Free Salt Story by Sarah Drummond

wanted to hurt someone, I could tell.
    â€˜Your van’s here, Salt. Why don’t you stay here and keep an eye out for them yourself?’
    I like Parsley and I was beginning to feel sorry for him.
    I’ve known Parsley for a long time and only ever on the stretch of beach between Muttonbird and Migo islands. His face is brown and cracked and permanently crowned with an old beanie. Even though he owns a house in town, Parsley seems happiest in his ancient caravan by the beach or camping on a friend’s farm. During the off-season he works fencing. He is kind and gossipy and rather old-fashioned. Salt asked him recently if he wanted some fresh plums from his overloaded tree and Parsley replied, ‘Oh, no thanks, Salt. I’ve got no taste for those new things. I like the old things, the tinned plums.’
    After the excitement of the salmon season beginning, things quietened down at the camp.
    â€˜I don’t even want to come out here sometimes,’ Salt said, as he did the country fisherman’s version of an intergalactic space drive: dodging peppermint trees in the dark on a sandy black track, boat and trailer kerthunking behind us. ‘We used to all sit up in the shed, all get together at night, cook and drink piss and carry on ... now everyone is in their own caravan at eight o’clock, watching TV.’
    They haven’t been fishing either. It seems at the moment that there is no market for this oily, fishy fish. After the salmon season, most south coast camps work the herring schools but, due to the recent decline in the cray industry, the local processors are not buying bait fish and will only buy herring for human consumption if it is iced down by the beach seiners. At dawn.
    One family out of the three who usually work this beach hasn’t turned up this year. Salt Sister had a baby a few weeks before, so she won’t be swimming out the anchor for the herring net and there’s not even enough reason to hire a tractor.
    Salt may have been annoyed at missing out on such a beautiful school of sea mullet but he is probably even more annoyed at seeing such an abundance of salmon swim by the camp that there is no point in catching. Who in the whole world could possibly want tons of cheap, sustainable run fish, drenched in omega-3s from the clean Southern Ocean? Anyone?

AND THEN THERE WAS AN OCTOPUS
    An octopus in the net out near Migo Island is a good starting point for our weekly argument.
    â€˜He’ll do for bait.’ That’s Salt. ‘We’re going out hookin’ tomorra.’
    My son, Stormboy, who knows these things, says, ‘Octopus are so smart, if they weren’t underwater, they would have learned how to make fire.’
    Tom Robbins hypothesised that because octopus are so emotional that they can become apoplectic when overwrought, it is perfectly plausible that an octopus might die of embarrassment.
    â€˜Bite ’im between the eyes and turn ’im inside out,’ says Salt.
    I remember Dunedin and the lovely wahine Donna Toa. She told me stories of living on octopus and fish from the bay and described to me the traps they set.
    My take this night in the channel near the island?
    â€˜I’ll eat him. Lightly blanched, dropped in vinegar. Otherwise the octopus goes back. Bait? No way.’
    I put the octopus in the box with a lonely squid and shut tight the lid. Half an hour later in the midst of hauling the night nets in and the motor cutting on the windward side of a snarly reef:
    â€˜Jesus Fucking Christ!’
    The critter was crawling over my bare feet and heading for the sides. I watched that octopus. The dog watched too. How the hell did it get out of the box? The lid was still on.Stormboy, the dog and I watched it creep along, tentacle after tentacle. We didn’t say anything to Salt.
    We headed to shore, stowed the nets and crunched onto the beach. Salt was trying to lift the new two-stroke’s propeller out of the