The Darkening Archipelago Read online

  THE DARKENING ARCHIPELAGO

  NEWEST PRESS

  the DARKENING

  ARCHIPELAGO

  A COLE BLACKWATER MYSTERY

  STEPHEN LEGAULT

  Copyright © 2010 STEPHEN LEGAULT

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law. In the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying of the material, a licence must be obtained from Access Copyright before proceeding.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Legault, Stephen, 1971–

  The darkening archipelago [electronic resource] /

  Stephen Legault.

  ISBN 978-1-897126-66-0

  I. Title.

  PS8623.E46633D37 2010 C813’.6 C2009-906233-X

  Editor for the Board: Don Kerr

  Cover and interior design: Natalie Olsen, Kisscut Design

  Cover image: Alexandra Morton, Raincoast Research Society

  Author photo: Dan Anthon

  Copy editing: NJ Brown

  NeWest Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Edmonton Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

  201, 8540–109 Street

  Edmonton, Alberta T6G 1E6

  780-432-9427

  www.newestpress.com

  No bison were harmed in the making of this book.

  We are committed to protecting the environment and to the responsible use of natural resources. This book was printed on 100% post-consumer recycled paper.

  1 2 3 4 5 13 12 11 10

  printed and bound in Canada

  This book, like everything else in my life, is for Jenn, Rio, and Silas.

  And with love and gratitude to Bob, Sharon, and Mabel.

  The Darkening Archipelago is a work of fiction. While the Broughton Archipelago, Alert Bay, and Port McNeill are real localities, the communities of Port Lostcoast and Parish Island, and the characters who populate them, are fictional, and any resemblance to actual places and people is purely coincidental. Likewise, the North Salish First Nation is fictional; while the author has drawn from historical records that depict real cultural practices of First Nations who have lived in the Broughton Archipelago area for millennia, any resemblance to actual First Nations is accidental.

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgement

  1

  The rain began suddenly. From the west, skipping like a flat stone over the broad waters separating Vancouver Island from the convoluted knot of smaller islands at the mouth of Knight Inlet, the storm raced toward the steep slopes of the Coast Mountains. When it reached them, it ricocheted up their flanks and back and forth across the narrow passage at the mouth of the fjord. With the rain came wind that moulded the water into small waves, churning it into ten-foot swells within an hour. The sky pressed down and pounded the water with machine gun volleys of driving rain. The tops of the densely forested mountains rising from the inlet disappeared as a tattered blackness settled against the sea.

  Archie Ravenwing felt the storm approaching before he saw it, before it soaked him through. He could feel it coming on for most of the day. Maybe someone had done the weather dance last night, their blankets twisting as they moved back and forth to the chorus of voices, to the beating of drums. Maybe he should have paid closer attention to that morning’s marine weather forecast.

  He felt the storm in his hands. Twisted and corded like the ropes he had spent his sixty years working with, his joints always ached when a storm loomed. From November to March, and sometimes well into April, his hands always seemed to ache. There was no denying it — he was well past his prime. But he still had work to do.

  Ravenwing had set off from Port Lostcoast on the Inlet Dancer before dawn. On the north shore of Parish Island, Port Lostcoast was where he was born and where he had spent most of his life working as a fisherman. But he wasn’t fishing today. The salmon season wasn’t set to open for another two months, if it opened at all. For thousands of years, people along the wild, ragged coast of British Columbia had guided their boats through the heaving waters of the Pacific, harvesting the fish for food and ceremony. Among the tribes of the West Coast, salmon was the most important animal in the world. Life turned on salmon seasons. But in the last twenty years, so much had changed. Ravenwing thought of this as he powered up the inlet that morning, intent on his destination but aware of the shifting weather around him.

  Salmon smolts had been running for nearly two weeks, and Ravenwing had spent every day on the water since they started. These silvery darts spent as many as three years living in the tiny headwater tributaries of Knight Inlet. Most of the salmon born there were eaten or died of natural causes. Only ten percent survived to grow large enough to migrate down river and out into the salty water at the mouth of the creeks and then into the Inlet itself.

