y day a rowboat could live outside the
Cove, there would be half a dozen, eight, ten, more or less, of these
solitary rowers bending to their oars, circling the Rock.

Now and again one of these would hastily drop his oars, stand up, and
haul in his line hand over hand. There would be a splashing and
splattering on the surface, a bright silver fish leaping and threshing
the water, to land at last with a plop! in the boat. Whereupon the
fisherman would hurriedly strike this dynamic, glistening fish over the
head with a short, thick club, lest his struggles snarl the line, after
which he would put out his spoon and bend to the oars again. It was a
daylight and dusk job, a matter of infinite patience and hard work, cold
and wet at times, and in midsummer the blaze of a scorching sun and the
eye-dazzling glitter of reflected light.

But a man must live. Some who came to the Cove trolled long and
skillfully, and were lucky enough to gain a power troller in the end, to
live on beans and fish, and keep a strangle hold on every dollar that
came in until with a cabin boat powered with gas they joined the
trolling fleet and became nomads. They fared well enough then. Their
taking at once grew beyond a rowboat's scope. They could see new
country, hearken to the lure of distant fishing grounds. There was the
sport of gambling on wind and weather, on the price of fish or the
number of the catch. If one locality displeased them they could shift to
another, while the rowboat men were chained perforce to the monotony of
the same camp, the same cliffs, the same old weary round.

Sometimes Squitty Cove harbored thirty or forty of these power trollers.
They would make their night anchorage there while the trolling held
good, filling the Cove with talk and laughter and a fine sprinkle of
lights when dark closed in. With failing catches, or the first breath of
a southeaster that would lock them in the Cove while it blew, they would
be up and away,--to the top end of Squitty, to Yellow Rock, to Cape
Lazo, anywhere that salmon might be found.

And the rowboat men would lie in their tents and split-cedar lean-tos,
cursing the weather, the salmon that would not bite, grumbling at their
lot.

There were two or three rowboat men who had fished the Cove almost since
Jack MacRae could remember,--old men, fishermen who had shot their
bolt, who dwelt in small cabins by the Cove, living somehow from salmon
run to salmon run, content if the season