“Watch out for the hooks,” Ruth tells her. “They are ruthless and painful to get out if you get caught. The only way is to push them all the way through.”

When they use the net for some of the salmon coming down from the river, they sit back and wait at the river’s opening. Lin drinks a root beer. They take out the many red salmon from the net. They don’t keep them all. There are other fishers around. It is an easy catch, too easy. They keep enough to eat and sell and for Aurora to smoke.

“I don’t want to kill them,” Lin says. Ruth is handling a fish that hasn’t given up. “I can’t.”

“I don’t, either. But one of us has to, so turn around.” Ruth, as soft-hearted as she is, hits each one at the back of the head in just the right place, praying, apologizing, then goes to work as fast as she can. There is much to be done. Fish to be put on ice. To be delivered. Ropes to coil. Lin helps wash the deck afterward. Fore and aft, she writes her husband.

They go farther out to catch the fish coming down from the north. It is not so easy when they go far out for king salmon that come down. The boat is not easy. It rolls and seems to tumble. Ruth always has to watch the weather, the moon, the tides.

The two women are easy together, able to be quiet and alone. Ruth keeps a journal and Lin makes sketches. “Those are good,” Ruth tells her, looking at the drawings of the sea, the dark rocks, the precise sketches of salmon.

At night, far out, there are the lights of phosphorescence, animals of the sea. One night nautilus shells come magically to the surface with their own gleaming. “Look,” Ruth says. They are shining and nearly round in the dark water under the moonlight.

Lin leans over. “Oh, they are beautiful.”

It has also grown colder, so that night Ruth says, “Here, use this comforter.” It is soft, filled with down. Lin has never slept so well or felt so safe except that night she remembers when the woman finally put her arms around her in the flower shop. Then, waking, she recalls the night with her grandmother on the boat when she was a girl and the boats were burning, even the little sampans where families and their dogs lived, and she had to leave the old woman in the bright lights and take to land. “Go.” Her grandmother was weary. “Go. You are the new. I am the old. It’s only natural,” said the old woman in the light of many fires and their reflection on water, and it seemed also that the old woman turned to light as Lin ran through the water. The whole world was burning. Lin left, sobbing, wet, but somehow still carrying her fish.

Sometimes at night she and Ruth talk. Lin, full of memories, begins talking about her father. “All my life they spoke of him, my father. He was a king. Now I find him and he’s a common man.” She thinks for a while. “He’s not even good at that.”