Hammond Innes - High Stand

The plane tied up aft of the barge and almost immediately he whispered down to us that it seemed to have come for Wolchak. Wolchak was coming out of the office carrying a bulging briefcase as well as a suitcase and there were two men with a stretcher. It was the man who had killed Tom, the man he had shot. There was a shout and he suddenly ducked his head, clambering quickly down to us. ‘The tug,’ he said. ‘They’ve just sighted it coming up the inlet. And there’s some brash burning down in the clear-felled area.’

We clambered back into our log holes and shortly afterwards there was the resonant clump of feet on the steel decking. By then we could hear the thump of the tug’s screws transmitted through the water. The engine of the floatplane started up, the sound of it passing very close to us. Then it took off and some minutes later there were shouts and the thud of a rope hitting the deck, followed by a grinding noise as the tug scraped alongside. Feet clambered over the barge, somebody shouted to let go for’ard, the tug’s engines gathered speed, the screws thrashing, and suddenly there was movement as the towing hawser lifted taut out of the water.

The speed of that departure surprised me. I had expected the tug to moor up and the crew to stretch their legs, possibly to have a meal ashore in the camp diner. Instead, the turn-round had been immediate. This, coupled with Wolchak’s departure by plane, suggested a certain degree of panic, and there were at least four men on the barge so it had clearly been decided to evacuate everyone. We could hear them arguing in the wheelhouse, an undercurrent of excitement in their voices.

In the circumstances we kept our heads down, each of us holed up and lying flat between the logs, nothing to do but listen for some scrap of information that would indicate our progress down the inlet. The tow rate I guessed at around 6 knots and I lay there trying to recall as much as I could of the details of the Coastguard cutter’s chart I had been poring over on the voyage up to Ocean Falls, but there was no way I could even guess at our heading. Maybe at night, if it was clear and I was able to look out, I would be able to identify a star or two. I reckoned by then we should be past the entrance to Cousins Inlet and headed into the Fisher Channel. Presuming they followed the same course as before, midnight should see us approaching the point where we altered course to the westward to pass through Hakai Passage.

Working it out helped pass the time and I played a sort of game with myself, going over and over in my mind the names I could remember on the chart- the Pointers, Surf and Starfish Islands, and, north of them, an area littered with rocks and islets that had stamped itself on my mind because of the name and the way both the Captain and the Mate had referred to it.

Hemmed in by the canyon-like sides of first Cascade Inlet, then the Dean Channel, with the cloud-base like a ceiling above us, the amount of light filtering down into the hold was very limited. By four that afternoon it was practically dark. But then gusts of wind began to play tricks with the sound of the tug’s engines echoing off the rocks on either side and it grew perceptibly lighter. Sunset came as an orange glow that shone on the damp metal of the hull and turned the butts of the logs to a colour that was almost salmon pink. Half an hour later it was dark, the wind blattering down from the heights and ragged gaps in the clouds through which I was able to catch a glimpse of the stars.

‘Any chance we can reach somebody with this thing?’ Brian had joined me, a foot on one of the steel rungs and the walkie-talkie he had taken from the hatchet-faced tree feller slung from his shoulder.

‘Short wave?’ I shook my head. ‘The range is probably no more than five miles.’

‘That Coastguard cutter.’ We were both of us whispering. ‘Could he receive it? Did he have short wave?’

‘Yes, but he’d have to be switched on and tuned to the right frequency.’

He nodded. ‘So it’s the VHP set up in the wheelhouse. D’you know the standby frequency that cutter uses? I’ve only operated VHP on land with an agreed frequency.’

‘Channel 16,’ I told him. Trouble is it’s the standby channel for all ships.’

‘And if he’s thirty miles away or more, then he’s probably out of range, and we’re blocked off from any of the inside passages by the mountains, so if he’s there …’ He shrugged, smiling at me, his teeth showing in the pale light that had turned almost green. ‘We’ll just have to hope for the best.’

It wasn’t only that VHP is a direct radio wave, so that if the Coastguards were in another inlet they wouldn’t hear us, but something he didn’t seem to realize was that every ship within an unobstructed 30-mile radius of us would have the call coming through on their loudspeakers. ‘That tug,’ I said, ‘will be only a hawser-length away — they’ll pick us up clearer than any other vessel.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘Wait till we’re a lot further south than we are now. In the narrows between Vancouver Island and the mainland there’ll be vessels of all sorts around, lots of fishing boats, more traffic coming in on VHP.’

There was movement on deck then. I think they were probably checking the towing lights. At any rate, nobody even shone a torch down into the hold. We were back in our log holes, and lying there I tried to work out what to say to Captain Cornish if we were able to get into the wheelhouse and raise him on the VHP set. There were other things on my mind too. I had to know whether or not we were taking the Hakai Passage. If we did, then inside of two hours we would be in the open sea, for it was not much more than five miles from Fitz Hugh Sound to the Pacific. The tug would turn south then, and once past Calvert Island we would be within range of the north end of Vancouver Island. If we didn’t go through the Hakai and kept straight on down the Fitz Hugh we would save at least a couple of hours.

We decided to wait until the early hours of the morning when the men aft would hopefully be sound asleep in the cuddy and watchkeeping on the tug would be at a low ebb. By then, at three-thirty say, I thought we would probably be in the open sea somewhere in the region of Calvert Island. But it was what I should say when I started calling the outside world on that VHP set that worried me. In the end I decided to sleep on it, having asked Miriam to wake me inside of four hours.

In fact, I woke of my own accord, for by then I was fairly rested. I was also very hungry. There was starlight in the gap between the logs and the steel rim of the afterdeck. I clambered up the rungs until I could see the Bear and had identified the North Star. It was straight above the wheelhouse, so we were still headed south, and it was not until an hour and a half later, when I had come to the conclusion that we were going to continue straight down the Fitz Hugh, that the position of the stars suddenly began to change. There was a light flashing straight over the bows, its reflection on the wheelhouse gradually changing as we turned. It was to port of us then and I stayed there until we were past it, the reflection of it showing the wheelhouse as a dark shape in silhouette, the stars steadying in their new alignment.

We had turned almost 90° to starb’d and were in the Hakai Passage.

Brian poked his head out. ‘We’ve turned, have we?’ He had felt the changed motion, something I had not noticed with my mind concentrated on the stars. I went back to sleep, planning to wake every hour and check our course. The time was then 01.12.

I woke again just before two and we were still headed south-west, then again a little after 02.30. I think it was the movement that woke me that time, and when I checked the stars, we seemed to be on a more westerly course. There was a flashing light away to port that intermittently illuminated the wheelhouse. That would be the beacon marking the southern side of the passage into the Pacific. No wonder the barge had started to roll quite noticeably, a lazy, slow, flat-bottomed roll which gradually changed to a corkscrew motion, an occasional jerk on the towing hawser sending shivers through the metal hull.