Soundkeeper (8 page)

After their walk, master and man’s best friend went to a pile of lumber stacked neatly behind the cottage. There were nine sheets of three-quarter inch plywood, one to cover every door and window of the small house during violent storms. There were also a dozen salt cured poles that appeared to be miniature telephone pole. The poles were twelve inches around at the base and tapered to six inches, twenty feet later. They weighed almost one-hundred pounds each. Hall selected one of them, and set to work after he took off his pistol belt and laid it on the seat of his truck.

He put the heavy pole on top of two sawhorses and retrieved a ragged set of plans from the tool shed. Jimmy’s sharp handwriting and drawings detailed how to build an osprey nesting platform. This wasn’t a specific task for him as a refuge officer but it was something he wanted to do. Jimmy taught him that while law enforcement was his primary responsibility, he was expected to help out with other tasks that needed to be completed in the refuge. Jimmy had taken on the responsibility of building the platforms years ago and Hall planned to keep the tradition alive.

As a wildlife refuge Pinckney Island was not just a nature preserve, but was actively managed for the benefit of all natural things, both plant and animal. Avian life was particularly abundant. Egrets, red knots, royal terns and endangered wood storks abounded. The grand American bald eagle was a common visitor to the refuge and hopefully a future resident.

The ospreys, or “fish hawks”, as the locals called them, were already year-round residents of Pinckney Island. There were two nesting pair of osprey on the island that had been documented by members of the local Audubon Society last year on the annual Christmas Day bird count. Found on every continent except Antarctica near lakes, rivers, and the coast, osprey were magnificent to watch when they plucked fish from the water. Hall had seen osprey all of his life, on camping and fishing trips and in Charleston when he was in college. Their distinct arched wings in flight made them easy to identify, and it seemed to him the large birds of prey were much better at catching fish than he was. He remembered from his studies osprey were the only raptor that could grab an object with two toes in the front and two toes behind, giving it a very strong grip and they could close their nostrils to keep water out when they dove feet-first onto their prey.

Of the two pair of ospreys that called Pinckney Island home, only one pair nested in a tree. The other pair built their nest on a tall platform that had been erected just for that purpose. Hall was building another. The nest of an osprey could weigh several hundred pounds, so the plans called for stout timbers and solid construction.

The time passed quickly as he worked and soon the platform was finished and he bolted it to the pole. He ate a sandwich on the dock in front of his house and watched the male fiddler crabs wave their grossly disproportional claws at the wind, trying to attract a mate. Hall wasn’t their type but waved back anyway. They didn’t seem to notice. When he was finished eating, he strapped the platform in the bed of his truck and sat Belker in his lap.

He dragged the platform and pole as close as he could to the spot that he and Jimmy had selected for the new platform. This platform would overlook Buzzard Island, a small collection of oyster shells and marsh grass that all but disappeared on the highest tides. This site had been selected because it was far enough away from the other nests and it was accessible by vehicle.

The post hole diggers he used were the long-handled type used by utility workers. The soft sand yielded easily to his efforts, and soon the hole was thirty-six inches deep. The nesting platform was now fifteen feet above him and as he packed the last of the sand around the base of the post, Belker started barking at the nearby water. A splash and a large flock of gulls and terns caught his eye.

At first Hall thought a few dolphins were menacing a school of fish, but he saw that this was not the case. Below the circling and raucous birds were several dolphins, perhaps a dozen in all. They were packed together tightly as they slowly swam with the falling tide toward Port Royal Sound. Hall retrieved a pair of binoculars from his truck for a closer look and was astonished by what he saw.

The dolphins were swimming so closely together that they formed a floating raft. On top of their bodies, fully out of the water, they carried a single dolphin. Hall never saw the passenger dolphin move, and after watching for a while was pretty sure it was dead. One of the dolphins near the front of the group had a few fresh wounds around its nose, and Hall wondered if it had been the one that had been entangled in the net. He watched the curious procession until the mammals were out of sight.

Belker had quieted with the strange passing, and Hall sat on the tailgate of his truck. He was not sure of what he had just witnessed, but hoped the small library of nature guides and reference books at the cottage would give him a clue. By the time he collected his tools and drove back to his house it was late afternoon. One of the features he liked the best about his cottage was the outdoor shower attached to the back of the house and open except for a partition of faded wood that hid everything between his knees and shoulders. The beach houses his family had rented throughout the summers of his youth all had outdoor showers, he remembered. He had a great view of the sound when he showered but was able to maintain his modesty in case any boaters ventured too close.

He emptied his pockets, kicked off his boots and stepped into the shower with his clothes on. He considered this a pre-wash for his muddy and sweaty clothes. After they were soaked he stripped and scrubbed, turning the water to its hottest setting, which chased Belker away from his feet. As soon as he turned off the water he heard his cell phone beeping.

He recognized the missed call as the phone number for the Beaufort County Communications Center. The sheriff’s department, volunteer fire departments, emergency management, and several other agencies used this central radio dispatching center. The woman who answered his call promptly put him on hold.

“Jimmy?” a man came on the line and asked him.

“No, this is Hall McCormick. Jimmy retired yesterday.”

“I knew he was getting close, good for him. This is Sergeant Crickson in the communications center. We just received an anonymous tip that two men are going to be netting illegally in Euhaw Creek this evening.”

Hall wrote the unfamiliar name on the palm of his damp hand.

“Can you respond? The state wildlife officer for our district isn’t working today. He put in about twenty-four hours straight searching for the missing boater. We were hoping that you’d check out the report.”

