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Like tumbling dolphins they were seiners all, with a single boat towing astern and a single dory, or sometimes two dories, lashed in the waist, all gear stowed away, under four lower sails mostly jumbo, jib, fore and main, though now and then was one with a mainsail in stops and a trysail laced to the gaff, and all laying down to it until their rails were washing under and the sea hissed over the bows.
The trollers harried them from the moment they showed in the Gulf, because the coho will strike at a glittering spoon anywhere in salt water. But the net boats take them in hundreds at one drift, and the purse seiners gather thousands at a time in a single sweep of the great bag-like seine.
He did not know what they were planning, but he could guess. It would not be the first time the individual fishermen had kicked over the traces and beaten the purse seiners at their own game. They did not include him in their council. He was a buyer. It was not his function to inquire how they took their fish.
For the time, at least, the back of his long-held monopoly was broken. MacRae got a little further light on this attitude from Stubby Abbott. "He's figuring on making out a season's pack with cohoes, humps, and dog salmon," Stubby told MacRae at the Crow Harbor cannery. "He expects to work his purse seiners overtime, and to hell with the individual fisherman. Norman was telling me.
The craft that came scurrying in just before nightfall were mackerel seiners from Gloucester. They were all of one graceful shape and one size; they came with all sail set, taking the waning light like sunshine on their flying-jibs, and trailing each two dories behind them, with their seines piled in black heaps between the thwarts.
I've seen ye in the wild typhoon beneath a Southern sky, I've seen ye when the Northern gales drove seas to mast-head high, But summer breeze or winter blow, from Hatt'ras to Cape Race, I've yet to see ye with the sign of fear upon your face. Oh, swingin' cross the Bay Go eighty sail of seiners, And every blessed one of them a-driving to her rail!
M-m but look at the juice squish through her scuppers!" He held it up for all of us to have a look. "Now another little wash of coffee in the wake of that and I'll be all right for a fine little watch aloft." That night was the worst I ever put in towing astern of a vessel. "Owling" is the seiners' word for that kind of work.
A few minutes more and the last of the "ghost seiners" had left the house and were climbing into the automobiles in the yard. Marietta Hoag's voice was the last distinctly audible. "I can't help it," she wailed. "It wasn't my fault anyway. And and, besides, that Bangs man hadn't any right to say 'twas him I meant.... I mean the control meant. It wasn't him at all.... I mean I don't believe 'twas.
And they violated it flagrantly themselves, or winked at its violation when that meant an added number of cases to their pack. Not alone in the Jew's Mouth; all along the British Columbia coast the purse seiners forgot the law when the salmon swarmed in a stream mouth and they could make a killing. Only canneries could hold a purse-seine license.
He was sick of the smell of salmon, weary of the eternal heaving of the sea under his feet, of long cold tricks at the wheel, of days in somber, driving rain and nights without sleep. But he kept on until the salmon ceased to run, until the purse seiners tied up for the season, and the fishermen put by their gear. MacRae had done well, far better than he expected. His knife had cut both ways.
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