  The morning had been bright enough, with nothing more menacing than a few clouds hanging over the mountains of Vancouver Island, far to the west. But now Ravenwing suspected that by day’s end there would be rain. He flexed his thick, burled hands as he lightly played the wheel of his thirty-two-foot troller, heading east up the inlet.

  By the time the day started to warm, Ravenwing had reached Minstrel Island and the narrow mouth to Clio Channel, the ideal place for a couple hours of dip-net sampling before he turned his attention to the small bays and coves that marked the jigsaw puzzle shore. Archie shut down the Inlet Dancer’s powerful Cummins 130-horsepower inboard motor and let the silence of the morning wash over him. He stepped from the wheelhouse onto the aft deck with a Thermos of coffee, stretching and yawning. Thermos in hand, he deftly walked the high, narrow gunwale and sat on the raised fish box, which doubled as a table. He unscrewed the cap of the Thermos and closed his eyes to savour the scent of hot, rich coffee. The smell mingled with the tang of the ocean, salty and spiced with the yin and yang of coastal life and decay, and the pungent fragrance of the thick Sitka spruce and red cedar forest rising up along the towering cliffs just a hundred metres off his port side. Archie Ravenwing smiled broadly as he drew these fragrances deeply into his lungs.

  He poured coffee into the Thermos cap and blew on it gently, squinting at the steam that swirled up and disappeared on the breeze. Later, Archie guessed, that breeze would turn into a squall. But for the moment the morning was warm and gentle, and he savoured it. He sipped his coffee and looked around him.

  Born into the Lostcoast band of the North Salish First Nation, Archie Ravenwing had been fishing, guiding, hunting, and exploring the coastal estuaries, inlets, reaches, and straits from as far away as Puget Sound to the Queen Charlotte Islands since he was old enough to manage a bowlegged stance in a boat. As he let his eyes roll over the massive sweep of land and wa
ter and sky before him that morning, he was happy that this reach of the Broughton Archipelago had remained unchanged for generations. The hills jutted steeply from the rich waters, their shoulders cloaked in spruce and fir. Beneath those giant trees, tangles of salmonberries and alders gripped the soil. And between them walked another totem species for the Lostcoast people — the grizzly bear. Bears and salmon and the ancient forests that surrounded them were a holy trinity for Archie and his people. Grizzly bears fed on the salmon as the fish bashed their way up through the ankle-deep waters of the tiny tributaries to their spawning grounds each fall. The grizzly bears grew fat, often eating only the fish brains, rich in the nutrients they would need for their winter hibernation. The dead fish, left to rot in the woods, nourished the stalwart trees, which in turn held the entire ecosystem together with their wide, spreading roots. The trees sheltered and cooled the salmon rivers and fed the many smaller creatures that made their homes among them. When the trees fell into the streams, downed logs created places for the spawning salmon to hide and rest as, exhausted and crazed, they struggled back to their source of life.

  Archie sipped his coffee, thinking about this cycle of existence. He pushed back the sadness that approached whenever he thought this way. There was some question as to whether there would be enough wild salmon in this year’s run to allow for a commercial fishery. Talk in Victoria, the provincial capital, and among senior federal officials responsible for the fishery, suggested that a complete ban might be necessary to allow decimated salmon runs to recover.