Hall assured the sergeant he would and disconnected. Poor planning, he thought as he padded through the kitchen with wet feet, looking for a towel. He threw his wet uniform in the washing machine that lived on the back porch and took a fresh pair of brown pants and a khaki shirt out of his closet. The Kevlar vest took as much getting used to as the heavy gunbelt did, but he strapped it on even though it was still damp and sweaty from wearing it yesterday, and pulled his shirt over it. His name and the badge of his office were embroidered on the front, and he thought that he looked trim and fit when he checked himself in the mirror.

“Sorry boy, not tonight,” Hall told Belker. He left his puppy in the kitchen and went outside to his patrol boat. Threading through the channel markers that delineated the deep water from the shallow, a dolphin breached the surface of the water off of his starboard rail and blasted air out of its blowhole. Hall tooted the boat’s horn in return.

Turning north after he cleared the lee of Pinckney Island, Hall crossed the headwaters of Port Royal Sound where the Chechessee and Broad Rivers met and headed inshore, northeast, on the Broad River. He took the chop head on, and the boat bounced hard over the water. He finally trimmed down the bow, which helped, but the salty spray still stung his eyes and ran off of his slicker.

It took him twenty minutes to reach the highway bridge, which he “dead-reckoned” to be the halfway point. It took him another half hour to find the mouth of Euhaw Creek after two short detours around some low water. He turned the boat motor off and considered his options.

According to his chart Euhaw Creek was less than two miles long. Hazzard Creek branched off of it and returned to the Broad River, but that small creek did not appear to be navigable. The wind and the tide were at odds with one another, and as a result Hall’s boat stood still. He had seen only one boat, a tug, on his wet and windy trip. He decided to wait for any boat that headed for the creek and stop it for a routine inspection of safety equipment. Any illegal gill nets would be easy to find. The shadowy crescent of an early rising moon climbed above the palmettos on the horizon, and Hall appreciated the similarity to the flag of the state of South Carolina.

The VHF radio kept him company. First he listened to the marine forecast and then some shrimpers who were headed out to drag their nets overnight. One of them asked if Gale’s body had been found yet, and someone answered that she was still missing. Hall scanned the water at all points of the compass with his binoculars and waited, just as cops had been doing since the beginning of time.

Two hours later he heard the sound of a boat engine. The sound carried on the wind, and he was unable to tell which direction it was coming from. Again he was reminded how far sound carried across water. He started his boat and eased out into the river and heard the engine on the other boat rev loudly. Then he realized it was in the creek behind him.

He turned his boat sideways and switched on his blue strobe light at the same time. The boat, a small jon boat that had camouflaged paint veered around him, and its propeller screamed as it struggled to get a bite of the water. The two men in the boat had seen him and didn’t want to stop and chat.

Hall picked up his radio microphone to call for assistance when he remembered that no one else was available. He knew he was on his own, and for the first time the heavy weight on his hip felt reassuring.

The patrol boat was much faster than the small jon boat and Hall was soon within twenty yards of the fleeing suspects. He didn’t want to get much closer because he knew they would soon run out of water at the end of the creek and would be forced to jump out of the boat or turn toward him. Hall decided he would not give way to the smaller craft. He would block the creek with his boat if they turned back toward him.

The passenger in the fleeing vessel busied himself with something in the bow of the boat, and Hall realized he was jettisoning the illegal nets. Hall slowed to go around the nets which would have fouled his propeller and ended the chase. When he cleared the obstruction he jammed the throttle as far forward as it would go and closed to within twenty feet of the boat. Neither man turned to look at him now, afraid of being identified later if they managed to escape.

Euhaw Creek twisted and turned and suddenly narrowed. Hall increased his following distance. A large white cooler flew out of the boat in front of him and glanced off the front of Hall’s boat with a dull thud. The suspect’s boat began to slow. Hall used his PA speaker, and ordered the men to raise their hands. They did as they had been instructed, and Hall drew his pistol and started to pull alongside.

Just as Hall was close enough to see that the boat had no registration numbers, it took off again. Hall holstered his pistol, cursed, and slammed the throttle forward all at once. The boat in front of him made a hard right turn into a narrow break in the marsh grass. Hazzard Creek, Hall correctly guessed. He knew he couldn’t follow them when the wake from their small boat turned gray with mud. Hazzard Creek was too shallow for his boat. Both men flipped him the bird just before they disappeared in the marsh grass.

Hall turned off his strobe light and slowly motored out of Euhaw Creek. The white cooler was almost submerged when he found it, and he struggled to get it on his boat. It was full of juvenile redfish, illegal to possess even if they had been caught legally with a rod and reel. To keep the abandoned net from becoming a hazard to navigation he hauled it on board too. It was good evidence, but he had no one to use it against.

Running now with both the tide and the wind, Hall made the trip back down the river in just less than thirty minutes. The ride was much smoother and drier, but instead of taking the familiar route home he turned into the Beaufort River.

The Penn School on St. Helena Island was founded by Pennsylvania abolitionists in 1862, before the Emancipation Proclamation was signed by President Abraham Lincoln. Its purpose was to educate the freed slaves on the sea islands of Port Royal Sound and did so for many generations. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. held his annual Southern Christian Leadership Conference on the Penn campus for several years, and it was named a national National Historic Landmark by the Department of the Interior in 1974.

Hall knew none of this when he pulled up to the rickety dock that protruded into Cowen Creek behind the Penn Center. He only knew Jimmy had told him that any fish he confiscated were to be delivered to this place.

An old man who reminded Hall of the shrimpers he had met helped him carry the cooler into the kitchen of the small school. The cook and headmistress thanked him profusely for the fish and his generosity. He apologized for not letting them keep the cooler, but made up for it by staying and helping clean the catch.

“You’ve cleaned a lot of fish,” the old man said after a while. Hall’s pistol belt and uniform shirt were hanging on a chair behind them. It was the first time the old man had spoken since they had met.