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Steller’s sea lions. Some of the bulls are bigger than the biggest bears in Alaska.
    For the time being, they let us be. Maybe they dropped back to pursue a free lunch from the boat behind us on the drag.
    The captain stayed sour even though we were catching salmon hand over fist. If his mood was the result of his back aching, I wished he would take some more Tylenol. His disposition was giving me some pains of my own, so I tried to cheer him up. “I never dreamed it could be like this!” I yelled after landing yet another one as long as my arm. Its head was three times the size of my fist.
    Torsen looked startled, almost like he’d forgotten I was there. “It seldom is,” he replied, his weathered face slowly breaking into a smile as he watched me work my lines. “Doesn’t get any better than this.”
    The bite finally tailed off in the early afternoon. The tide had ebbed, Tor explained, pulling the feed farther out to sea and the predator kings with it. We cleaned fish until one-thirty. “What do you say we fix some eggs,” he said finally.
    After nine hours of work, it was time for breakfast.
    â€œWhat’s the count?” Tor grunted from the galley as he washed his hands in the sink.
    â€œA hundred and three kings, thirty-seven cohos.”
    â€œThat’s not half bad,” he said with a grin. “Not bad for a morning’s work.”

7
    A FTER OUR AFTERNOON BREAKFAST , the fish quit biting in Veta Bay. We pulled our gear and the skipper headed south until we joined another small fleet of trollers off of Granite Point. We were soon working the drag between Granite and Cape Chirikof.
    The action picked up again, and I landed and cleaned king salmon well into the evening. We were the last of the trollers to steer for Cape Chirikof’s polished limestone slopes. Motoring past a deep sea cave, we slipped inside a finger of water behind the bony tip of the cape and dropped anchor in the company of half a dozen other trollers. There was wind in the forecast;the rest of the boats had run for a more protected spot around the lee side of the island. “What do you say we fix something to eat?” Tor said.
    While the salmon was baking, I gave the skipper’s library a good looking over. It was above his bunk and spanned its length—three spill-proof shelves full. Most of the books were about Alaska and Canada. Some were about trolling, going back to the earliest days of hand trolling from small skiffs. There were quite a few about the Russians in Alaska. I was paging through one of them when I spotted something familiar—a picture of a plaque a lot like the one I had seen on the boat. This one didn’t have a number, or the Russian writing, but it had a two-headed eagle. The caption said the photo was of a metal crest that was a gift from the Russians to the Tlingits.
    Then it hit me.
    Not only had Tor found me trespassing on his boat, he’d caught me looking at what must have been a valuable treasure. Maybe he’d taken me for a thief—maybe a thief looking for something very specific. I flipped the book around so he could see it from where he was working at the stove. “Look what I found,” I said.
    Tor’s face hardened, but that was nothing new. I kept going. “It’s like yours, right? I saw something like this myself once, but it was on a totem pole. That’s pretty cool, that the Russians got the double-headed eagle from the Indians.”
    Tor stared at me like I was dumb as a ling cod. “You got that backward. The Indians got it from the Russians.”
    â€œOh,” I said.
    That was it. Tor didn’t say another word about the plaque. He just brought a platter of salmon to the table with some rice and sat down across from me. I avoided his eyes at first, wondering what new trouble I’d gotten myself into, but he seemed content to change the subject. “Are you sore from working down in the