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Updated: May 3, 2025
The blueback pushed on the Gray Rock to the Ballenas, as if the blackfish and seal and shark that hung always about the schools to prey were herding them to some given point. Very shortly after they could be taken in the shadow of the Ballenas light the schools swarmed about the Cove end of Squitty Island, between the Elephant on Sangster and Poor Man's Rock.
But he was of the sea, of that breed which survives by dint of fortitude, endurance, stoutness of arm and quickness of wit. He clawed to his feet. Almost before him lifted the bleak southern face of Squitty Island. Point Old jutted out like a barrier. MacRae swung on the tiller. But the wind had the mainsail in its teeth. Without control of that boom his rudder could not serve him.
The fishermen have made a noise that disturbs the politicians, I guess. Another thing, there's a slack in the demand for all but the best grades of salmon. But the number one grades, sockeye and blueback and coho, are short. So that a cannery man with an efficient plant can pay big for those fish. If you can hold that Squitty fleet of trollers like you did last year, you'll make some money."
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.
The southern end of Squitty was not of such vast scope that two people could roam here and there without sometime coming face to face, particularly when these two were a man and a woman, driven by a spirit of restlessness to lonely wanderings. MacRae went into the woods with his rifle one day in search of venison.
That little trip to France cost us both something." MacRae sprang up and walked over to a window. He stood for half a minute staring out to sea, looking in that direction by chance, because the window happened to face that way, to where the Gulf haze lifted above a faint purple patch that was Squitty Island, very far on the horizon. "I'm not kicking," he said at last. "Not out loud, anyway."
Every plan he had ever made for the future had included old Donald MacRae and those wide acres across the end of Squitty. He had been deprived of both, left without a ready mark to shoot at. The flood of war had carried him far. The ebb of it had set him back on his native shores, stranded him there, so to speak, to pick up the broken threads of his old life as best he could.
Squitty is six miles wide and ten miles long, a blob of granite covered with fir and cedar forest, with certain parklike patches of open grassland on the southern end, and a hump of a mountain lifting two thousand feet in its middle. The southeastern end of Squitty barring the tide rips off Cape Mudge is the dirtiest place in the Gulf for small craft in blowy weather.
Peter had been active with gill net and seine when Jack MacRae was too young to take thought of the commercial end of salmon fishing. He was about sixty-five now, a lean, hardy old fellow, but he seldom went far from Squitty Cove. There was Steve and Frank and Vincent and Manuel of the younger generation, and Manuel and Peter and Joaquin of the elder.
Southward from Squitty the Gulf runs in a thirty-mile width for nearly a hundred miles to the San Juan islands in American waters, beyond which opens the sheltered beauty of Puget Sound.
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