Alaska (120 page)

As soon as Tom heard this, his interest focused not on the machinations of Hoxey, whom he despised, but on the locations which he proposed obtaining for R&R: 'What rivers did he have in mind? Did you hear any specific names?'

'What does it matter? It's stealing, that's all it is.'

'But it's very important to me. Because I'm supposed to build the new canneries, and I'd like to know where I'm to be working.'

Nancy could not understand how Tom could so loathe a man like Hoxey and at the same time be involved in the evil things he was doing: 'I don't like him, Tom, and I'm surprised you let him do business for you.'

But Tom was so concerned about his own future assignments, as if one bleak and lonely spot for a cannery was preferable to another, that he requisitioned one of Totem's small boats and had two workmen sail him to Juneau, where he learned what hotel Hoxey was staying in, and there, like some merchant trying to sell the great man a bolt of cloth for a new suit, he applied for an interview.

Hoxey, remembering well this capable young man from Nome and the R&R offices in Seattle, graciously received him, and when Tom wanted to know what sites he had acquired, Hoxey unrolled his maps and indicated the five proposed locations. 'I thought there were to be six,' Tom said, and Hoxey replied: 'There were. But a new firm called George T. Myers beat us to the best one of all in Sitkoh Bay. So we have five.' And with a forefinger neatly manicured, he indicated the remote and desolate spots at which huge installations requiring thousands of carpenters would soon be built, and from which millions of cans of salmon would be sent to all parts of the world.

'There's never been anything like it,' Hoxey said with unfeigned excitement. 'Always before . .. Take the cotton mills in New England why, you had your factory near some town or even in the middle of it. Out here, look at our five spots! Not a settlement of any kind for fifty, eighty miles. Factories 729

in the wilderness, and the obedient salmon swim right up to them.'

Tom asked about rumors that new laws might halt the placement of traps across waterways, or at least cut down the length of the jiggers, but Hoxey reassured him: 'It's our job to see that you men doing the work are not hampered.'

'No need for such laws,' Tom said. 'You should see how many salmon go through over the weekends.'

'There are always people,”Hoxey said expansively, 'who want to interrupt the flow of progress.' Then he asked: 'Will the new machine, what they call the Iron Chink, will it do the job?' And Tom spent the next minutes recounting his adventures with Ah Ting: 'If the Iron Chink does nothing else but get rid of the Chinese, it's worth the effort.'

When he returned to the cannery he had a fairly good idea of what his life was going to be like for the next years, and although he continued to long for Seattle, life on the frontier was not an unpleasing prospect; the challenges would be great and the rewards commensurate with his efforts. Besides, he found that he liked organizing men and equipment into a major operation in unlikely locations, and the grand openness of Alaska was alluring. But as a normal young man, he began contemplating how he was going to find a wife, and he began asking questions about how the managers of other canneries in southeastern Alaska handled this problem.

One white man who had worked at various sites said: 'The manager only has to be at the plant four or five months during the campaign. He's like a sailor. He can have a perfectly good marriage the other seven or eight months.' And another man told of two managers he knew who had brought their wives to small private houses attached to the plants: 'They brought their kids too, and they had a high old time.'

Without revealing any specific plans, Tom said to both men: 'I think I'd want my wife to live at the cannery,' and the first man issued a caution: 'You didn't ask me about that. But I saw a man down near Ketchikan try that once. A disaster. At the end of the campaign she ran off with the engineer in charge of the cooking boilers.'

But regardless of how the debate went, during his spare hours Tom traveled more and more frequently across the estuary to visit with the Bigears, and now he had his own skiff, which he operated with such skill that one day Sam said as he greeted him at the Bigears dock: 'You handle that like a Tlingit.'

'Is that good?'

'Best in Alaska. You ever see one of our great canoes?'

