As she was lowering the mug for the last time, she caught sight of the calendar swinging merrily back and forth on the opposite wall. It was October 21. Or was it October 22? She couldn't remember. They'd left Dutch Harbor the Tuesday before, she thought maybe October, but it was hard thinking that far back. Visions of the bunk just down the companionway danced like sugar-plum in her head, her sleeping bag open and its red plaid flannel lining rough-smooth on her cheek. The illusion was so real that she took an involuntary step in its direction. Angrily, she gave herself a rough shake, all over, like a dog shaking water from its fur. Without sleep for so long, now she was hallucinating about it.
They'd been hot, "on the crab" for the last three days.
The pots they'd set during their last run were coming up plugged with keepers and almost no garbage. They'd been humping it for thirty hours without so much as a sit-down dinner or a nap during that time. Or was it forty hours? She couldn't remember. Kate gave it up and pulled her way to and through the galley's portside door and around the cabin and back to the pot launcher.
Greeted by a slap of wind-driven salt spray, she wondered, with a spurt of irritation that surprised her because she didn't think she had the energy for anything except filling the next bait jar that came to hand, why the skipper persisted in powering through the troughs sideways, instead of bringing the ship around and catching them bow on. A flash of yellow caught her eye and she looked up to see Seth Skinner leaning over the rail to catch the next triad of buoys with a boat hook, a long pole with a sharp, curved hook on one end. He hauled in the sopping line hand over hand and when he had enough caught a length of it in the block. Line whipped through the winch, piling up on deck. Minutes later the pot's bridle broke the surface, followed immediately afterward by the pot. It was full of crab, loaded with crab, brimming with crab, overflowing with crab, and Kate didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
Seth Skinner, lean, lanky and imperturbable and who looked like Jimmy Stewart without the horse, pulled the ties that opened the pot door and the crab cascaded down to the deck. For a moment Kate stood still, looking at him speculatively. Seth Skinner, too, had been on board the Avilda the night Alcala and Brown had disappeared.
He raised his head suddenly and caught her looking at him. She met his gaze and held it, more curious than embarrassed. Seth's eyes were a clear gray and vacant of an identifiable expression, oddly peaceful. He smiled at her, a small smile that didn't touch his eyes and barely dented the corners of his mouth, and pulled on the pot, swinging it to one side.
"Shugak!" The shout was snatched out of the mouth of the deck boss and blew past her. She looked around.
"You're on sorting!"
She nodded to show she understood. Waiting for the next swell, she caught the roll of the deck and slid to a position between pot launcher and hold, up to her knees in every kind of crab known to populate the bottom of the Bering Sea. Bending over, she began to sort through them mechanically. There were a few Dungeness, a couple of blue kings and one small and indignant squid, but mostly the pot was filled with tanners, Chionoecetes bairdi and Chionoecetes opilio. They were both thin, pale crab, with a light brown carapace and a yellowish under-shell, their legs long, slender and slightly flattened.
The differences between them were slight. The bairdi weighed about a pound more. The opilio had smoother shells, slightly longer than they were wide, but otherwise to the untrained eye looked much the same as the bairdi. Kate decided it was like telling the difference between red and silver salmon; you had to get up close and personal to tell them apart. But not too close; she jerked back out of the reach of one snapping pincer just in time.
The season on opilio didn't open for another two months so they went back in the water. The bairdi were sorted for sex and size. A week's practice had made the six inchers easier to spot; the ones closer to the legal limit she checked with a curved piece of wood carved to fit over the crab's upper shell, measuring five and a half inches end to end. Males under five and a half inches and females were thrown back into the sea, the remainder into the hold, the trip into Dutch and a steam cooker all that remained of their immediate future.
Kate remembered reading somewhere that tanner crab could live up to fourteen years. It took six years for the female to mature and bear eggs. When she did, she could carry as many as 300,000 eggs. As tired as Kate was, she marveled every time she saw a bulging abdominal flap, and there was a certain reverence in the way she handled them. The males she tossed carelessly into the hold with the thousands of tanners already sloshing back and forth in the sea water that would keep them alive until they reached shore and the processor. Plenty more where they came from, or she wouldn't be standing up to her ass in them right now.
Bending once again to her task, she was somewhat shielded from the gusts of wind by the pot launcher and the railing, but the constant rocking back and forth made her head swim and her stomach churn. She knew better than to complain, though, and kept sorting.
About a year later the deck boss signaled the third deckhand to spell her, and she pulled her weary way over to the hold with arms that trembled in protest. She sat a moment on the edge, her numb hands beating some kind of response into the legs dangling into the hold, uncaring of the spray scouring the deck with a frozen hand.
"Get a move on those bait jars, Shugak!" Nordhoff barked.
A sudden rage, welcome because it warmed her, drove her to her feet and to the bait table butted up against the foredeck. At that same moment a malicious gust of wind swirled around the boat and momentarily enveloped the foredeck in a miasma of diesel exhaust.
The rage was as instantly replaced by nausea. She barely made it to the rail in time. Cereal, milk and water, all of it came up and then some, in retching, wrenching bursts that left her exhausted and trembling. Someone laughed, and it wasn't a nice laugh. It had to be Nordhoff. She hung, head down, wanting nothing so much as for the next wave to sweep her over the side and into the oblivion of a cold, wet and final embrace, anything to stop the heaving motion of her entire world.
All too soon, a voice boomed out. "Goddammit, get busy, Shugak!"
This time it was the captain's voice, bellowing down at her from an open window on the bridge, and this time when she struggled to repress her initial reply she saw Jack's face. Jack's entire body in a cast. Jack's tombstone, sans the Rest in Peace. She didn't want Jack to rest in peace. She wanted Jack to burn in hell.
Unable to summon up even enough energy to swear aloud, she called on every shaking muscle and pulled her way back to the bait table. The block of frozen herring was sliding back and forth with the heaving action of the Avilda, and she grabbed for it with one hand and for the big knife with the plastic handle with her other.
On the first blow she brought the knife down too close to the fingers of the hand that held the herring.
She caught herself. The deck boss might be an asshole, the captain marginally competent and the rest of the crew either untrustworthy or unknown, but that didn't mean she had to behave recklessly herself. In fact, considering her reasons for being on board, it was imperative that she did not. She got a better grip on her temper and the knife and began to chop again, this time with more care.
The chunks of herring went into perforated plastic jars. Andy Pence, hired on the day after she was and who had learned everything he ever knew about crab fishing during the last six days, seven hours and thirty-six minutes of his life, staggered across the deck and gathered up an armful of the jars and went staggering back toward the empty pots lined up against the railing.