Oolichans spawn in other rivers on the northwest coast like the Chilcat, Nass, Skeena, Kimsquit, Bella Coola, Oweekeno, Kingcome and Fraser rivers. Each place has its own way of spelling and pronouncing “oolichans,” so the fish are also known as eulachons, ooligans, ulicans, hollikans and oulachens. Other people on the coast make oolichan grease too, but Mom always said, “Ours is the Dom Perignon of grease.”
When I was a kid, I assumed Dom Perignon was another kind of fish oil. I was very disappointed when I found out that it was just a champagne, like Baby Duck, which I’d snuck a sip of one New Year’s Eve and hated. I coughed, spitting and sneezing as the bubbles tingled sharply up my nose.
We drove past Costi Island, which splits the channel in two. We took the north side. Behind Costi Island are the Costi Rocks, a small chain of bare rocks. All except the highest are covered by the high tide. Light brown seals lay like fat cigars, crowded together, barking.
“You want some seal?” Mick yelled.
I made a disgusted face.
He laughed. “You don’t know what you’re missing.” He paused, slowed the boat down, then let the motor idle. “You want to drive?”
“Really?” I said as we drifted in the tide. “Really?”
“Come on, hop over,” he said, sliding out of the captain’s chair. I was too short to see over the bow, so Mick let me sit on his duffel bag. He gave me a brief lesson on the steering wheel and the stickshift. The outboard motor, he explained, could be sped up or slowed down, but reversing was tricky because the engine tended to stall.
“I’ll get it fixed sooner or later. Keep the bow towards a sightline,” Mick said. “See that point way down there?” I nodded. He continued, “Drive straight towards it and you’ll be okay. When we get there, I’ll take over. Whoa, gently, gently,” Mick said as I cranked the engine. “Start off slow and work your way up or you’ll burn our motor out. And watch ahead of us for deadheads. Do you know what deadheads are?”
“Old logs sunk underwater but floating near the surface.”
“Good. Avoid kelp too. If it gets tangled in the blades, we’re going to have to stop and take it out, and that’ll waste good fishing time. Okay?”
“Can I speed up now?”
“Yeah, yeah. Go ahead.” Mick sat back, smoking, as I pushed the engine as fast as it would go. It felt as if we were barely touching the water. I saw a flock of black ducks bobbing on the surface and swerved to go through them. Mick swore, but didn’t tell me to stop. The ducks rose up and, for a moment, flapped alongside us. Mick lifted his arms like he was flying, cigarette dangling from his mouth, and honked. They honked back, sounding aggravated, then climbed into the sky and flew north. Mick grinned at me.
He took over near Wee-wah, a small cove about a half-hour from the village. A forestry camp is there now. They built their base over one of the best crab beds on the channel, but back then, the crabs caught there were large and fat. We set our traps. Mick let me bait them and toss them into the water. We drifted on the ocean for a while, bobbing with the waves. Mick turned his face to the sun. I played my cassettes, but quietly, because Mick hated Air Supply. If I played it too loudly, he’d reach into his bag and pull out Elvis and we wouldn’t be able to listen to anything else for the whole trip.
“It’ll take a while. You want to wait at the hot springs?” he said.
“Hot springs!”
“Get your swimsuit, then.”
I dug around until I found it. The hot spring was a squat little hut tucked fifty feet up from the shore and surrounded by high, creaky trees and squishy moss-covered ground. But the water, when I dipped my toes in, was silky and warm. Mick went up into the bushes to change into his shorts and let me use the hut. The air was cold, so I sat down fast after I changed. The concrete tub was slick and my feet slid so I landed on my rump.
“Knock, knock,” he shouted.
“I’m decent,” I said.
He came in, dropped his stuff by the door and sighed as he sank down. His face went red with the heat. His hair flopped over his shoulder, frizzing where it was loose from his braid. Staying in the water, he half-swam, half-bobbed towards me. He leaned against the rocks. “Pretty cool, huh?”
I nodded. “I wish I could live with you.”
“No, you don’t.”
“You’re fun. They never let me have any fun.”
Mick sucked in a deep breath. He swam over to his clothes and shook out a cigarette. He came back dog-paddling with his head tilted out of the water, cigarette in his mouth, his braid trailing behind him.
“Your mom and dad are fun too,” Mick said.
I gave him a doubtful look.
