The sound of gunshots gradually faded into silence. The sound of the waves. There was no way to know if the gunshots came from our island, a boat, or a nearby island. Whatever, they came from somewhere pretty close.
Dad and I looked at each other. His eyes were puffy from sleep, and his hollow cheeks were shadowed by three days’ growth. We both crawled toward the tent flap at the same time and poked our heads out into the rosy dawn.
Roger and Willie were already outside, squatting around the fire ring from last night, rubbing their hands. We quickly dressed and wobbled out to join them.
“Poachers, I bet,” Willie said, snapping a thick stick with his bare hands and preparing to build a fire. “There’s Sitka black-tailed deer out here on these islands, and no Fish and Game folks prowling around. No law at all.”
“Could be crazies,” Roger said. “Firing off at seabirds or eagles, just for fun.” He fired a match, held it to a twist of dry moss, and blew softly on it before pushing it beneath a small tepee of kindling.
“Or commercial fishermen,” Willie said. “They’ll shoot seals and sea lions—even otters—’cause they compete with them for the fish and crab and abalone.”
I thought of the boat captain with the yellow sunglasses and gray ponytail.
“Heck,” Roger said, “it could be anybody. Neptune’s grandmother!”
“Whoever it is,” Dad said, “I think we should move out now. Put some space between us and them.” He nervously scratched his bearded chin.
Cassidy came crawling out of his tent like a sleepy bear and said, “Whoa! Dreamt I heard gunshots. BAM!” and he fired an imaginary rifle, right between my eyes.
An hour later we were nosing into the crisp current of the straights with a strong wind out of the east at our backs. The gale lulled for a while after our break for lunch, and we floated, silent as feathers, by a small raft of sea otters wrapped in kelp, catching their afternoon nap.
Peace came over us amid the pristine islands. And I’d almost forgotten about the gunshots when we glided around a point, and there, in the center of a small group of islands—like a meadow surrounded by forest—floated the fishing boat we’d seen a couple of days before. Its anchor was dropped, and the man with the yellow sunglasses was standing in the bow, watching our approach. The sun glinted off his reflective sunglasses, and again I was reminded of the eyes of a wolf.
And of his nighttime visitations to my dreams.
My stomach contracted. Call it a gut response.
“Hello the boat!” Roger called, drifting up toward its bow.
The man just stood there staring. A rifle leaned against the cabin behind him. That might account for the gunshots, I thought. Then I noticed for the first time the name on the hull: Sea Wolf.
Fits, I thought to myself. This was seriously giving me the creeps.
We clustered near the bow, shipped our paddles, and gazed back up at him in a tense silence.
Finally Willie spoke. “Out here fishin, pard?” he said. The brow of his hat threw his face into shadow.
“Nope.” The man bit the word off, like a mobster snipping the end off a Havana cigar. “Geoduck diving.” (I thought for a long time it was spelled “gooey duck,” because that’s how it sounds.)
“Any luck?”
“We’ll see, won’t we?” the man said. He turned his gaze away and trained it down into the dark water off his prow, where a column of bubbles was rising to the surface.
Suddenly the water boiled up before us, and the masked head of a scuba diver popped up. He looked at us and lifted up the biggest clam I’d ever seen. It must have weighed nine or ten pounds.
“Wong!” growled the man on the bow. “Get up here!”
Wong lowered the giant clam, then pulled up his mask. “Hi! You like geoduck?” he said with a strong Chinese accent. “I get them for my brother in Chinatown. Vancouver. He has a very good restaurant. You want, I’ll give you one. Good to eat!”
“Wong!” snapped the man on the bow.
A bruised silence filled the air around us.
“Thanks,” Willie said to the diver, “but we gotta be going now. Got to make camp before the tide changes.” The diver nodded, then swam to the fishing boat and started climbing up a ladder on the side.
We were paddling away when we heard a loud thump against the hull of the Sea Wolf and a muffled, heartrending cry from within.
“What was that all about?” I asked when we met up later in a huddle of kayaks, while Roger and Willie consulted their sea charts. A gull screamed and swooped overhead.
“Which?” Willie said, not lifting his eyes from the plastic-sheathed chart. “The geoduck diver or that cry from their boat?”
“Both.”
“I never even heard of geoducks,” Lisa said.
“The Chinese consider them delicacies,” said Willie, still not looking up from his sea chart. “They’re chopped up for a seafood chowder. Chinese restaurants pay a small fortune for ’em. A geoduck diver can earn four hundred a day harvesting them.”
“Awesome!” said Cassidy. “Why don’t we do that? We’d get rich!”
“Can it!” Willie said.
“So why was the captain so mean?” I said. “He should’ve been happy if he’s making good money.”
“For one thing,” Willie said, “I doubt he had a license. Big fine if you’re caught without one. And I don’t even think it’s legally the season for harvesting them.”
“Do you think they’re hiding something?” I asked. “Do you think it’s maybe a front?”
“A front?” Lisa said. “For what?” A big fist of wind blind-sided our kayaks, and one of the sea charts almost sailed away. Willie wrestled it back down.
“Maybe they’re really smuggling . . . immigrants or something,” I said.
“It’s not time to be worrying about smugglers,” Willie cut in.
“But there’s something going on in that boat, right?” I said.
Willie didn’t say any more, but I could see he was thinking. And his silence was like a slowly burning fuse.
I couldn’t get the sound of that heartrending cry inside the boat out of my head. Humans? Traffickers? Smugglers?
Seriously scary stuff.
Thinking this, I saw in my mind’s eye, the man with the sunglasses.
And he was looking at me.
