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some instinct told him that might be a good thing.
    By dusk he had covered more than twenty miles. He was tired and hungry, even though Annie had shared her meal of oysters with him when he had stopped to talk to her, and Old Tom had given him a handful of dried berries. He had told them that Claire was missing but not that he had found her boat. He didn’t know why he had withheld that information. At first he told himself that he didn’t want to frighten them. There was truth in that, but it wasn’t the whole reason. That was something more personal. More raw. His grandmother would have said that his spirit was linked with Claire’s. That perhaps held more truth, although he did not understand how that could be.
    He had never really believed in the world of totems and spirits he had been born into, never called on the powers his membership in the Salmon and Raven clans gave him. Yet he knew the meaning that that world held for his people. Knew the beliefs that sustained them. He had seen the ceremonies, heard the stories, even danced the dances, but he had been too cynical, too hungry, too restless to listen. Now he wished he had. Now he wished he could turn into a raven and fly.
    None of the water folk had seen anything of Claire, but he knew they would search for her. He had wanted to warn them to be careful but didn’t know how to put into words what was only a gut feeling. Instead, he pointed them north and east, reserving the southwest for himself. There was something happening that had nothing to do with the storm. He could feel it. It was man-made and it was evil and somehow it involved the black ship.
    Long after the sun had set he rounded the point of Benjamin Island, across the channel from Shoal Bay. He kept close to shore, steering the canoe gently among the rocks. Even before Shoal Bay opened up, he could see movement on the water. Three small boats moved back and forth, the narrow beams of spotlights focused on the water ahead of their bows. The sound of voices occasionally reached him above the sound of the motors, but he could not make out the words. Above it all, he could hear the rattle of chains and the harsh sound of metal striking metal. The sounds were punctuated by loud splashes.
    Slowly he edged the canoe forward, using the rocks to propel himself so that the splash of his paddle would not draw attention. The black ship lay alongside the wharf. It was no longer silent. Bright lights lit the deck, where several men were maneuvering some kind of metallic cylinder over the railing using one of the davit cranes. As each dinghy approached, the crane swung a cylinder out and lowered it gently to the waiting boat. Two men in the dinghy then carefully settled the metal tube into some kind of device set near the bow before releasing the crane hook and heading over to the east shore of the bay, where they disappeared from view behind the point. The process was repeated for the next dinghy. And the next. Supervising it all was a man with hair so pale it seemed to be alight with its own luminescence.
    Walker stayed motionless against the rocks. It was almost midnight when the activity in the bay ceased and the three dinghies were winched back aboard. An hour later the black ship was quiet again. Still Walker remained. He felt the current slow and then reverse, gently tugging him backward. Several times he thought about moving, but the occasional glow of a cigarette tip high up on the western point of the bay held him. Finally, his patience was rewarded as the thin beam of a flashlight pierced the darkness, moving slowly back down toward the ship.
    Cautiously, he let the canoe float free, guiding it gently with his hands until he felt safe enough to dig the paddle into the water. Grimacing as the muscles in his shoulders protested, he steered back toward the bays he had visited earlier. He was exhausted. He had been on or in the water for almost eighteen hours, and he had long ago lost most of