Tom had seen only the smaller ones at the potlatch, but 730

some days later he had an opportunity, for scores of Indians gathered at the Bigears place, and on Saturday afternoon, when the trap was closed down for the weekend, two teams of Tlingits, each with a very long hand-hewn wooden canoe which could hold sixteen men seated on boards slung across the gunwales, held a set of races down Taku Inlet from the mouth of the Pleiades River, around the Walrus, and back to the starting line. As soon as the Chinese workers realized what was going on, they began placing very large bets, some preferring the canoe with a bright-red star on its prow, others backing the one with a carved eagle as figurehead.

Tom was surprised at the appearance of the Indians; they were darker than either Sam Bigears or his daughter, and shorter. But they were quite husky across the chest and their arms were powerful. They dressed almost formally, in heavy shoes, dark woolen trousers that looked rather bulky, and store-bought white shirts buttoned at the neck but without ties. However, when Sam Bigears shot his revolver to start the race, the Tlingits lost all sense of formality, digging their paddles deep in the water and pulling backward with brutal force.

Tom, standing with Nancy, could hardly believe it when Sam came over to say: 'See those two men back of eagle canoe? In very small canoe they paddle Seattle to Juneau.

Right through high seas, rocks they couldn't see.'

When the races ended the teams having been intermixed after each finish to make the betting more interesting Tom stayed at the Bigears house, and in the shadow of the totem pole he met with the rowers, only a few of whom spoke English. 'They all understand,'

Sam explained, 'just bashful with white man.' But as the evening progressed, several of the men became quite voluble, and learning that Tom was associated with the cannery, they wanted to know why Totem had decided to rely upon the trap rather than on fishermen like themselves. And as Tom started to give bland explanations, he found out that eleven of the men had formerly fished for the cannery but had been replaced by the trap.

'You come from Seattle. You take our salmon. You don't leave nothing.'

'But all Alaska will profit from the canneries,' Tom protested, but when Nancy heard this fatuous claim she burst out laughing, and the men joined.

That evening, inspired by the frivolity of the races and the good humor of the picnic that followed, Tom lingered with the Tlingits, and for the first time since he had arrived in Alaska he caught the full flavor of native life. He liked these men, their frank manners, their obvious love of their land, 731

and he could see the stolid grandeur of their women, those round-faced, black-haired wives who remained observant in the background until some outrageous thing was said.

Then they pounced on the man who made the foolish statement and goaded him until sometimes he actually ran off to escape their taunts. To be among a gathering of proud Tlingits was a challenging experience.

When the time came for the visitors who were staying with Bigears to drift off to bed, Tom and Nancy walked down to where his skiff had been dragged ashore, and there they stood for some time in the light of a late-rising moon. On the opposite side of the estuary rose the huge buildings of the cannery, only two lanterns throwing light at entrances. Tom had never before actually studied the immensity of this strange construction in the wilderness, and to see its many buildings now in silhouette, with the moon casting strange shadows from the east, was sobering.

'I never realized what a huge thing we've built,' he said. 'To be used for just a few months a year.'

'Like you said, it's a gold mine, except you mine silver, not gold.'

'What do you mean?' And before she could explain, he added: 'Oh yes! The silvery sides of the salmon. I never think of them that way. I see only those precious red sides of the sockeye. They're my salmon.'

He found no easy way to say goodnight, for having seen the Tlingit women at their best, he appreciated more than ever before the unique qualities of Nancy Bigears.

He saw the beauty of her rounded face, the gamin appeal of her black bangs, the lilt in the way she walked. 'You are very close to the earth, aren't you?' he asked, and she said: 'I am the earth. You saw those men. They're the sea.'

Knowing that he must not do this thing, he caught her in his arms and they kissed, then kissed again. Finally she pushed him away: 'They told me you were in love with Mr. Ross's daughter.'

'Who told you that?'

'Everybody knows everything. They told me that you had paddled over to talk with Mr. Hoxey. To steal more rivers from us.' She drew away, leaning against a spruce tree that edged the water. 'There's no hope for you and me, Tom. I saw that tonight.'

'But I love you more tonight than ever before,' he protested, and she said with that frightening clarity which Indian girls like her often commanded: 'You saw us for the first time as human beings. It was the others you saw, not me.' And then she quietly stepped forward and kissed him gently 732

on the cheek: 'I shall always love you, Tom. But we both have many things to do, and they will take us far apart.' With that, she went swinging back to her house, where her father and three cronies were singing in the moonlight.