  The people of the Lostcoast band had been fishing there for thousands of years, but they had never contributed to the decimation of salmon the way the modern industrial fishery had. Now Archie Ravenwing’s people would pay the price incurred by the greed and short-sightedness of the commercial fishing industry and its proponents in government. In the years since British Columbia’s current Liberal government had lifted the moratorium on new salmon farms in the province, there had been an explosion of interest in new aquaculture developments along bc’s knotted west coast. In the Broughton Archipelago, where Archie Ravenwing fished and lived, there were nearly thirty salmon farms in operation. Many of these open-net farms were located on the migration routes of native wild salmon. And though industry advocates argued that the two were unrelated, along with the development of salmon farms came a corresponding decline in the number of wild salmon. Archie knew that, in a recent count, only one hundred and fifty thousand wild salmon returned to the Broughton, down from the historical three and a half million. In 2002 the wild pink salmon stock collapsed, with only five percent of the native wild fish returning to spawn. Archie knew the numbers by heart.

  For Ravenwing, it was as if part of his own body, his own soul, had vanished. The part of his heart that swam through the waters of Tribune Channel and up the mouth of Knight Inlet was gone, lost like the spirit of the once-great salmon.

  Archie tried to keep his darkening sadness at bay. How could it have come to this? he wondered. After a thousand years of tradition, his family wouldn’t be allowed to fish their ancestral waters? He turned his face toward the sky. A throaty call greeted him, and he opened his eyes to see a jet-black shape cruise overhead. He heard the husky chortle again. Archie raised a hand in greeting. “Good morning, Grandpa,” he said quietly, waving at the raven, a smile creasing his face. “U’melth, Raven, who brought us the moon, fire, salmon, sun, and the tides,” he recited. “Trickster, grandfather of a thousand pranks. Okay! I’ll lighten up!” He drained his mug and slung the dregs into the water. “Time to get to work,” he added.

  Archie rose, stretched out the stiffness that had accumulated in his joints, and walked back to the wheelhouse, where he opened a large bin and removed the tools he would need for his morning work. He put the long, flexible net together on its pole and readied half a dozen plastic sample jars. These he put on the fish box on the deck of the boat. Without ceremony he began his sampling, drawing forth the tiny salmon fry to be funnelled into the jars. So few, so few. Ravenwing shook his head as he dipped again into the waters.

  By noon he had filled the jars with juvenile salmon, whose tiny, finger-sized bodies were being consumed by sea lice. This was what Archie Ravenwing was seeking — irrefutable evidence that the wild salmon stocks of Knight Inlet and the Broughton Archipelago were being parasitized by sea lice.

  Archie held a jar up to the light and counted the lice clinging to the salmon. On one smolt he counted four parasites from two different species. Adults might succumb when they had six or seven sea lice on their fins, gills, or skin. Smolts like those in Archie’s sampling jars would die with only a few sea lice feeding on them. Archie regarded his unfortunate catch. “Not doing so good, are you, little friends?” He kept finding more and more smolts with more and more sea lice on them, and he had yet to reach his day’s destination: Jeopardy Rock. There he expected to find the epicentre of sea lice contamination.

  “Not so good….” he repeated, his voice trailing off.

  Ravenwing knew that sea lice were a natural parasite that preyed on wild salmon along British Columbia’s wild coast and elsewhere across North America. But in the last ten years there had been a shocking rise in the number of lice infesting wild salmon. Where before the numbers had been low, and very few salmon actually died as a result of playing host to the lice, now entire runs of wild pink and other salmon were being devastated by them. Despite protests from the salmon farming industry, irrefutable evidence pointed to the rash of farmed Atlantic salmon as the source of the outbreak. The Atlantic salmon could survive with many more sea lice than the native pink, chum, and coho.

  Archie took a black felt pen from his shirt pocket and labelled the jars. He would return these to Dr. Cassandra Petrel for her study.

  Archie flexed his big hands and looked at the sky. “Starting to crowd in,” he said aloud to nobody in particular. “Fixing to churn up pretty good, I think.”

  He knew he should head back down the inlet toward Port Lostcoast before the storm set upon him, but he had one more thing to do that day. Something was eating Archie Ravenwing, and he had to set it straight. So instead of turning the Inlet Dancer for home, he powered across the inlet toward the mouth of Tribune Channel, skipping the heavy boat across the small waves already being formed by the wind.