“They are. But with you, they have to do parent things. They have to keep you fed and clothed and pay the bills and watch out for you. That kind of stuff. We can just hang out like this. You understand?”
“Yeah. You don’t want me either.”
He flicked some water at me.
“Na’
. What a mood.”
I wiped the water from my face. My hands were going all white and wrinkly. “I want to be like you. I don’t want to stay here and be all boring.”
“Mmm. You might want to think that over.”
“I want to be a warrior.”
“A warrior, huh?”
“I do! I don’t care what you think.”
His smile faded. “Fighting didn’t get me anything but lots of scars.”
“But you did things!”
“For all the good it did,” he said, poking me in the side. He finished the cigarette, let it hiss to death in the water, then flicked it out one of the small windows. “Okay, let me tell you a secret. You want to hear a secret?”
I shrugged, disappointed that he hadn’t reacted more enthusiastically to my revelation.
“When your mom and dad went on their first real date, he invited her over for a few drinks. He had to go across to get some beer and got stuck in a snowstorm in town. He had to wait for the snowplow to go back to the village, and meanwhile, your mom was so nervous that she bummed some booze off her friends and was waiting for him at his house, getting royally pissed.”
“Bullshit,” I said, having never seen Mom even tipsy.
“Cross my heart,” Mick said. “But she got tired of waiting for him and went home. He tried to phone her when he got back, but she said she was beat and wet and wanted to go to sleep. The next morning, your ma-ma-oo came home and asked him who made the snow angels. Your dad went to the window, and the whole front yard was covered with them. Your mom doesn’t even remember making them, that’s how toasted she was. ‘That’s when I knew I was going to marry her,’ your dad told me.”
It didn’t sound like them at all. I thought Mick was mixing them up with two completely different people, and I said so.
“You can ask them,” Mick said. “Go ahead.”
“No way. They’d kill me.”
“Blackmail material,” Mick said with a wink.
We had a lot of time on our hands. Mom had said that she wanted to reach Kemano before us, so we hung out at the springs. Mick got out first, sitting on the edge of the tub, lighting another cigarette. He chain-smoked. I don’t think there was a moment when I saw him without a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth. When he lifted his arm, I could
see the pale scar along his side where the bullet had grazed his ribs.
After hanging out at the hot springs, we toweled off and Mick had another smoke. I hunted between the logs on the beach for shells, but didn’t find any. About noon, we went back to the crab traps. When he pulled up the first crab trap, he whooped, delighted. It was so full, there were crabs clinging to the outside. “Ready to jump in our pot!”
The crabs skittered on the bottom of the boat. We put them in buckets. I hated the sound of their claws rasping on the plastic. I hated the way Mom and Dad cooked them, the way they rattled against the pot as they were boiled to death. I liked it best when Mick cooked them because he stuck a knife through their bodies first, one quick thrust.
The next crab pot and the next were full too. Mick began to throw crabs back in the water. His whole face glowed with satisfaction. The last pot was so heavy, his arms were bulging with effort. The boat tipped, and I thought we’d flip. As the pot came over the rim of the boat, a halibut inside began to flap. There were three crabs clinging to it.
“Far out,” Mick said, panting.
“How’d it get through such a tiny hole?” I said.
Mick shrugged. “Don’t touch it. It means either really good luck or really bad luck, I think. We’ll have to ask someone. But meanwhile, there you go, big fella.” Mick opened the pot and dumped the halibut back in the water. It spiraled into the darkness, its pale white belly flashing as it sank.
“What’d you do that for?” I said.
“It’s a magical thing,” Mick said. “You aren’t supposed to touch them if you don’t know how to handle them.”
“It’s just a halibut.”
“Do you know how it got in the pot?”
I shook my head.
“Then leave it alone. We got enough crabs anyway. Let’s get going.”
He wouldn’t let me drive any more because I didn’t know the area. The mountains stretched on and blurred together. As the previous night of sleeplessness began to take its toll, my eyes drifted shut.
“Afternoon, sleepyhead,” Mick said, shaking my shoulder. “Day’s almost finished.”
The air had changed, was sharp and made me shiver. He’d put a sleeping bag over me while I napped and I pushed it aside, stretching. Mountains untouched by clear-cuts, roads or houses rose fiercely high. The bald rocks, scraped by the Ice Ages, were topped by glaciers that melted in the sunshine, the water glittering down the grey cliffs. A sparse treeline started halfway down, thickened into forest, then ended in lush green carpets that fell into the ocean.
