s. Nor the ground fish, plaice, sole, flounders, halibut.
Already the advance guard of the great run of mature herring began to
show. For a buyer there was no such profit in running these fish to
market as the profit of the annual salmon run. Still it paid moderately.
So MacRae had turned the _Bluebird_ over to Vin to operate for a time on
a share basis. It gave Vin, who was ambitious and apparently tireless, a
chance to make a few hundred dollars in an off season.

Wherefore MacRae, grown suddenly restless beyond all restraining upon
his island, made a trip or two north with Vin--a working guest on his
own vessel--up where the Gulf of Georgia is choked to narrow passages
through which the tidal currents race like mountain streams pent in a
gorge, up where the sea is a maze of waterways among wooded islands.
They anchored in strange bays. They fared once into Queen Charlotte
Sound and rode the great ground swell that heaves up from the far coast
of Japan to burst against the rocky outpost of Cape Caution. They
doubled on their tracks and gathered their toll of the sea from fishing
boats here and there until the _Bluebird_ rode deep with cargo, fresh
fish to be served on many tables far inland. MacRae often wondered if
the housewife who ordered her weekly ration of fish and those who picked
daintily at the savory morsels with silver forks ever thought how they
came by this food. Men till the sea with pain and risk and infinite
labor, as they till the land; only the fisherman with his nets and hooks
and gear does not sow, he only reaps. Nature has attended diligently to
the sowing, from the Cape of Good Hope to Martha's Vineyard, from Bering
Strait to Botany Bay.

But MacRae soon had enough of that and came back to Squitty, to his
fireplace and his books. He had been accustomed to enjoy the winters,
the clear crisp mornings that varied weeks of drenching rain which
washed the land clean; to prowl about in the woods with a gun when he
needed meat; to bask before a bed of coals in the fireplace through long
evenings when the wind howled and the rain droned on the roof and the
sea snored along the rocky beaches. That had been in days before he
learned the weight of loneliness, when his father had been there to sit
quietly beside the fire smoking a pipe, when Dolly Ferrara ran wild in
the woods with him or they rode for pure sport the tumbling seas in a
dugout canoe.

Now winter was a dull inaction, a period of discontent,