A GYRE IS A MASSIVE BODY OF SEA WATER WHICH RETAINS

its own peculiar characteristics and circular motion, even though it is an integral part of the great ocean which surrounds it. The name, pronounced jire, comes from the same root as gyrate and gyroscope

and obviously pertains to the circular or spiral motion of the water. How a gyre is able to maintain its identity within the bosom of a tumultuous ocean poses an interesting problem whose unraveling carries one back to the beginnings of the universe.

Certainly, in our day, the great Japan Current sweeps its warm waters from Japan across the northern reaches of the Pacific to the coasts of Alaska, Canada and Oregon, modifying those climates and bringing much rain. But this and all other ocean currents have been set in motion by planetary winds created by the differential heating of various latitudinal belts, and this is caused by the earth's spin, which was set in primordial motion when a diffuse nebular cloud coalesced into our solar system.

This carries us all the way back to the original Big Bang which started our particular universe on its way.

A gyre, then, is a big whirl which generates at its edges smaller whirls whose motion increases its viscosity, forming a kind of protective barrier about the parent gyre, which can then maintain its integrity eon after eon. One professor of oceanography, name now unknown, striving to help his students grasp this beautiful concept, offered them a jingle:

Big whirls make little whirls That feed on their velocity. Little whirls make lesser whirls And so on to viscosity.

The Pacific houses many of these self-preserving gyres, one of the most important being the Alaskan, which dominates the area just south of the Aleutian Islands. Reaching more than two thousand fluctuating miles from east to west, four hundred variable miles from north to south, it forms a unique body of water whose temperature and abundant food supply make it irresistible to the salmon bred in Alaska and Canada.

This gyre circulates in a vast counterclockwise motion and the sockeye like Nerka who enter it swim with the current in this unvarying counterclockwise direction.

Of course, the

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very fine salmon bred in Japan start from a contrary orientation, so they swim their ordained route clockwise, against the movement of the gyre. In doing so, they repeatedly pass through the larger number of Alaskan salmon, forming for a few hours a huge conglomeration of one of the world's most valuable fish.

For two years, starting in 1904, Nerka, accompanied by the remaining eleven survivors of his group of four thousand sockeye, swam in the Alaskan Gyre, eating and being eaten in the rich food chain of the North Pacific. Mammoth whales would swim past, their cavernous mouths able to sweep in whole schools of salmon. Seals, who had a predilection for salmon, sped through the gyre decimating the ranks. Birds attacked from the sky, and from the deeper waters came big fish like tuna, pollock and swordfish to feed upon the salmon. Each day consisted of a ten-mile swim with the current in an ocean literally teeming with enemies, and in this perpetual struggle the salmon that survived grew strong. Nerka was now about twenty-five inches long, seven pounds in weight, and although he looked almost immature in comparison with the huge king salmon of the Pacific or the even larger members of the salmon family living in the Atlantic, of his type he was becoming a superb specimen.

The reddish color of his flesh stemmed in part from his love for shrimp, which he devoured in huge quantities, although he also fed upon the larger forms of plankton, gradually shifting to squid and small fish. He lived, as one can deduce from these details of his existence, in a mid-range of the ocean hierarchies. Too big to be an automatic prey of the seal and the orca whale, he was at the same time too small to be a major predator. He was a tough, self-reliant master of the deep.

During his three and a half irregular circuits of the Alaskan Gyre, Nerka would cover a total of about ten thousand miles, sometimes swimming largely alone, at other periods finding himself in the midst of an enormous concentration. For example, when he reached the halfway point, where sockeye more mature than he began to break away and head back to their home streams, he was drifting along the lower edges of the Aleutian chain when a massive concentration of salmon composed of all five Alaskan types king, chum, pink, coho and sockeyebegan to form, and it grew until it contained about thirty million fish, swimming in the same counterclockwise direction and feeding upon whatever they encountered.