"Sailboats? You mean like with no engines?"
"Yeah, they weren't allowed to fish motorized vessels in Bristol Bay until 1951."
Riggins Bay was one of the many lesser bays that formed the coastline of Bristol Bay, but it was big enough for Liam. It had a curving beach that looked at least twenty miles long to Liam's less than experienced eye, the inner arc of which faced southeast. Each end sported prominent rocky towers and shoals, and the incoming tide was caught in the act of covering up a nice collection of boulders covered in dark green seaweed that waved gently in the ebb and flow of the water.
And the bay was simply boiling with boats. "Jesus, Wy! How many boats are down there?"
He immediately regretted asking, because Wy banked left to get a good look at the armada. "I'd say about two hundred, right around the same amount we had at the last opener. Not everybody who has a permit fishes it, you know."
Liam didn't know, and if he understood her implication, it meant that there could be even more boats out there than there already were, but for the life of him he wouldn't have known where to put them all.
"Some of them are rerigged gillnetters, some of them are purse seiners," she told him.
"Where are ours?"
"I'm looking." They flew around for a few moments, always turning left, Liam noticed. "Look for an orange buoy in the crow's nest."
Liam looked. "They've all got orange buoys in their crow's nests, Wy."
She sighed, heavily enough to be heard over the headphones. "You know, this would be such a great business, if it weren't for the fishermen."
She pulled out of the pattern and proceeded toward the beach. "We were about a hundred miles south of here day before yesterday," she told him over the earphones.
"Why not go back there?"
"Because the herring have moved since then, up the coast. We're following them."
"Why do they move up?"
"They're looking for kelp to spawn on," she said, and nodded out the window at the enormous beds of kelp, one after another, that lined the coast offshore. "The egg sacs adhere to the kelp, and hang on until hatching."
"The roe is what sells the herring, right?"
"Yes."
"Why not just wait for the herring to spawn and harvest the kelp then?"
"Some do. Others go for the fish, by purse seine or gillnet. It's a matter of what the Japanese buyers want more, plain roe or on kelp, and a matter of quotas-each method has a quota in tons. Fish and Game projected this year's biomass at a hundred twenty-five thousand tons, about seven percent below last year's."
Liam knew nothing about herring, but he knew just enough about salmon, Alaska's leading industry before the discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay, to ask, "How much of that can you catch?"
"All the fleet, all together? Twenty-five thousand."
"Tons?"
"Tons."
Liam did some quick figuring. "Fifty thousand pounds. Doesn't seem like very much."
"I'd agree with you." She tossed him a quick, tight grin over one shoulder. "If we weren't getting fourteen hundred a ton."
"Fourteen hundred?" Liam's voice scaled up in disbelief. "Dollars? Fourteen hundred dollars per ton?" She nodded, and the dark blond braid bobbed with emphasis. "Jesus H. Christ on a crutch," he said, stunned.
"Best price we've ever had," she agreed. "We usually average around a thousand a ton, but I guess the Japanese are hungry for roe this spring."
Liam tried to do some more figuring, but too many zeros kept coming up on the ends of all the numbers. "How much in an average catch?"
"There is no average catch. You get what you can."
"Well, okay, how much do you want to catch?"
"All of it," she replied promptly. He heard a faint chuckle over the muffs. "But I'd settle for, oh, I don't know, two hundred tons." Suddenly wistful, she added, "Two hundred tons would be one hell of a haul."
"Two hundred for one boat?"
"Yes."
Liam blinked. Two hundred tons at $1,400 a ton was $280,000. "And you're spotting for how many boats?"
"Three."
"And you get fifteen percent of each boat's catch?"
"Yup."
Liam's heart sank. Fifteen percent of $280,000 was $42,000.
For that kind of money, Wy could buy herself a dozen kids, and a judge to give them to her.
Especially if she didn't have to share it.
"Uh, Wy?"
"What?"
"How much do I get for riding back here?"
Wy's voice was mocking, reminding him irresistibly of the tone that big bastard of a raven used whenever he was in Liam's vicinity. "Why, Liam, and here I thought you were suffering through this all for love of me. Hold on to your tonsils."
"What? Hey!"
They banked hard right and descended in a series of tight spirals that had Liam bracing both arms against the sides of the plane and praying for a quick, merciful end.
When he ventured to open his eyes again they were flying low and slow along the inner curve of the long beach, and Wy was cursing softly over his phones. "What's the matter?" he said, panicking again. "What's wrong?"
"This would be such a great business if it weren't for the goddamn fishermen," she said bitterly. "Look at that, I told that son of a bitch two barrels down and one barrel up with the gas pump on the standing barrel. Look down there-can you see any barrels standing up?"
Liam swallowed his gorge and leaned over to look out the window. The ground seemed to be moving by awfully fast to him, but he saw a dozen dumps of 55-gallon drums, from one to five barrels each. None of the barrels was standing upright.
"Well, hell," Wy said, and pulled the Cub around in a large left-hand circle and set it down neatly at the edge of the receding tide, about five minutes ahead of another Piper, a Tripacer this time, coming in right behind her. There were already three other planes on the beach ahead of them.
It wasn't the first beach landing Liam had made, but he had enough trouble with Anchorage International and two miles of paved tarmac stretching out in front of him; a slanted gravel beach was considerably harder on the nerves. Wy taxied to the nearest pile of drums and cut the engine. The Cub shuddered and the prop went from Liam's blurred lifeline to full stop. Wy folded the door out of the way and deplaned. "Come on, Campbell, let's top off the tanks."
"We haven't been in the air much over an hour," he said, climbing out gladly enough.
"With herring you top them off every chance you get," she informed him. "And the dentist didn't put a long-range tank on his plane." There was a pump and a wrench on the gravel next to the barrels. "Come on, help me roll this down." He joined her and they rolled one of the barrels to beneath the right wing and stood it on end. She went to work on the cap with the wrench.
"So," he said, feeding one end of the hose into the drum, "when do we know if or when we can go fishing?"
"Fish and Game said there might be an opening last night, not that there would be for sure. They'll be out here themselves already"-she nodded at the bay-"either on a boat or in a plane. Probably in a plane."
"Maybe the 206 taking off after us."
She nodded. "Maybe. Probably yesterday they got one of the fishermen to sample the herring, see if it's ripe."
"They trust what the fisherman tells them?" Liam said skeptically.
She gave him a tolerant look. "Why would he lie? He can't sell them green."
"Oh. Sure, that makes sense."
Wy fetched a stepladder from the back of the Cub and stood it beneath the wing.
She climbed the ladder, opened the tank, and fed the other hose in. "Pump," she said.
He pumped. The sun was up and playing hide-and-seek with the cumulus clouds scudding across the sky before a brisk wind. There was a light chop across the bay but nothing serious. From here the boats scattered across the water looked less like an armada and more like the residents of a small boat harbor, a forest of masts and booms on the horizon. "How do they test them?"
"What?"
"How do they test the herring?"
"Oh. They come up on a ball of them and dipnet some out. They break the fish open to look at the roe. When they're ripe, or just about to spawn, the eggs turn a little yellow."