United States or United Arab Emirates ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"I'd still be on the job," MacRae ventured. "Would you, though?" Stubby asked doubtfully. "Yes." MacRae made his reply positive in tone. "You could buy all right. That Squitty Island bunch of trollers seem convinced you are the whole noise in the salmon line. But without Crow Harbor where could you unload such quantities of fish?"
MacRae laid down the last page and went outside to sit on the steps. Shadows were gathering on the Cove. Far out, the last gleam of the sun was touching the Gulf. A slow swell was rising before some far, unheralded wind. The Blanco came gliding in and dropped anchor. Trollers began to follow. They clustered about the big carrier like chickens under the mother wing.
"I have an idea," he said at last. "It's worth trying." He opened his bag and, taking out the wedge-shaped cap of the birdmen, set it on his head and went out. He took the same path he had followed home. On top of the cliff he stopped to look down on Squitty Cove. In a camp or two ashore the supper fires of the rowboat trollers were burning.
So once the cannery opens, Gower has a bunch of trollers ready to deliver salmon, at most any price he cares to name. And he generally names the lowest price on the coast. He don't have no competition for a month or so. If there is a little there's ways of killin' it. So he sets his own price. The trollers can take it or leave it." Old Manuel stopped to light his pipe.
From a single line over the stern it was but a logical step to two, four, even six lines spaced on slender poles boomed out on each side of a power launch, once the fisherman learned that with this gear he could take salmon in open water. So trolling was launched. Odd trollers grew to trolling fleets. A new method became established in the salmon industry.
Even when American buyers trailed MacRae to the source of his supply their competition hurt Gower instead of MacRae. The trollers supplied MacRae with all the salmon he could carry. It was still fresh in their minds that he had come into the field that season as their special Providence. But the blueback run tapered off at Squitty.
To a man familiar with packing costs it is a simple sum. MacRae often wondered why Gower stubbornly refused to pay more, when his collecting boats came back to the cannery so often with a few scattered salmon in their holds. They were primitive folk, these salmon trollers. They jeered the unlucky collectors. Gower was losing his fishermen as well as his fish.
One thing the trollers did know, where the small feed swarmed, in shoal water or deep, those myriads of tiny fish, herring and nameless smaller ones, there the blueback would appear, and when he did so appear he could be taken by a spoon hook.
She stared thoughtfully at the Blackbird, marked the trollers slipping in from the grounds and clustering around the chunky carrier. It might have interested Mr. Horace Gower could he have received a verbatim report of his daughter's reflections for the next five minutes. But whether it would have pleased him it is hard to say. The Complexity of Simple Matters
Those restless trollers who crossed the Gulf to Hornby and Yellow Rock Light got little for their pains. Between Folly Bay and the swirling tide races off the desolate head of Cape Mudge the blueback disappeared. But at Squitty the runs held constant. There were off days, but the fish were always there.
Word Of The Day