Alaska (121 page)

But now a large collection of seals heading for their breeding grounds in the Arctic Ocean came rampaging through

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the middle of the aggregation, devouring salmon at a rate that would have exterminated a less numerous fish. Two female seals swimming with amazing speed came right at Nerka, who sensed that he was doomed, but with a sudden twist he dove. The two seals had to swerve to avoid colliding, and he escaped, but from his vantage point below the turmoil he witnessed the devastation the seals wrought. Thousands of mature salmon perished in that ruthless onslaught, but after two days the seals passed beyond the outer fringes and continued on their journey north. But Nerka's group was .now down to nine.

Nerka was almost an automatic creature, for he behaved in obedience to impulses programmed into his being half a million years earlier. For example, in these years when he thrived in the Alaskan Gyre he lived as if he belonged there forever, and in his sport with other fish and his adventures with those larger mammals that were trying to eat him he behaved as if he had never known any other type of life. He could not remember ever having lived in fresh water, and were he suddenly to be thrown back into it, he would not have been able to adjust: he was a creature of the gyre as irrevocably as if he had been born within its confines.

But in his second year in the great Alaskan Gyre a genetically driven change occurred in Nerka, compelling him to seek out his natal stream above Lake Pleiades. And now a complex homing mechanism, still not fully understood by scientists, came into play to guide him over thousands of miles to that one stream along the Alaskan coast.

Though employing this inherited memory for the first time in his own life, Nerka did so instinctively and expertly, and thus began his journey home.

The clues guiding Nerka were subtle: minute shifts in water temperature triggered his response, or it could have been electromagnetic changes. Certainly, as he approached the coast his sense of smell, among the most sensitive in all the world's animals, detected trace chemical markers similar to those in his own Pleiades. This chemical distinction could have been a difference of less than one part in a billion, but there it was. Its influence persisted and grew, guiding Nerka ever more compellingly to his home waters. It is one of the strangest manifestations of nature, this minute message sent through the waters of the world to guide a wandering salmon back to his natal stream.

THE 1905 SUMMER CAMPAIGN WAS THE LAST THAT TOM Venn would spend at the Totem Cannery, since Mr. Ross

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wanted him to supervise launching the new R&R cannery north of Ketchikan. Tom would have enjoyed making the acquaintance of that distinctive area of Alaska, but the professors who were installing the Iron Chink machines at Totem insisted that a practiced hand like Tom remain there to handle the problems that would inevitably arise when instructing a new work force in such a radical procedure.

For a host of reasons the summer was unforgettable. Tom had spent much of February in Seattle with the Rosses, and had received intimations from both of Lydia's parents and from Lydia herself that as soon as she finished two years of university it might be possible to consider marriage. As if to demonstrate the seriousness of this possibility, in July, after the Iron Chinks were operating at top speed and with an efficiency not even their inventors had envisioned, Mrs. Ross and Lydia sailed to Taku Inlet aboard the Canadian luxury vessel Montreal Queen, and Tom had the pleasure of showing them around the cannery.

'I'm really surprised,' Mrs. Ross said. 'From the tales I'd heard Malcolm and you tell, I'd expected to see hundreds of Chinese, and I find none.'

'Well,' he reminded her, 'didn't you see us studying the Iron Chink that day in your sitting room?'

'That little thing, Tom? It was just a model, trivial, really. I never visualized it as a mechanical monster like this.'

He guided Mrs. Ross and Lydia to one side as he explained the workings: 'This one machine, and we have these three here, the other two slightly improved on this ”one ...' He lost the thread of his reasoning. 'Well, as you can see, this Iron Chink as we call it has the capacity to handle a fish a second, but we don't like to run it that fast. At the speed you see, it can take care of more than two thousand salmon an hour.'

'Where do you get them all?'

From the window he showed the women the enlarged trap in the center of the inlet with its very long jiggers: 'We catch a lot of fish down there. See how the baskets are winched up out of the holding pen . . . And you can't see it, but another winch at the end of our dock lifts them right up to that conveyor over there.'

He showed them how, after the salmon were cleaned and slimed by the Iron Chink, the raw flesh, bones and all, was cut by fast-moving machines into appetizing chunks which fitted precisely the famous 'tall can' designed for exactly one pound of fish and recognized worldwide.

