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back and go the way we came. Use your oar deliberately and slowly, while I do the same. If God is with us they will not see that the boat we are rowing is the boat they lost."
    "I will speak a word to Mukat," my brother whispered, and began to mumble to himself.
    "Push on your oar and be quiet. Nor look in their direction."
    "Our boat has a new color and a new name," Mando said. "They will not recognize it."
    "If they do we are in trouble," I answered. "Now that we have made our turn, I will row and you put out your fishing lines. They will think we are fishermen, maybe."
    The smoke from the fires grew thin but we were less than half a league from the promontory. Once beyond it we could not be seen from the ship. I began to row faster, until I thought my lungs would burst. The boat was heavy and not meant for two oarsmen.
    We reached the headland and pulled into the cove, out of sight of the ship. We had outwitted the Anglos. We were safe.

    "Mukat heard me," Mando said.
    As he spoke these words, a longboat rounded the headland. It was the same kind of boat as ours. Four men were at the oars and one sat in the bow. They rowed to where we were drifting. They rowed around us once in silence. They were black from the fire and whale smoke. Then they all shipped their oars except one who kept his oar in the water and steered.
    One of the men had blue eyes. He stood up and spoke to me.
    "Where did you get the boat?" he asked.
    "At the Mission Santa Barbara," I said.
    "How long have you had it? Since the storm?"
    "Yes," I said, "since the storm."
    "It washed ashore?"
    "Yes."
    Mando spoke up. "I painted it and worked on it and gave it a new name," he said.
    "So I see," the man with the blue eyes said. "But the boat is ours. It is one we lost in the storm. We lost two men also."
    "The boat belongs to us," I said. "Father Vicente says that there is a law. Because it washed ashore and we found it, it is ours."
    "That is the law," Mando said. "Father Vicente vows it."
    A man who sat in the bow of the longboat and had said nothing spoke up now. He had a face with many wrinkles, though he was a young man, and the tip of one of his ears was missing. In the other he wore a heavy gold earring with a pearl in it.

    "Enough talk," he said. He had a deep voice and he bit the ends of his words off. "We have work to do. Put them ashore and be done with them."
    "We can use another hand," the man with the blue eyes said. "John Tucker turned up sick this morning and last night Woods got his arm burned bad. The young one looks like he could do a little stoking. And the girl can help in the galley. Cook us up some of those Mexican tortillas and frijoles."
    "Makes sense to me," one of the whalers said. "We'll get in trouble with the Mission if we leave them on the island."
    The young man in the bow said nothing for a while. He was looking us over carefully. Then he said, "Women on the ship bring bad luck. Usually, that is. But once on the Caleb Stone the captain had his wife along and we killed seven whales in one day. Killed five the next. We almost sank with oil. We split a good thirty thousand on that voyage. The best of the season."
    He gave a signal and one of the whalers jumped aboard with a rope in his hand. He tied it to our bow and went back and took up his oar. The four men began to row, towing us after them.

    My brother and I sat silent and fearful.
    The young man with the blue eyes called back to us, "Give us a hand. This is no free boat ride."
    Mando and I took up our oars and began to row. I did not row hard. Nor did Mando, who kept his eyes on the rope that was towing us, as if he had a mind to cut it.
    I spoke to him in Indian dialect, so the Anglo whalers would not understand.
    "Do not use your knife. On the rope or on the white men. They are many and there are two of us. They will kill us and not think twice about it. Be polite and do as you are told."
    "I will use my knife tonight while they sleep."
    "You will do nothing with your