Hammond Innes - High Stand

I checked the position of the stars again and there was no doubt about it, the southerly swell was on our port quarter. We were heading north-west away from Seattle.

I didn’t tell the others, and I didn’t go to sleep again. It could mean only one thing — that we were on a smuggling run and headed for a rendezvous with the South American carrier somewhere in the mass of islands between our present position and the point where the Inside Passage broke out into open water in Milbanke Sound. I remembered the Spider then, how the Mate had said Captain Cornish had gone in there just for the hell of it, mooring up to a red cedar that was half dead and had a bald-headed eagle’s nest in the upper branches. The whole area had been thick with small rock islands, but all of them steep-to, and deep water everywhere. ‘Looks much worse on the charts than it really is,’ he had said, and now I had this feeling we were being towed there.

That was when I climbed out onto the deck and peered in at the wheelhouse windows. There was nobody at the wheel, the place deserted. Slipping round the starb’d side, I gently slid open the door and went in. The trap door to the cuddy below was open. After listening for a moment and hearing no sound, I released the securing catch and lowered it quietly to the floor. Then I switched on the VHF set.

Even then, as I picked up the mike and pressed the button for Channel 16,I wasn’t sure how I was going to phrase my calls, except that I would use Pan, which is urgent but less so than the Mayday distress call. Tan. Pan. Pan. Are you there, Cornish? Calling Cornish. Cornish, Cornish, Cornish.’ I tried my best to imitate a Canadian accent, my lips’ close to the mike and speaking very quietly: ‘This is fishing boat Klewarney calling Cornish.’ I had talked to him a lot about the Kluane and Ice Cold — ‘Klewarney calling Cornish. Come in please Cornish. I got fish for you. Ice Cold. Cornish, Cornish, Cornish. Answer by that name only. Okay? Do you hear me, Cornish? Over.’

A fishing boat was the first to answer, the accent so strong I could hardly understand him: ‘Yu got fish? Yu tell me where. Where yu are, fella?’ And when I repeated my call, he shouted at me, ‘Who is this Cornish? Yu tell me where yu lying,’ and behind his words I caught the whisper of another voice: ‘Coastguard cutter Kelsey. Coastguard cutter Kelsey — state name of vessel and position. If you want to speak to — ‘

I slammed in then: ‘Get off the air, Coastguard. Shut up, both of you. I want Cornish. Cornish. Nobody else. Do you hear me? Cornish. Over.’

There was a pause, then Cornish’s voice came on the air, breathless and tinny out of the speaker as I bent my ear to it: ‘Cornish here. Switch to channel 16.’ I switched and his voice came up again, but still very faint, asking me what I wanted.

‘I have a big haul for you, and I’m keeping it ice cold. You understand? Over.’

There was a pause and I thought I had lost him. But then he said, ‘Yes, I think so. Where are you?’

‘North of where we were three nights ago,’ I told him. ‘About ten miles. Your Mate will know. He said you’d been there once. Tied to a tree with an eagle’s nest in it. You got that? Over.’

Again the pause, and the indistinct murmur of voices then: ‘Yeh, reckon we got the message. A big haul, you say…’

But I shut down on him then, for the tug had suddenly come on the air quite loud demanding to know what my position was and why I was putting out a Pan call. Then abruptly everything went quiet and I switched off, opening up the trap door again and slipping out of the wheelhouse, back to the hold. I had done all I could. It was now up to Cornish.

Just after four a change of movement warned me we were turning. The barge was rolling again, quite heavily, the wind catching us almost broadside and making a whining sound. A glance at the stars confirmed the alteration of course. We were headed almost due east, straight in towards the land, the speed of the tow falling away until we seemed to be barely moving. Then, suddenly, we were under the lee, the rolling abruptly ceased, no wind at all. We were in the Spider. I had no doubt of that, and shortly after that there was a dreadful grating sound, steel on rock as we ground to a halt against one of the islands; then feet pounding, lots of shouting, followed by a hollow thud and the sound of the tug’s engines close alongside.

‘We’ve left it too late,’ Brian hissed at me. And when I told him I had already contacted the cutter he could hardly believe me. ‘Christ! I was fast asleep. Where are we?’

‘At the rendezvous.’ And I explained where I thought we were.

Footsteps on the deck again, the sound of mooring lines being made fast, voices calling back and forth, then somebody in authority — it sounded like the Greek tugmaster — calling those on the barge to come aboard the tug for breakfast. ‘How longa’we got, Captain?’ And another voice answered him, ‘Bout an hour, that’s all.’ They were scrambling onto the tug, somebody asking where the supply ship was and a voice answering, ‘Holed up in Kildidt Sound.’

‘Tha’s not much more than coupla miles away.’

‘Sure. But they gotta go round — Fulton Passage or else Spider Channel. They ain’t gonna fly, that’s for sure. So Skip’s probably right. You got ‘bout an hour. Okay?’

The footsteps died away, everything suddenly quiet except for the slow grinding of the two hulls as they moved to the ghost of a swell coming in through the entrance. I went up the rungs then, peering cautiously out. We were in what appeared to be a lake, rock islets all covered in trees and merging into one another so that there was what appeared to be a continuous shoreline of green all round us. Glimmers of sunlight glinted on the water, the surface ruffled by a slight breeze, and the tug standing over us, funnel and deck housing higher than the logs on the deep-laden barge. The wheelhouse appeared to be deserted. I could actually see right through it to the mountains beyond and a mackerel sky, the scaling of the cloud all silver like a dusting of snow.

The radio had been left on and I could hear a voice, an Indian by the sound of it. He seemed to have got himself and his fishing boat hopelessly lost. ‘Bloody Indians.’ Somebody had entered the tug’s wheelhouse from below. ‘Drunk, I bet. Sleeps it off and when he wakes up don’t know where the fuck ‘is shit-bag of a boat is. Typical.’ And another voice said, ‘What about that Klewarney boat?’ It sounded like the tug’s Master. ‘He wasn’t lost and he seemed a lot nearer. Who was he calling?’

‘One of the fish company ships by the sound of it. Calling Pan like that. Raised the Coastguard cutter, didn’t he? Wonder where those buggers are?’

‘Wherever they are, they’ll be occupied now, presuming that Indian’s put out a search-and-rescue call.’

‘Sure. So why don’t you finish your meal. We’ll be busy ourselves soon.’

I didn’t hear the reply, for both of them went out by the other door and all was quiet again, only another fisherman jabbering away on the radio to a mate of his down around Egg Island at the entrance to Smith Sound. I climbed back down to my log hide, Brian whispering to me, ‘You reckon the captain of that cutter understood what you were telling him?’

‘I think so.’

‘How long before he gets here?’

But I couldn’t answer that. I’d been going to ask Cornish what his position was, but then the tug had come on the air and I had had to shut down.

‘They could radio for a helicopter.’ Miriam was rubbing at her left leg as though it had gone to sleep. ‘You said they had one on that night operation. If they called in a helicopter — ‘ But I had to tell her it was most unlikely. It would mean explaining the whole situation over the air to the Rescue Coordination Centre at Victoria and, presuming Cornish had understood my message, he would be afraid the tug might be monitoring his radio calls.