Ryan Lockwood - Below

“And then?”

“If the squid are in there, we’ll let your friends here do what they need to do. Then we’ll brail the buggers out of it and fill my hold with profits. Aha! Found the damn thing.”

A moment later a smelly, grease-stained sweatshirt landed in Joe’s face.

Midnight came and went.

More than a half hour had passed since they started pulling in the seining net. The large volume of water inside the net had now been reduced to a fraction of what it had been before, and most of the net’s length was back on board, dripping in huge stacks in the stern between the two deckhands. From the actions of the crew, Val sensed the net was almost completely hauled in.

She and Joe waited together on the starboard side of the seiner, his hair and pants still damp, but the rest of him looking warmer under a dry T-shirt and hooded blue sweatshirt that said “Alaska!” in huge white letters on the front, with a peeling image of mountains and wildlife. It was colder out in the breeze on deck than inside the cabin, but Joe’s nausea had returned after his adrenaline had worn off, and he clearly felt better out in the open air. Val told him that she planned to keep an eye on him, in case he dropped something else overboard.

And, like Joe, she couldn’t resist seeing what they had inside the net.

The waiting reminded Val of the excitement of catching her first fish when she had been a child in Florida, her imagination at play as she’d wondered what was on the other end of the line. You never knew what you had until you landed it. When she was six, it had been a shimmering sunfish, and her father had been relatively sober. Despite his drinking even when they went fishing together, they’d always had fun and she’d quickly become interested in aquatic life.

She was a long way from that first cane-pole attempt to catch sunfish. There were probably ten or more tons of jumbo flying squid inside their net.

“The captain was right, Joe.”

“What do you mean?”

“You do owe us a camera.”

“Ha ha.”

“Did I tell you Sturman called me back?”

“No… when?”

“I just pulled up the message a little while ago. He’s still in Gull Harbor, not far from here. He said he wants to help us out. I figured I’d call him in the morning.”

Joe smiled. “That’s great to hear. Dumb bastard’s finally coming to his senses.”

“Yeah, he is a dumb bastard, isn’t he?” They laughed together. “Still, he’s got a few good qualities.”

Joe looked over at her. “Been my best friend for a long time. At least he’s got great taste in women.” He smiled.

“He said he was married to your sister once.”

“That he was. Like I said, great taste.” Joe cleared his throat. “So… I was wondering. What are we going to do with these squid when we have them drawn in next to the boat?”

“Yeah… well, Humboldt squid have these very high metabolisms, which is one reason they spend the daytime in deep, cold, oxygen-depleted water. Some people call the low-oxygen layer the ‘dead zone.’ Humboldt squid can slow their systems down to conserve energy, sort of like going into suspended animation or short-term hibernation.”

“Okay. I’m following you so far.”

Overhead, the power block clanged loudly under the strain of the incoming net cables.

“Well, the idea is that if we keep them in the net near the surface for a few days, without food, theoretically they’ll all weaken and die and can then be brought on board.”

“I’m a little surprised that you’re okay with that. You seem to be a champion for these squid.”

She sighed. “Someone needs to be. Look, I don’t agree with our methods here. But I’ve been outvoted. I’m just focused now on the possibility of obtaining live squid for observation or research, even if they don’t live long on the surface.”

“You’re one of those ‘the net is half full’ kind of people, then?” Joe smiled at her.

“Stick to law enforcement, Joe.” The net clanged up on the boom. “I think the net’s almost in.”

It was difficult to make out the outline of the floating upper edge of the net at first, but as the last several hundred feet of net were drawn in, the Centaur ’s lights revealed the yellow floats of the corkline on the surface. A confined space no more than about a hundred and fifty feet across now remained inside the shrinking enclosure, with still no sign of any catch inside. The crew had greatly slowed the winch as the volume inside the net decreased, so that the heavy line barely crept through the boom pulleys. The captain walked out of the cabin and hopped down next to them at the gunwale.

After another few minutes and nothing visible in the net, Val was beginning to wonder if they had come up empty when Captain MacDonald spoke quietly.

“There.”

“What? Do you see anything?”

“Aye.” MacDonald squinted down into the net. “We’ve got something.”

The shoal was agitated.

Drawn in by bright lights, the squid had found some small fish but little food. Now they jostled against one another as though they had been forced into shallow water, something pressing them together.

Those on the outer edges of the shoal instinctively tried to separate from the group to allow more room for the others, but found themselves held back by the rough lines of an almost invisible barrier in the water. Those that sounded in an effort to escape found themselves up against a much more obvious barrier, a thick gathering of the object and heavy obstacles gathered in a tight mass beneath them.

As the space inside the barrier continued to shrink, the painfully bright lights above drew closer. While some of the squid began to make panic-stricken rushes into the rough barrier or lash out at one another, most in the shoal followed their instincts and moved toward the deep, huddled as far from the light as possible.

And waited.

“Is it the shoal?” Joe saw a torpedo-like shape catch the lights from the vessel as it hurtled across the shrinking space inside the net, a fathom or two under the surface. “Was that one of them?”

“Aye. We may have caught the shoal after all. Tomás! Slow it down!”

Joe heard the winch slow to an almost imperceptible crawl. Now that he knew what he was looking for, Joe began to see the shoal. Not just a few squid. All of them.

“That’s them, all right. What do you think of them, Joe?” Val looked excited and sad at the same time.

In the black water within the net, the ghostly bodies materialized. The shapes were huge, seemingly lifeless. Most drifted in place, barely visible as they crowded together in a great mass at the bottom of the net, almost out of sight of the surface.

“They look like rows of gigantic sardines in a can.”

Val smiled. “I guess they do, crowded inside the net like that.”

A few more panicked squid darted frantically above the organized mass, releasing flashes of self-generated bioluminescence, apparently aware that they had been caught. Many of the squid were the size of large tuna, and appeared to have a similar shape as they jetted through the net.

Joe watched as one of the light-emitting creatures propelled itself against the side of the net, then slowly turned and changed shape, its body spreading out dramatically under the waves as its body unfolded from a neat point into a tangled confusion, its arms seeking a means of escape as they grabbed at the webbing along the wall of the net.

“How many are there, Captain?”

MacDonald grunted. “Hard to say yet. We’ve got a decent catch, though. And if—look at that!”

The captain was pointing at the water toward the center of the net, but movement there had already caught Joe’s eye. A lone squid erupted from the water, blasting skyward with tremendous speed to reveal a wet, bruised-looking body hurtling in the lights. It arched through the air, trailing a perfect jet of water, then splashed down into the water thirty feet away with a loud smack.