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Walker sat quietly across from the old man and waited for him to speak. The man had come a long distance in order to find him, first by boat from his home in Tsa’wit, far up the long tongue of water the white man’s charts called Banks Inlet, and then on foot once he reached the town of Yalis on Cormorant Island. He had shuffled along the beach in front of the village and asked one of the men he found there for directions, saying that he was looking for Walker. He had been greeted warmly and directed to the house of Walker’s aunt, who offered him a cup of tea and then told him how to find her son, Patrick, who was perhaps the only person in the village who knew where Walker was currently living. The old man had thanked her and made his way slowly up to the top of the hill as he had been instructed.
Almost an hour later he located Patrick’s house and found him in the driveway working on his truck. The two men exchanged greetings and chatted for a while and then the old man asked Patrick if he could please take a message to Walker. Patrick listened to the request and then drove them both back to his mother’s house to ask her opinion. Both Patrick and his mother knew that Walker did not like visitors and even though Patrick knew where Walker now lived, he himself did not go there uninvited.
Patrick’s mother listened to the old man’s explanation, and when she nodded her approval Patrick left the two of them sitting in her kitchen with a pot of tea on the table in front of them and went down to the marina where he kept his boat. He fired up the engine, made his way out to the tiny cove where Walker had built a rough cabin out of driftwood, and gave him the message. Walker agreed to talk to the old man, but he refused a ride back to Alert Bay: he never went anywhere without his canoe. He would make his own way there.
It had taken more than two days, but once Walker arrived the old man showed no sign of impatience. He would speak in his own time. Walker waited with equal patience, and when that time finally came, the old man’s voice was as thin as the breeze that rustled the branches of the poplar trees.
“I am troubled, my nephew,” he said, and Walker smiled as he heard the traditional honorific. ‘There are evil things happening. The balance has been broken.” He paused and looked out across the beach, his eyes staring blindly at the ocean beyond. “These men that have gone missing. They are good men. Hard workers. They honor our traditions. They know the ocean and her ways. They have travelled on her waters since they were children. It does not seem possible they would both lose their way.”
“When did they go missing, Grandfather,” asked Walker, offering back the respect he had received. “Were they together?”
“No,” replied the old man. “They went alone. The first disappeared a little more than one of the white man’s weeks ago. The other less than that.”
“Do you know where they were going?”
“They both had work on one of those places that farm fish. There are many of those things here and I do not know which one they were working for.”
“Have you spoken to their families? Perhaps they would know.”
The old man smiled. “Yes, but it was a job, nothing more. These things were not important to them so they did not ask. We do not have farms. Mother earth gives us all we need. A farm that grows some kind of strange fish is not something we understand.
Walker nodded. “What is it you would like me to do Grandfather?”
“The farms belong to the white man. I have been told that you have a friend, a white man, who is with the white man’s police. My people say that he is a good man, and that he has helped us before.”
Walker let his gaze wander across the cluttered shoreline of the village: the rocky breakwater that enclosed the marina, the tangled rigging of the fishing boats, the wooden houses jutting out over the water on crumbling pilings, the ferry dock that linked Cormorant Island to the bigger island to the west, and then he looked out over the restless ocean beyond.
The old man was talking about Dan Connor, someone Walker hadn’t seen for over a year and someone this wise and gentle man had certainly never met, yet somehow news of Dan and his efforts on behalf of Walker’s friend Joel had reached the remote and isolated community of Tsa’wit. How long had it taken, Walker wondered, for that news to travel down that wild, empty coastline; a hundred miles across Hecate Strait from Haida Gwaii, another seven hundred as the raven flies from Prince Rupert down to Banks Inlet, perhaps twenty thousand miles if it had also made its way up all the other inlets and out to the forty thousand or so islands that clung to that the western edge of Canada. Had news of how he and Dan Connor first met all those years ago down in the city also travelled that same route?
“Yes Grandfather. His name is Dan Connor and he is a good man. He honors and respects our people. I consider him to be my friend.”
The words sounded strange in his mouth, but even as he said them he knew it was true. Dan Connor was his friend.
“We would be grateful if he would help us with this matter also.”
The old man finished speaking. They were sitting on a low wall above the beach and the slanting rays of the sun shone on his face, burnishing it with copper light and etching the deep lines that marked his years with shadow. Sitting beside him, Walker thought he looked more like an ancient carving than a frail and elderly man. He looked as if he had been sculpted out of bronze, strong and powerful and as old as the land itself.
“I will ask him, Grandfather,” Walker answered. “I think he will try.”
The old man turned and looked at him. “Trying is all any of us can do, my nephew. It is enough. I thank you. Gilakas’la.”
He reached for the carved stick he used as a cane and stood up. As if on cue, the boat that had brought him to the cove nosed around the rocks on the outer point of the bay.
***
WALKER WATCHED AS THE boat now carrying the old man disappeared back around the point and thought about what he needed to do. It seemed as if it should be an easy task to contact Dan Connor. Dan kept his boat tied up at the marina in Port McNeill, less than ten miles away from where Walker was sitting.
Almost everybody with a boat in Alert Bay—the town Walker’s people called Yalis – would have a VHF radio, and would be happy to let him use it, but VHF was public and one of the favorite pastimes in the village was listening in to conversations between boats. Hot fishing spots were discovered that way, as were new romances, infidelities and affairs. It provided endless entertainment and fueled the village gossip. If people were disappearing, it didn’t seem wise to announce that Dan Connor was being asked to help find them.
Radiotelephone or satellite phone would be better, but it meant climbing up into the wheelhouse of one of the big fish boats tied to the floats behind the breakwater. Because of the damage he had done to his legs when he fell from the roof of a bank all those years ago Walker could not do that without assistance, and assistance meant any of the privacy gained would be lost.
Ham radio or SSB might be possible—he knew Dan had them both onboard his boat—but Walker didn’t know how to use them and even if he did, few of the boats at the marina would have them. That left regular telephone lines—and Dan’s boat, Dreamspeaker, was not equipped with a regular phone.
It was less than a mile from the beach up to his aunt’s house but it took Walker well over an hour to get there. It would have taken considerably longer if he hadn’t been offered a ride from a passing truck that took him over the steepest part of the road. While he could sit for hours in a canoe, his legs no longer allowed him to walk easily and even with the help of a driftwood branch he had picked up on the beach each step was agony.
Once at the house, he spent an hour with his aunt as both courtesy and tradition demanded, then another hour with the two neighbors who dropped in to see who was visiting her. By the time he made the phone call to the police station in Port McNeill, the sun was very low in the west. It was only when the man who answered the phone asked him how Dan Connor could contact him that he realized he would either have to stay with his aunt until Dan called, or go and find the man himself.
Although he loved her dearly, staying with his aunt was not an option. It had been many years since he lived in a place completely surrounded by walls, the wind kept out by solid doors and windows, the sky blocked out by a roof. It was not something he had any desire to do again. That made his decision easy. It was what he should have done in the first place.
The beach was deserted when he slid his canoe back into the water, the troughs of the waves already dark with the shadows of night. If he returned to his cove, he would be on the water until well after midnight and he would still have a long trip ahead of him the next day. If he headed straight for Port McNeill he could get there by two or three o’clock in the morning. It would be a long paddle but nothing he wasn’t used to, and there would be little if any other traffic out on the water. He had woken Dan Connor from his sleep in the stillest hours of the night more than once in the years they had known each other and he smiled as he thought about Dan’s reaction when he did it yet again. Walker twisted his paddle to angle his canoe out into the bay.