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's catch netted three hundred
dollars. All they could hope for was a living. They had become fixtures
there.

Jack MacRae looked down from the bald tip of Point Old with an eager
gleam in his uncovered eye. There was the Rock with a slow swell lapping
over it. There was an old withered Portuguese he knew in a green dugout,
Long Tom Spence rowing behind the Portuguese, and they carrying on a
shouted conversation. He picked out Doug Sproul among three others he
did not know,--and there was not a man under fifty among them.

Three hundred yards offshore half a dozen power trollers wheeled and
counterwheeled, working an eddy. He could see them haul the lines hand
over hand, casting the hooked fish up into the hold with an easy swing.
The salmon were biting.

It was all familiar to Jack MacRae. He knew every nook and cranny on
Squitty Island, every phase and mood and color of the sea. It is a grim
birthplace that leaves a man without some sentiment for the place where
he was born. Point Old, Squitty Cove, Poor Man's Rock had been the
boundaries of his world for a long time. In so far as he had ever