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 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, 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 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 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.
But now a large collection of seals heading for their breeding grounds in the Arctic Ocean came rampaging through 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 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.
'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 m
any 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 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.'