  Now the rain fell in torrents, churning the waves like knives thrust into the sea. The Inlet Dancer bounced and rocked, nose into the waves, powering past the fish farms at Doctor Islets and into the main body of Knight Inlet, making for home. Archie stood in the pilothouse near the stern of the boat, one hand locked on the wheel, the other clenching the throttle. This blow was bigger than he had foreseen and, though he was prepared to moor and wait out the storm, this stretch of water had few safe harbours.

  After what he had seen at Jeopardy Rock, a new urgency filled Archie Ravenwing and made him push for home against what seemed prudent for the weather.

  A wave crashed over the bow of the Inlet Dancer, and the boat dipped into the trough behind it, rising up the side of another stack of water. The swells now topped fifteen feet and came in irregular patterns, every fourth, fifth, or sixth wave taller than the rest, coming on faster than the others. Ravenwing firmly held the wheel, keeping the boat head-on to the storm, not wanting the narrow vessel to get punched side-to by one of the rogue waves.

  He had suspected for some time that what was happening at Jeopardy Rock was more than just simple salmon farming. He had suspected for some time that the company was doing more than just breeding Atlantic salmon. Now he was certain. He would make his calls when he reached Port Lostcoast and begin to set the record straight. He would begin to make amends. Did Archie Ravenwing believe in redemption? He believed in justice, even if his own actions hadn’t always seemed just. He believed that a man’s motivation sometimes propelled behaviour that appeared inconsistent with his espoused values. But we are complex creatures, reasoned Ravenwing.

  Another wave rocked the Inlet Dance
r, and Archie pitched forward. He patted the wheel and remembered that she had survived worse.

  It was growing dark. The day was slipping from the sky, and the clouds pressed down so low that the tops of the trees on mighty Gilford Island were hardly visible. Ravenwing switched on his running lights — not so he could see, but so he could be seen. Sonar and radar would guide him down the inlet, through the darkness and the storm, but he worried about small pleasure crafts caught in the weather with no such second sight.

  Ravenwing counted the waves, counted the minutes. A half hour passed and the hulk of Gilford Island started to recede. The waves still crashed on the Inlet Dancer’s bow, and now he was moving across the channel toward the eastern tip of Turnour Island. At his pace of seven or eight knots per hour, it would be another two hours or more before he would be abreast of Parish Island, and home.

  The VHF marine radio in the pilothouse crackled and, intuitively, Ravenwing set it to scan. Static filled the wheelhouse, the white noise engulfed by the sound of the storm that darkened the archipelago around Ravenwing. Then there was a voice, clear as a bell: “Any craft in the vicinity of Deep Water Cove, this is Rising Moon. I’ve lost my primary and am taking on water.”

  Ravenwing snatched up the handset and spoke over the howl of the storm. “Rising Moon, this is Inlet Dancer. I’m passing Ship Rock now, about to make the crossing. What is your position?”

  “Glad to hear your voice, Inlet Dancer. I’m about one mile west of Deep Water, but I’m getting pushed toward the rocks on Deep Water Bluff.”

  “Do you have secondary?”

  “I’m running on my little Evinrude 25, Inlet Dancer.”

  “Okay, hold on, I’ll circle back for you.”

  “I’m glad to find you out here,” came the static-filled response.

  “I’m not,” Ravenwing said over the v h f and returned the handset to the radio.

  For a moment he would be side-to the brunt of the storm, so Ravenwing determined to make that quick. He throttled up, pushing over the breaking waves, and counted. The big waves pushed a wall of water over the boat’s bow onto the deck, momentarily flooding it until the water drained away through the breaks in the gunwales. He counted. A wave crested, ebbed, and Ravenwing throttled back, spun the wheel, and turned to lee, then powered back up again as the stern of the boat was engulfed in the next white breaker. The ocean flooded into the wheelhouse, washing Ravenwing to his ankles in icy water.