But they never seemed to be satisfied and rather than just eat what they had grabbed they would look to what other eagles had taken and go for their gutty treasure instead of their own. Soon there were open fights, wide-winged and screeching battles with talons ripping at each other, fish guts and fish heads flying through the air, dropping down and draping across the tops of those same majestic white heads.

Adding to this wild chaos came the truly clever ones – the ravens. They worked among the eagles, some going in close to get an eagle’s attention, hopping and short-flying at their heads to distract them while other ravens, apparently preselected, waiting patiently, dodged in and took the fish heads or tails or guts from the eagles, many pausing mid-theft to poke at the eagles’ eyes.

It became a swirling mass – above and below water – of whales, salmon, eagles, ravens, hopping and flying jays, and some waterbirds the boy had never seen before, diving into the centre of it all to bring offal up from the water that other birds would grab, and all was slashing, flying fish guts and heads and tails and screeching eagles and squawking ravens and whale tail-flukes slamming explosively down on the salmon in the water . . .

In all of this, the canoe had been freely drifting. Without thinking, Leif moved to safety, stroking the paddle, carefully balancing the canoe with his knees to keep from capsizing as the whales rolled nearby and the eagles dived so close to him that he had to duck to keep from being hit by a wing.

One eagle actually perched on the bow of the canoe to eat fish guts. But the instant a raven stole the morsel away from him, the eagle turned and, spying the dead salmon in the bottom of the canoe where Leif had put them, jumped down. Sinking its talons into one of the fish, the eagle tried to fly away, but the fish was too heavy to allow it a quick escape and Leif clipped the bird with the flat of the paddle. It dropped the salmon, screeched at Leif, and flew back into the fray.

In a few moments, Leif had worked out to a place slightly further away from the action.

Clear. And he sat there at the side, balancing the still-plunging and rolling canoe and tried to see it all, understand it all, follow all that was happening, but there was too much and it overloaded his vision, his thinking.

Finally he just sat, nearly as stunned as the salmon, reeling with the violence of what he saw.

Then, as suddenly as it had started, it ended. The whales veered off, swam out of the inlet; the eagles and ravens flew off, holding in talons what food they could carry; even the smaller birds vanished back up into the trees.