Free The Fisher Queen by Sylvia Taylor Page B

life-giving than halibut or red snapper steaks just an hour out of the water. In fact, most fishermen prefer them to salmon.
    It might have been thought easy enough to sneak a bunch on board, but the Coast Guard had collaborated with the Department of Fisheries in a new trolling fleet boarding program early that year whereby officials could legally inspect any boat for fishing infractions, even on the grounds, and if they found fish out of season or licence type, the boat would be escorted to the nearest town and the entire catch dumped, along with a hefty fine or even a tie-up period. We’d heard rumours that there had already been a couple of boardings and no one in their right mind would take a chance just in case a cutter came speeding up to their stern one day.
    I had wanted the real deal and I was getting it. My alarm clock was the engine that started up behind my head. Getting up in the cold and dark at 5 a.m. after a few hours of restless sleep tossing at anchor was like swimming up through viscous dark water. By the end of the second day out, Paul allowed me to set a few pieces of gear and bring them in, unless I thought there was a salmon on the hook. Then insisted he be the one to clip the line to the stern and pull it in the six feet to the stern, where he expertly hit it on the back of the head with the gaff so he could slip the gaff under its gill and pull it over the stern and into the checkers. I could practise on the dead cohos or small L fish that were no financial threat if I lost them or accidentally cut into the belly flesh while dressing them.
    I learned fast and never complained but yearned for a little tenderness and affection beyond the goodnight peck on the lips before descending to the fo’c’sle. We worked in silence most of the time and fell into our bunks exhausted at night, but I could feel every part of me building endurance and getting stronger with every day. So far, though, it seemed I was trading one set of worries and problems back home for another here. Despite all that, I loved being in this beautiful and perilous world and prayed the fishing would improve. Still, I daydreamed about having enough money to travel and go back to college for a nursing and counselling degree. I longed to see Paul’s matinee-idol face free of thunderclouds.
    Under the daily concerns that hit all the Big Buttons, like mortality and making a living, lurked the dark fear that my body couldn’t take all I demanded of it out here, and I demanded a lot, maybe more than I should have. The issue of being a female in this male domain was already proven wrong every season by the few women in the fleet. My insistence to do more, be the best, was my Excalibur, my weapon against the memories of terrible weakness and pain. My dreams were still haunted by the sound of tearing metal and broken glass, the orthopaedic surgeon telling me I would never be what I had been; that I would be crippled by arthritis by the time I was 50.
    I had ignored pain so long I had learned to almost deny its existence, but now I had to pay attention, because if something went really wrong, I was a long way from help. Sometimes I still let myself wonder if two years really was long enough for torn ligaments to reattach all along a spine, if it was all more than I could bear. I fought with bright bravado the fear, crouching dark and silent in the shadows, that I wouldn’t make it through this time. That even if my body held out, the anxiety over money for school, the viability of this relationship and the barrage of divorce issues would take me down.
    But no one who had watched that dark-eyed blondie stride around Hardy a couple of days earlier, taking photos of eagles prowling the mud flats, abandoned fishboats rotting in the shallows and silent First Nations women repairing nets, or chowing down in the town’s de rigueur Chinese restaurant, or whooping it up with her honey and their hometown fishing friends at the