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Updated: May 3, 2025
Well, Gower has the Folly Bay license, and a couple of purse-seine licenses, and that just about gives him the say-so on all the waters around Squitty, besides a couple of good bays on the Vancouver Island side and the same on the mainland. He belongs to the Packers' Association. They ain't supposed to control the local market. But the way it works out they really do.
"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.
And although there was big money-making in this short stretch, and the secret satisfaction of helping put another spoke in Gower's wheel, MacRae did not neglect the rest of his territory nor the few trollers that still worked Squitty Island. He ran long hours to get their few fish.
Gower was finished as an exploiter. There was no question about that. When a man as big as he went down the crash set tongues wagging. All the current talk reached MacRae through Stubby. That price-war had been Gower's last kick, an incomprehensible, ill-judged effort to reëstablish his hold on the Squitty grounds, so it was said.
But there was no wind on Squitty yet. There was breathless stillness except for the low, spaced mutter of the surf. He stood a long time, drinking in the beauty of it all, the sea and the moon-path, and the hushed, dark woods behind. Then his gaze, turning slowly, fell on something white in the shadow of a bushy, wind-distorted fir a few feet away. He looked more closely.
Squitty Island lies in the Gulf of Georgia midway between a mainland made of mountains like the Alps, the Andes, and the Himalayas all jumbled together and all rising sheer from the sea, and the low delta-like shore of Vancouver Island.
A southeast wind came backing up against the westerly. There was in its breath a hint of something stronger. Masterless, the sloop sailed, laid to, started off again erratically, and after many shifts ran off before this stiffer wind. Unhelmed, she laid her blunt bows straight for the opening between Sangster and Squitty islands. On the cockpit floor Donald MacRae sprawled unheeding.
Horace A. Gower, when he learned that ten to twenty thousand Squitty Island salmon were passing down the Gulf each week to an American cannery; that a smooth-faced boy out of the Air Service was putting a crimp in the ancient order of things so far as one particular cannery was concerned.
MacRae sometimes had the strange fancy of being caught in a vast machine for feeding the world, a machine which did not reckon such factors as pain and sorrow in its remorseless functioning. Men could live without love or ease or content. They could not survive without food. He came up to Squitty one bright afternoon when the sea was flat and still, unharassed by the westerly. The Cove was empty.
He knew every nook and cranny on Squitty Island, every phase and mood and color of the sea. It is a grim birthplace that leaves a man without some sentiment for the place where he was born. Point Old, Squitty Cove, Poor Man's Rock had been the boundaries of his world for a long time. In so far as he had ever played, he had played there.
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