“We’re near Kemano,” Mick said. “Look up there. That’s your ba-ba-oo’s trapline on that mountain. I think Al has it now.”
At the base of the mountain, there was a stretch of flat space that ended in a point. A square patch glinted like mica in the sunlight, a bright glowing spot swallowed by the surrounding dark green of the trees.
“Can you see it?” Mick said. “That’s where we’re staying.”
I picked up the binoculars. The house was still just a fuzzy patch. I searched up and down the beach. A tiny figure waited on the beach. I caught glimpses of buildings through the trees. The figure raised its arm and waved. As we got closer, I could see it was Mom in a kerchief. They must have passed us while we were at the hot springs, I thought. Mom waited until Mick landed the speedboat against the shore before she asked, “Did she give you any trouble?”
“Nope,” Mick said. “Look, we brought crabs.”
“I saw seals and ducks too,” I butted in after I jumped out of the boat. The beach at Kemano was all gravel, large round stones that sucked at your feet and made every step slow. “And we caught a halibut, but we had to throw it in the water.”
“I don’t believe you,” Mom said to Mick. She turned to me, “Go run up and down the beach a few times.”
“Is there a village here?”
Mom shook her head. “Used to be.”
“What happened?”
She looked down at me. “Most of the people died.”
“How?”
“They just died,” she said, her lips thinning.
Which meant that she wanted me to stop asking what she called my nosy questions. I wanted to go into the little town that Alcan had set up for the Kemano workers. Dad worked there for a month when me and Jimmy were little, and he said the money had been great but he hated being away from civilization.
Even though it was just around the corner from the old fishing village where we were going to be staying,
when I asked if we could go, Mom looked down at me and gave an exasperated sigh. “Later, Lisa.”
I put my finger on the side of my nose and let out the loudest moose call I could. The sound echoed off the mountains, coming back faint and shaky. Uncle Geordie came down to help Uncle Mick unload fishing gear. Aunt Edith stood at the base of a path that led to a white house with a tin roof and gestured at me to follow.
“Here’s my crazy girl,” she said.
“I want to go to the townsite.”
“Hear that? Just like Gladys.”
Mick and Geordie laughed, passing each other bags and boxes.
I raced up the path but paused at the bottom of the steps that led to the front door. I felt a heaviness, like you feel emerging from water after swimming, pressing against me, making my skin tingle. I turned around, fast, to catch anyone who happened to be staring at me. The bushes near the house were still bare, the buds barely breaking from the cases, and the grass wasn’t even poking out of the ground yet. I looked back to the beach. Mom was helping out the others, and their laughter carried clearly across the beach.
I heard it then and thought it was an echo. But long after Mom, Mick and Uncle Geordie had stopped laughing, the distant, tinkling laughter came again from somewhere past the house, in the trees.
I ducked inside. The house was deliciously old, and each step I took was rewarded with loud, reverberating groans. It had to be haunted, I thought as I darted through the musty rooms with the saggy mattresses and
skittering mice. I had been transported somewhere magical, full of endless opportunities for adventure.
“Lisa!” Mom yelled from downstairs. “Stop banging around!”
“She’s excited,” Mick said. “Let her be.”
“She’s going to get hurt. Lisamarie Michelle Hill, where are your ears?”
I stopped, dropped my bags and waited for the laughing ghosts to appear. The upstairs rooms were silent, but not ominous, just empty. I swallowed a heavy lump of disappointment and slumped onto one of the beds. Maybe, I consoled myself, they showed themselves only at night, which wasn’t too far away.
“Want to help me get the water?” Mick said, popping his head around a corner.
“What water?” I said as I came back downstairs.
“Our drinking water, silly,” Mom said, busily turning bacon in the frying pan. The smell reminded me that the last time I’d eaten was hours earlier.
“No running water here,” Mick said. “We do it the old-fashioned way. We go and get it.”
He gave me a small bucket and took two large white pails. We went down the steps, Mick whistling. The air was cold and my arms goose-pimpled, the breeze biting through my sweater. I shivered but followed him along the beach. Mist crawled through the mountains, sluglike and pale against the darkness of the forest. Mick walked close to the waves, which surged and hissed listlessly.