'You can it raw?' Lydia asked, and he said: 'We sure do!' and he showed them how the filled cans passed under a machine which clamped the lid into place.

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'That isn't safe,' Lydia said. 'There's air in there, and bacteria.'

'There sure is,' Tom agreed. 'As a matter of fact, there's even a small hole in the lid, but look what happens next!' And proudly he showed them a standard canning device which his cannery had improved upon: 'The filled can with a hole in its lid comes here, and a vacuum expels all the air that Lydia is worried about, and as soon as that happens, this next machine drops down this dab of solder, and whango! the salmon is locked in an airtight can.'

He then took them to another building where sixteen massive steam retorts stood in a row, huge ovens, really, into which whole trolley cars loaded with cans of salmon could be wheeled. When the massive iron doors clanged shut, whistling steam under great pressure was let into the ovens, and for a hundred and five minutes the salmon were cooked until even the succulent bones were edible.

'I always ask for the part with the bones,' Lydia said as they moved to a third huge building, in which so many unlabeled cans of cooked salmon were stored that the effect was dazzling. At the far end, teams of women, recently employed, applied the distinctive Totem label, now well regarded by better stores throughout the nation, since its cans carried only the superior pink sockeye of Taku Inlet.

Deftly snatching one of the finished cans from the production line, Tom held it before Mrs. Ross and said with pride: 'Some woman in Liverpool or Boston is going to appreciate this can when it reaches her kitchen. We do a good job here.'

Thousands of wooden boxes, each holding forty-eight cans of Totem salmon, two tiers of twenty-four each to the box, waited to be filled or stood ready for shipment south on an R&R steamer. 'How many boxes do you ship a year?' Mrs. Ross asked, and Tom replied: 'About forty thousand.'

'My goodness, that's a lot of salmon,' and Tom assured her: 'There's a lot out there.'

The Ross women could stay only two days, and then they had to leave by fast boat to catch the Montreal Queen

as it sailed from Juneau. As they said farewell, they both invited Tom to spend Christmas with them this year, and once more Lydia kissed him warmly as they parted, a fact which would find its way to Nancy Bigears across the estuary.

Some days after they were gone, a most amusing contretemps occurred, for one of the Iron Chinks became temperamental, cutting heads and tails in a way that wasted half the salmon and gutting it so that the backbone was whisked away while the entrails remained attached, partially spilling 737

out of the fish and making a gruesome mess. Despite his normal skill at handling emergencies, Tom was unable to correct the malperformance, and it looked as if he would have to send to Seattle for Dr. Whitman, but one of his workmen suggested that he see if Sam Bigears could do the job: 'He's very good with machines.' But when Sam sailed over to look at the Iron Chink he said: 'Too complicated. But I know man who fix.'

'Who?' Tom asked, and he was chagrined when Sam replied: 'Ah Ting.' However, Sam was so insistent that he took it upon himself to sail to Juneau to fetch the Chinese miracle worker, and Ah Ting saw nothing unpalatable in going back to work on the machine which had displaced him and the other Chinese.

Tom's reception of him at the dock was decidedly cool, which gave Ah Ting no concern.

Smiling his buck-toothed smile as always, he lugged his tool kit into the former cutting shed where for two years he had reigned. 'Well!' he said as he watched the two functioning Iron Chinks slicing their way through hundreds of salmon. 'Good machine I think. Now what's wrong?'

Tom ordered his men to run half a dozen salmon through the malfunctioning machine, and in that first minute Ah Ting spotted the error, but how to correct it he could not determine so quickly. In fact, it took him about two hours to fix what at first had seemed only a simple problem, and as he lay on a piece of bagging under the Iron Chink he called to Tom: 'Much better this rod go over here,' but Tom shouted: 'Don't change anything!' However, Ah Ting had detected a much superior way to relay power to the cutting knives and at the same time protect them from what had disabled the machine. So without seeking further permission, he began hammering and sawing and making such a racket that Tom became distraught, but after some fifteen minutes of this, Ah Ting climbed out from underneath and said, with his usual confident grin: 'All right now. You want me fix other two?'

