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in the harbor.
    Just beyond those first two towers I could make out the stations that controlled the submarine net. Strung across the entire width of the inlet was a thick net, supported by steel cables. It extended from just below the surface right to the bottom. It was like a heavy curtain designed to stop any submarines from entering the harbor. When ships — friendly ships — were sighted, the net was lowered just enough to allow the ship to pass, but not enough to allow a sub to sneak in with it. I wondered what they thought about the sight of sixty-five little wooden fishing boats sailing up into the harbor — fishing boats that belonged to Enemy Aliens. That was what they were calling us: Enemy Aliens.
    I couldn’t even think that term without my stomach starting to churn. Born and raised in Canada … most of us were either Canadian-born or naturalized Canadians, but we were all the same to them; “Once a Jap, always a Jap” — that’s what they were saying.
    I guess the only difference they mattered to them was the color of our registration cards: pink if you were born in Canada or naturalized, and yellow if you were a Japanese citizen. They must have thought that was pretty smart, yellow for the “yellow peril” from the Far East. Either way, though, regardless of the card’s color, it meant the same. Each man and woman over the age of sixteen had to carry around those cards, and on those cards it said ENEMY ALIEN in big letters, and if the police caught you out in public without that card, they could throw you in jail.
    Some people had been thrown in jail. Nobody from our village, but I’d heard about some businessmen and writers and people like that down in Vancouver who were locked up the day after Pearl Harbor. And I don’t know, maybe they were people who would have been dangerous, who would have passed on information to the Japanese army. After all, there were around twenty-two thousand of us in this province, so I guess maybe a few of them would be cheering for Japan, and maybe even helping out a little … maybe.
    Rumor was that those people taken prisoner were shipped out to someplace the other side of the mountains and were being kept in some sort of prisoner-of-war camp. If they were spies, then the government did the right thing in rounding them up … at least, that’s what I’d thought when I first heard about a few men being taken away. Now that we were all being rounded up too, I had some different thoughts in my head.
    â€œThere sure are a lot of boats,” Yuri said as she appeared at my shoulder and peered forward out the windscreen.
    I nodded my head in agreement. Looking beyond the little convoy of fishing boats, I could easily see the outlines of at least a dozen big supply ships at anchor in the middle of the harbor, waiting their turn to dock and unload. And I knew that because of the shape and size of the harbor, there were probably just as many others at anchor and half as many again at the docks being loaded or unloaded — and it was going on twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Men, supplies and equipment. Either being unloaded to supply the growing military bases that ringed Prince Rupert or being loaded after being brought in by rail to be taken by ship to the Queen Charlotte Islands or further north to Alaska.
    My eyes scanned the shore. The only things that took up more space in town than the docks were the rail yards. The entire western part of the town’s shoreline was dominated by the railroad tracks. There was a big freight yard that must have had twenty or even thirty sets of tracks that came off the main line. There weren’t enough men to unload the ships and railroad cars when they arrived, and they were backing up more and more. I shook my head in disbelief. There were some Japanese who’d worked the freight yards before the orders came to fire them. Did they think that stopping all