He comforted himself that he was in the best possible plane in the best possible hands and nerved himself to look around.
He hated to admit it, but the view was superb. There are few places to look at more beautiful than the coast of Alaska, and few places better to look at it from than the window of a small plane. To the south, Bristol Bay rolled out like a plush green carpet, sunlight caught like gold dust in the nap. To the north was the immense body of the mainland, what the Aleuts used to call alyeska, or greatland, to distinguish it from the Aleutian Islands. Coastal lowlands rose slowly into mountain ranges, the ranges marching irregularly up the interior like soldiers shouldering angular blue-white packs. One range ran into another with barely a river or a lake or a valley between, the Wood River Mountains, the Ahklun Mountains, the Eek Mountains, the Kilbuck and Taylor and Kuskokwim Mountains. Soldiers wasn't a bad simile, he thought. The mountains were the last line of defense against the encroachment of settlement. They would be a harsh trial, as well, sorting out in swift order the quick and the dead.
Below them the Nushagak Peninsula curved southeast, and to the west he could glimpse the enormity of the Bering Sea beyond. It was a breathtaking sight, and he could tell Wy knew it by the smile in her voice. "Enough mountains for you, Liam?"
For one halcyon moment he forgot that his ass was hanging out a thousand feet up in the air and laughed for the sheer joy of it. "I guess so, after all," he admitted.
A few minutes later she spoke again. "Okay, we're here."
He tore his eyes from the distant mountains and looked down, catching his breath sharply when she put the Cub into a shallow descent, banking right in a wide, gentle circle.
"They call it Riggins Bay," Wy said. "I heard after the surveyor that worked this coast. You know, this coast wasn't charted even in the Coastal Pilot, not in any well-defined way, until the late seventies."
"And they fished it anyway?"
"They fished it anyway. They've been fishing it since before the turn of the century. For a long time they fished it in sailboats."
"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?"