He spent a good many hours during the next three or four days lying in the shade of a gnarly arbutus which gave on the cliffs.  He took a book up there with him, but most of the time he lay staring up at the blue sky through the leaves, or at the sea, or distant shore lines, thinking always in circles which brought him despairingly out where he went in.  He saw a mustard pot slide each day into the Cove and pass on about its business.  There was not a great deal to be got in the Cove.  The last gas boat had scuttled away to the top end, where the blueback were schooling in vast numbers.  There were still salmon to be taken about Poor Man’s Rock.  The rowboat men took a few fish each day and hoped for another big run.

There came a day when the mustard pot failed to show in the Cove.  The rowboat men had three hundred salmon, and they cursed Folly Bay with a fine flow of epithet as they took their rotting fish outside the Cove and dumped them in the sea.  Nor did a Gower collector come, although there was nothing in the wind or weather to stop them.  The rowboat trollers fumed and stewed and took their troubles to Jack MacRae.  But he could neither inform nor help them.

Then upon an evening when the sun rested on the serrated backbone of Vancouver Island, a fiery ball against a sky of burnished copper, flinging a red haze down on a slow swell that furrowed the Gulf, Jack MacRae, perched on a mossy boulder midway between the Cove and Point Old, saw first one boat and then another come slipping and lurching around Poor Man’s Rock.  Converted Columbia River sailboats, Cape Flattery trollers, double-enders, all the variegated craft that fishermen use and traffic with, each rounded the Rock and struck his course for the Cove, broadside on to the rising swell, their twenty-foot trolling poles lashed aloft against a stumpy mast and swinging in a great arc as they rolled.  One, ten, a dozen, an endless procession, sometimes three abreast, again a string in single file.  MacRae was reminded of the march of the oysters—­

                “So thick and fast they came at last,
                And more and more and more.”

He sat watching them pass, wondering why the great trek.  The trolling fleet normally shifted by pairs and dozens.  This was a squadron movement, the Grand Fleet steaming to some appointed rendezvous.  MacRae watched till the sun dipped behind the hills, and the reddish tint left the sea to linger briefly on the summit of the Coast Range flanking the mainland shore.  The fish boats were still coming, one behind the other, lurching and swinging in the trough of the sea, rising and falling, with wheeling gulls crying above them.  On each deck a solitary fisherman humped over his steering gear.  From each cleaving stem the bow-wave curled in white foam.

There was something in the wind.  MacRae felt it like a premonition.  He left his boulder and hurried back toward the Cove.