Poor Mans Rock | Page 9

So he pursued the salmon as the salmon pursued the little
fish among the kelp and boulders.
Only a poor man trolled in a rowboat, tugging at the oars hour after
hour without cabin shelter from wind and sun and rain, unable to face
even such weather as a thirty by eight-foot gasboat could easily fish in,
unable to follow the salmon run when it shifted from one point to
another on the Gulf. The rowboat trollers must pick a camp ashore by a
likely ground and stay there. If the salmon left they could only wait till
another run began. Whereas the power boat could hear of schooling
salmon forty miles away and be on the spot in seven hours' steaming.
Poor Man's Rock had given many a man his chance. Nearly always
salmon could be taken there by a rowboat. And because for many years
old men, men with lean purses, men with a rowboat, a few dollars, and
a hunger for independence, had camped in Squitty Cove and fished the
Squitty headlands and seldom failed to take salmon around the Rock,
the name had clung to that brown hummock of granite lifting out of the
sea at half tide. From April to November, any day a rowboat could live
outside the Cove, there would be half a dozen, eight, ten, more or less,
of these solitary rowers bending to their oars, circling the Rock.
Now and again one of these would hastily drop his oars, stand up, and
haul in his line hand over hand. There would be a splashing and
splattering on the surface, a bright silver fish leaping and threshing the
water, to land at last with a plop! in the boat. Whereupon the fisherman
would hurriedly strike this dynamic, glistening fish over the head with
a short, thick club, lest his struggles snarl the line, after which he would
put out his spoon and bend to the oars again. It was a daylight and dusk
job, a matter of infinite patience and hard work, cold and wet at times,

and in midsummer the blaze of a scorching sun and the eye-dazzling
glitter of reflected light.
But a man must live. Some who came to the Cove trolled long and
skillfully, and were lucky enough to gain a power troller in the end, to
live on beans and fish, and keep a strangle hold on every dollar that
came in until with a cabin boat powered with gas they joined the
trolling fleet and became nomads. They fared well enough then. Their
taking at once grew beyond a rowboat's scope. They could see new
country, hearken to the lure of distant fishing grounds. There was the
sport of gambling on wind and weather, on the price of fish or the
number of the catch. If one locality displeased them they could shift to
another, while the rowboat men were chained perforce to the monotony
of the same camp, the same cliffs, the same old weary round.
Sometimes Squitty Cove harbored thirty or forty of these power trollers.
They would make their night anchorage there while the trolling held
good, filling the Cove with talk and laughter and a fine sprinkle of
lights when dark closed in. With failing catches, or the first breath of a
southeaster that would lock them in the Cove while it blew, they would
be up and away,--to the top end of Squitty, to Yellow Rock, to Cape
Lazo, anywhere that salmon might be found.
And the rowboat men would lie in their tents and split-cedar lean-tos,
cursing the weather, the salmon that would not bite, grumbling at their
lot.
There were two or three rowboat men who had fished the Cove almost
since Jack MacRae could remember,--old men, fishermen who had shot
their bolt, who dwelt in small cabins by the Cove, living somehow from
salmon run to salmon run, content if the season's catch netted three
hundred dollars. All they could hope for was a living. They had become
fixtures there.
Jack MacRae looked down from the bald tip of Point Old with an eager
gleam in his uncovered eye. There was the Rock with a slow swell
lapping over it. There was an old withered Portuguese he knew in a
green dugout, Long Tom Spence rowing behind the Portuguese, and

they carrying on a shouted conversation. He picked out Doug Sproul
among three others he did not know,--and there was not a man under
fifty among them.
Three hundred yards offshore half a dozen power trollers wheeled and
counterwheeled, working an eddy. He could see them haul the lines
hand over hand, casting the hooked fish up into the hold with an easy
swing. The salmon were biting.
It was all familiar to Jack MacRae. He knew every nook and