'No!' Tom said, and after paying Ah Ting, he shoved him along to Sam Bigears' waiting skiff. However, some weeks later, one of the other machines broke down in much the same way, and back came Ah Ting to correct the mistake in its design. This time Tom looked the other way when the clever Chinese crawled under the third machine and corrected it too. That night he drafted a letter to Starling and Whitman in Seattle, advising them that he had learned through hard experience that the power transfer under the knives of their Iron Chink could be much improved if they 738

made the changes he outlined in the drawings which accompanied his note.

IN LATE JULY ALL KINDS OF GOOD THINGS SEEMED TO happen, each more pleasing than the preceding. At the government offices in Juneau, where he had gone to consult with officials about extending the jiggers even farther across the inlet, Tom was working over maps when he heard a familiar voice, and when he turned to see who it was, there stood Reverend Lars Skjellerup of the Presbyterian Mission in Barrow, who had come south with his pretty Virginia wife to plead with the government to send schoolteachers, not to the mission, where he and his wife were doing a creditable job with the money he had earned in the gold fields of Nome, but to the Eskimos of the Barrow area in general.

Tom invited the Skjellerups to lunch, where he realized for the first time that one of the greatest joys of a human life is to learn, after a prolonged absence, how people with whom one had shared dangers were doing. Now, as he listened to the adventures of this man he had known so intimately in troubled days, he became almost effusive in his desire to recall old times.

'Lars, you'll never in a hundred years know who sat last year in that very chair you're in. He's advising our firm on land acquisitions.'

'Matthew Murphy?'

'No, but I'd sure like to see him. Hold on to your hat. It was Marvin Hoxey.'

With a shout that could be heard across the room, Skjellerup jumped up from the chair and cried: 'Is he out of jail?' and both he and his wife sat dumfounded as Tom told them how Hoxey had become an even greater force in Washington and the legislative adviser to Ross & Raglan.

He spent three days with the Skjellerups, learning how a man with no religious education could suddenly find himself a missionary in a frozen land, but he was even more impressed by Mrs. Skjellerup, who had reached that distant, frozen mission in such a curious way: 'You must have been very brave to go to the end of the earth where one winter night is three months long,' and she laughed off the suggestion: 'I'd be just as happy in Fiji.'

The idea astounded him. He knew nothing of Fiji and he supposed she didn't either, but it was about as far away from Barrow and the arctic ice as one could get: 'Do you mean that?'

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'Of course I do. And it's the truth. Adventure. Hard work. Seeing good results. That's why we're put on earth.'

'Are you religious?' he asked. 'I mean, do you believe in God?'

'My wife and I believe in work,' answered the man who had driven reindeer to the top of the world, 'and I think that God does too.'

'Yes,' his wife broke in. 'I believe in God. I prefer to see Him as an old man with white hair who sits on a throne about six miles higher than the clouds. He sits there with a big book and writes down everything we do, but fortunately for people like me, He has very poor eyesight. You see, He's been writing like that for a good many years.'

The Skjellerups were well on their way back to Barrow, where the July midnights were a silvery gray, when Tom started for Taku Inlet, and as he was leaving Juneau's Occidental Hotel, he saw coming up the street from the wharf seven of the most improbable citizens of Alaska. In the forefront, giving orders as usual, came A. L. Arkikov, the Siberian reindeer herder, with his wife and three children, all of, them wearing the winter clothing of Siberia. Behind them came two whom Tom had hoped to meet again more than anyone he had ever known, Matthew Murphy and his companion Missy Peckham, and their baby daughter.

He saw them before they saw him, and he ran quickly down the hotel steps, dashed into the street, and grasped Arkikov by the waist, dancing him about before any of the newcomers could identify him. Then, as he whirled past, Missy saw him, and she stopped dead in the street, put her hands to her mouth, and fought back tears. Murphy, when he recognized this stranger, joined the dance, and for some minutes, there in front of Juneau's major hotel, the four veterans of the gold fields celebrated in noisy joy.

Insisting that they all accompany him to the dining room, Tom ordered a feast, and once more he posed his riddle: 'Who do you think was sitting in that chair you're in, Missy, not too long ago?”