people who are affected by a policy should have some input into it.
We cruised along in silence for a while. I wrestled with my thoughts but we were booed out of the ring. I stared out at the shoreline fading in the dusk. Eagles festooned the trees like large fierce flowers. Seine boats werenât the only predators gathering to feast on the herring.
And so my thoughts returned, laudably but late, to work. âPete, when do you think itâll happen?â
He rubbed his jaw. âWell, I donât know if George will agree, but things look pretty much on schedule to me.â George nodded without taking his eyes off the water. âTomorrowâs Sunday,â Pete continued, âI think we can afford to take the day off. But weâll send the plane up and I think weâll see more spot spawn, maybe fifteen, twenty miles of it. Thereâs bigger tides starting on Monday and theyâll push those southern fish farther up into the channel. Iâm thinking maybe Wednesday we should let âer go.â
âOkay,â I said, âmaybe tonight we should put the fleet on forty-eight-hour notice.â George and Pete both nodded. âCongratulations gentlemen, we have formulated a plan.â
Dinner that night was an impromptu experience that only fishermen and us parasitic bureaucrats could ever experience. We started with the crabs Iâd caught, then got into a bucket of clams that someone had dropped off. George brought out some sockeye that heâd smoked last summer, and we finished with grilled halibut donated by one of the company scout boats, obviously trying to curry favor.
After genuflecting before Alex, the cook, I headed to my stateroom with the intention of perusing Alistairâs computer. I realized Iâd need a monitor and turned toward the wheelhouse. George was there, picking his teeth. âHow much you figure that meal would have cost downtown?â
âYou couldnât have got it downtown,â I said. âNot that good. I need to borrow a computer monitor. Do you mind?â
âTake the one off the GPS . Itâs the best one.â
âThanks. Iâll have it back in a couple of hours.â I performed a quick lobotomy and lugged the monitor into my stateroom. In no time, I had it hooked up to its new brain, and powered up Alistairâs computer. As Iâd feared, though, the computer asked for a password. I tried to bypass it but Alistair had been much too canny for that. Prawns? No. Hmmm. Shrimp? Crustacean? Wait a minute. Latin. What the hell was the Latin for prawn? That didnât work either. Shit! A flash of memory: Chimera. Bingo! I was in.
The password allowed me access to the desktop. I looked at the array of program icons and clicked on Excel, and then âopen.â The drop-down menu showed a list of files and I opened the first one. I was now looking at a database like the ones pasted in the journal. I opened more files. More of the same and I still couldnât make heads nor tails out of it. I closed Excel and considered the other program icons. There was Word, Access, Adobe, Eudora, Internet Explorer, Photoshop, and all the assorted junk stuff that no one ever uses. I opened Eudora, knowing there wouldnât be much because he didnât have a phone line. His inbox, surprisingly, ran to seven hundred and thirty-eight messages, courtesy presumably of landlines in Bella Bella. Most were of the âCheaper prescription drugs from your best friendly guys in Nigeriaâ or âDrive your women crazy in bedâ variety. There were a few messages from colleagues, invitations to conferences, and family updates from a daughter in Ontario, but nothing to interest me.
I opened Word. There were three files and every one of them was gobbledegook. Alistair had encrypted them. Ergo, they were really important. Ergo, I had to read them. Ergo, Iâd have to enlist someone more computer literate than me. Maybe this