At the last minute, the very last second, the boat veered toward deeper water. We heard laughter as the wash of its passage lapped against our hull and rocked us in the giant cradle of the sea.
It wasn’t the Sea Wolf at all!
The fishing boat was powering away. And with a flood of relief, we coasted up to Roger and Lisa’s kayak.
It was time to regroup. Willie and Cassidy turned back and joined us in a huddle, rolling gently in the swells. Cassidy yipped for joy.
“Jerks,” Willie said, glaring at the disappearing fishing boat.
“Well, at least no one got hurt,” Roger said. “And it wasn’t the smugglers, thank God. But we have to keep going.”
I looked back. It still wasn’t very light out, but no more boats were coming our way. Now we were out where other boats would be common. Not a place to be shot at by human traffickers.
“I don’t see the Sea Wolf,” I said. “And I don’t hear their motor. I don’t think they’re chasing us. At least right now. I heard the captain say they would leave for Vancouver first thing in the morning. Maybe they’re heading full throttle for Vancouver now! Or checking the cove to see if we’re gone.”
“We should keep moving anyway,” Roger said. “They could still be coming for us.”
“I don’t think they’d risk it out here,” I said. “This girl I met down in the hold, Shai, she said they paid—and still owed—big money to be taken to Vancouver. I don’t think they’d try anything in the channel with other boats around, and the sun coming up.”
Everybody scanned the horizon. A couple of distant islands. A freighter off in the distance—the first we’d seen in days.
“Maybe you’re right, mate!” Roger beamed.
Cassidy tried to splash me with his paddle. He missed. Then he grinned and flashed me the Rock On sign.
I could breathe again.
We all could.
“But just in case,” Willie said, “we keep moving.”
“Bella Bella, here we come!” hollered Roger. He dug his paddle in and took off.
“Bella Bella here we come!” we all yelled, and dug in our paddles as well.
All day we kept on paddling, hard, glancing over our shoulders, listening. Always listening.
And by the time the sun had risen into the low clouds, I could feel the ropes that bound my chest—SNAP!
And we were free!
Soon we were far up Hunter Channel and there were fishing boats and barges and small freighters in every direction. I breathed in the whole sky, and let it out.
Nothing was going to happen to us now.
“Aaron,” Dad said out of the blue. He still paddled in front and let me do the steering. “I’m so proud of you, kiddo.”
“What?” I couldn’t believe I’d heard him right.
“I said that I’m proud of you. The way you escaped from the Sea Wolf unharmed. You didn’t do anything foolish, something that would’ve got you hurt, or brought harm to the rest of us. You were very . . . well, mature. And brave.”
I stroked through the water, the rhythm as natural to me now as breathing. I’d gotten my “sea legs,” as Roger had said I would. I didn’t say anything, but I was beaming—as proud as could be. Dad didn’t know how much his words meant to me.
But I kept looking back over my shoulder, thinking about the starving Chinese families trapped in the hull of the Sea Wolf. Especially Shai.
“Dad? What does ‘yin yang’ mean?”
“Wong, the man who helped me escape, when I asked him why, he just said, ‘Yin yang.’”
Dad coasted awhile, thinking. The wash of a passing fishing boat lapped against our hull, and another bald eagle soared overhead. “Well, kiddo,” he said, “in Chinese philosophy, everything in nature is a combination of yin and yang. An interplay of opposites. Dark and light. Low and high. There’s always a spot of one in the other.”
Maybe Wong was referring to the spot of good in the evil. He—by freeing me—was the spot of good.
Like a pearl in an oyster, I thought. A rotten oyster.
And I thought about nature. How, in the middle of a storm, there’s the promise of calm. And amid the calm, there’s the seed of a storm.
“Dad, are we going to report them?” I asked.
Dad started paddling again. “I think we have to, Aaron. As soon as we get to Bella Bella. Those traffickers are dangerous. They threatened you—all of us, really—with death. And the immigrants’ lives are at stake. The boat could sink, with all the refugees locked down below drowning.”
“But I promised. Wong cut the rope when I promised I wouldn’t report them. He cut me free. He even cut himself. He risked his captain’s revenge, and he even risked prison. For me.”
Dad didn’t answer. I kept paddling. The truth was, I didn’t know what we should do. Nothing was simple, right or wrong. I felt sorry for Shai’s family. They were risking their lives to join their relatives and look for work. Risking tens of thousands of dollars and years of debt. They just wanted to live a good life, like everybody else. But the smugglers, they were doing this for money; they didn’t care about freedom or family. They had to be stopped.
But if illegal trafficking was shut down, there would be less chance for other families like Shai’s to sneak in. Meanwhile, these immigrants were at the mercy of some very dangerous people.
The more I thought about it the more I realized that I agreed with what Lisa had said: If more immigrants could come in legally, less would fall into the hands of traffickers.
I wrestled with my thoughts, as with a tangle of kelp.
Finally, after ten minutes or an hour—I don’t know how long—I came up with an idea.
“Dad?”
“What’s up?”
“I was thinking,” I said. “We should wait until we’re back in Vancouver, and then report the Sea Wolf. Shai and her mom and the other families would be with their relatives by then. We could explain that Wong was just a diver, that he wasn’t one of them, and that he’d freed me.”
Dad was silent a moment. “We’ll see, kiddo. We’ll see.”
That didn’t sound like a “yes.” I knew what Dad wanted to do, and suddenly I was sure it was the wrong thing.
“Listen, Dad, if the Coast Guard goes after the Sea Wolf before they let their passengers off in Vancouver,” I argued, “it would put the families in danger. The boat’s not likely to sink now, not after crossing the whole Pacific Ocean. But that captain, he’s ruthless. He’d hold them hostage, like he did to me. He’d let them die before he’d give them up. But if we wait until they get to Vancouver, he’ll let them go. He wants the other half of his money from their relatives. That’s all he cares about: the money. And he’d have no reason to hurt them if he wasn’t threatened. He’d sneak into Vancouver and finish his deal, no matter what.”
Dad was silent. He was thinking.
And while he thought, the only thing that remained sure and clear in my mind was that we had to do what would give Shai and the other people in that boat the best chance of not getting hurt.
Dad stopped paddling and we coasted. “You’re right,” he said. “We can’t do anything that would endanger the people trapped inside that boat. Good thinking, Aaron.”
Wow! I was speechless.
He agreed with me. My dad actually agreed with me!
Something grazed my shoulder. It was Lisa touching me with the tip of her outstretched paddle. I felt as though I’d just been awakened from a deep dream, or risen from the bottom of the sea.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” I said back, and she smiled.
I floated on that smile—a whole person floating on a smile—until Cassidy yelled out, “Dude. Look!”
Just at that moment, the sun burst through the clouds and poured down an intense light on the old native village of Bella Bella up ahead.
We made it!
We’d come full circle. And one thing was for sure: I felt like a different person from the one who’d started out ten days before. I felt like a seaman. What Roger called an “old salt.”
I looked again at the village in the blazing light, and I thought about the meaning of the name.
“Bella Bella,” I said to myself, “doubly beautiful.”
