the back and a flat bottom. It moved over calm water very fast but, because of the flat bottom and George’s propensity for speed, it was the most uncomfortable boat I had ever been in when travelling over choppy water. I felt every wave jangle up my spine and crack and crunch the vertebrae in my neck. Where, oh where was that skyhook when I needed it? We drove the boat up the coast from Nanaimo to Port Hardy, tied up to the government dock and stayed overnight at the Seagate Hotel. We planned to get a super-early start the next morning. I was dreading crossing Queen Charlotte Sound again, but since we had spent just about every dime we had on the boat, if I was going back to the inlet, I was going in a boat.

We headed out at first light with the boat loaded with supplies, the dog and me. George wanted to get away before the afternoon westerly started to blow. It was now the middle of June and the weather was clear and sunny. I jacked up my deep-breathing, sang songs in my head and held onto Tuki. There was not much swell as we turned out of Goletas Channel and onto the open water, and there was almost no wind. The crossing was quick because George didn’t have to slow down very often, and we were safely back in our cabin in Sunshine Bay in time for a late breakfast. I had survived another crossing of Queen Charlotte Sound.

We visited Ed and Dottie Searer at the head of the inlet again. Most of the fishing guests that they had with them in the summer were from the Deep South and loved the way Dottie cooked. She fried everything in hot fat and served just about everything with delicious baked beans. Everything she made was delicious. She told us that she packed a lunch for her fishing guests with the leftovers from the previous night’s dinner. If there were baked beans left over … they got baked-bean sandwiches. One guest was moved to tears to be given a wrapped baked-bean sandwich just like his grandmother gave him when he was young.

The Searers’ cat had several wild kittens, and we were hoping to catch one. Dottie went out behind their cabin and threw a box over the head of a tiny grey one. Then she quickly taped the top of the box closed with air holes in the side so the cat could breathe on the way back to our place. When we got home, I opened the box inside the cabin. The kitten was wild all right. It ran along the perimeter of the wall looking like a rat, ran out the door and hid under the cabin for the next two days. I knelt down near the steps with a dish of milk and called, “Here Kitty, Kitty, Kitty.” The name stuck. I don’t think Tuki liked having a kitten around. I happened to look out the window and saw her walking gingerly across the stiff leg to shore, carrying the kitten in her mouth. I think she wanted to get rid of it. We had to go to shore and poke around under logs and roots to find the kitten before the mink, marten, otters, eagles, cougars or grizzlies found her. Kitty was staying very quiet just like her new mom would want her to, but we finally found her stashed in a little hole in the moss at the bottom of a huge cedar.

I was looking forward to starting work for Fisheries in a few weeks. The sport-fish floats would be tied up at the head of the inlet in the permit area. I knew that I would have more time to explore the area with George since the permit office had hours posted and we would work in shifts. We loved living in the inlet and so in the meantime, we made plans to earn enough money to pay our expenses so we could continue to live in the wilderness.

There were not many jobs available in the area. George had done his share of logging during his university days and was not about to go back to it, and I would never make a good commercial fisherman given my fear of the open sea. That left the sport-fishing industry, which we had experience with—and working for ourselves made sense to us. Why work sixteen-hour days for someone else when we could work eighteen-hour days for ourselves? We would start our own fishing resort.