The way it worked was this. One end of the purse seine was fastened to the skiff, the other end to the boat. The idea was for the skiff to make a large circle around as many herring as possible and head back for the mother boat, which would then draw the bottom of the seine together, making a bag of the net. From there, they would use the boom to lift the net into the boat, or brail the fish into the hold one large scoop at a time, or deliver the fish to a waiting tender -Liam caught distant glimpses of three larger boats hanging around the perimeter of the action, but they weren't about to run into him so he ignored them. "Watch it, that green plane-son of a bitch!"
The green plane's pilot misjudged his altitude and the 172's speed and his gear glanced off the left wing of the 172 as it was coming up from behind. The 172's wing dipped sharply waterward, started to spin, and recovered, pulling up and banking right, out of the circle.
Something wet running into his eyes blinded him for a moment. Liam wiped it away and discovered that sweat was pouring down his forehead in rivulets. In front of him Wy was oblivious, all her attention trained on the water below. "Yes! Okay, Cecil, close it up, close it up, close it up!"
The expressionless voice came over the headphones. "Ten minutes remaining in the opening; I say again, ten minutes remaining in the Riggins Bay herring opener."
"Mike, you've got ten minutes to lose that jerk and set your net! Alex, hard right rudder, you got nothing but net if you close it up now! Cecil, you still got company off your stern, watch out he doesn't foul your seine!"
One of the two poaching gillnetters was still being fended off by Mike's boat, every zig of the gillnetter being met by a zag from Mike's. The boat tagging Cecil had dropped his skiff and was preparing to make a run for the fish.
Liam saw water boil up from Wolfe's stern, and the big seiner surged forward and ran right over the top of the other boat's skiff. The man in it dove over the side at the last possible moment, the prop of the big seiner passing over the exact spot he'd been standing not three seconds before.
"Jesus Christ," Liam said in disbelief.
"Nine minutes to closing; I say again, nine minutes to closing."
"Watch the sky, Campbell!" Wy snapped. "Close it up, Cecil, close it up, you've got nine minutes!"
There were six or seven planes-or maybe twenty; Liam was never really sure-in the same tight circle, buzzing around the fishing scene like angry wasps, the 172 recovering enough to rejoin the group. It seemed as if every time he looked up he saw a pair of floats through the skylight. Every time he looked right, another plane filled up the window, someone in the backseat slapping the back of his pilot's head. There was never a moment when it seemed to him that they were not in imminent danger of a midair collision. Here a pair of floats passed so closely by he could see water dripping from the rudders; there the face of another observer was so near he could see the strain and fear on it as plainly as he could feel his own. The sharp blur of a propeller reminded him of what had happened to the last person to fly observer for Wy, not a comforting thought. Liam's poking and slapping became less tentative. Yelling and cursing seemed natural; in the space of twenty minutes, Liam was learning a whole new vocabulary.
There was as much or more chaos on the water below, where twenty-five boats battled for sea room and herring, with more competitors arriving every moment. In between his constant scanning of the sky and the equally constant poking and prodding of Wy he caught glimpses of a continual game of bump-and-run, of the gillnetter's swamped but not sunken skiff, of a bulging purse seine black with fish-he hoped theirs, but for the life of him he couldn't tell one boat from another-of a gillnetter with its prop fouled in its own seine, of another adrift with a dead engine, of a third-Liam blinked. If his eyes did not deceive him, there were three men on the deck beating the hell out of each other.
The man who had dived off the swamped skiff had bobbed up to the surface and one of his crewmates on the gillnetter ran a boat hook out for him to grab on to and hauled him on board. From the brief glimpse Liam caught of him, he didn't appear to be bleeding. Bleeding or not, Liam had personally witnessed a thirddegree assault, a class C felony at least. They came around again in their circle and Liam caught a glimpse of the big seiner getting its catch on board-lowering the boat considerably in the water-then running its net out again.
The dispassionate, disembodied voice came over the air once more. "Five minutes remaining in the opener; I say again, five more minutes remaining."
Liam went back to watching the sky. Either everyone had slowed down or in the short space granted to him he had adjusted to the pace of the job. He felt like someone had switched him from 45 to 33-1/3. Everything took on a dreamy, slow-motion quality. There was plenty of time to spot traffic, forever to notify Wy, an eternity for her to find them safe passage. The loud jumble of excited voices over the earphone receded, and all he could hear was the sound of his own words, concise, deliberate, heavy with importance.
Slap. "Cessna on floats at ten."
Poke. "We're sneaking up on the red plane again; fall back, fall back, fall back."
Nudge. "Watch out, there comes that 172 again."
Point. "Trooper plane at two, trooper plane at two."
"One minute remaining in the opener; I say again, one minute remaining."
The Cub's circles seemed to tighten, and Liam's entire focus narrowed to five square miles of sea and air. Planes, boats, fish seemed to blur together; he heard his own voice speaking, saw his own hands moving, felt his own eyes roving back and forth, looking, watching, waiting.
"-ten seconds to closing, eight seconds, seven seconds, six seconds, five, four, three, two, one… The herring opener for seiners for the Riggins Bay District is now closed; I say again, the herring opener for seiners for the Riggins Bay District is now closed."
Wy immediately straightened out the Cub, heading it away from the scene on a southwest course. "What's it look like, Cecil?" There was no immediate answer, and she banked right and made a relaxed sweep north to look over the situation from what Wy considered a safe distance and from what Liam, returning slowly and reluctantly to real time and space, did not. He squinted at the sky as if he'd never seen it before. It had never seemed so blue. "Is it really over?"
Wy was busy going into a tight circle and didn't answer.
Directly below, one of the big processors had come alongside Cecil's fifty-twofooter. There was a widemouthed hose stuck into the bulging seine net, busily vacuuming up the herring penned there and sucking it into its own hold. The hose was transferred to Corseiner's hold, where it sucked up everything there, too. Alex was next in line with a catch a third the size of Wolfe's. Mike's catch looked smallest of all, but then he'd been busy for much of the opener fending off the encroaching gillnetter, which Liam privately thought was a little greedy of him-surely in a ball that size there was more than enough herring to go around. He knew better than to voice this thought in present company, however.
The other boats, the ones that had not fouled themselves in their own nets or had their sides stove in by someone else or whose engines had not failed them at the crucial moment-or whose crews had not mutinied-had done well, if not as well as the first three boats on the scene. Everybody had fish in their nets, including one tardy soul who failed to close up his purse in time. Over the radio for all the fleet to hear, he was commanded by the Fish and Wildlife officer in the air above to open his seine and let the fish go. It was one of the larger of the lesser catches, and it took a minute for the skipper to bring himself to do it.