All night, the horn on Caginish Hill wailed, the same horn that moaned for fires, hurricanes, and once for ships lost at sea. Lights burned up and down the beaches, in cottages and fishing shacks, in all the old gingerbread homes in Trachis Harbor. In the drawing room at Trachis Inn, the TV blared, the windsurfers huddled together beneath a blanket, but Kevin stayed away. At three o’clock Douglas rang, breathless and agitated, from Government Dock. A search and rescue was under way. They’d probably need food. When are you coming home? Kevin asked but didn’t expect an answer. Finally, around four in the morning, Kevin stumbled into a chair in the library and closed his eyes. Some nights he went there when he couldn’t sleep. With the windows closed, the dehumidifier humming, it was the only room in the entire house where you could forget momentarily that you lived so close to the sea.

Three

In the early evenings at the end of summer, migratory birds grow restless. When dusk approaches, they fly off their roosts, circle overhead, call from the dark. The behavior, known as zugunruhe, or “migratory restlessness,” has long been observed by bird biologists. Anxious, expectant, the migrants begin small reconnaissance flights at twilight as early as August. Their disquiet builds for weeks, until finally an evening arrives in September when the skies clear and the wind bears down from the north. When the sun drops precisely six degrees below the horizon, thousands of birds pour into the sky, triggered by a signal not yet completely understood. The birds stream into the twilight and rise five thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand feet above the earth. They travel by night because the moon is much more forgiving to fly beneath than the hot sun, and they expend less energy, and fewer predators await them in the dark. They migrate through midnight and sometimes until early the next morning. Even the first-year fledglings, who’ve never made the journey before, know exactly when to depart in fall, and which direction to go.

Miles from Trachis Island, in the Ornithology Lab at New York University, Ana Gathreaux slept at her desk. Dawn was approaching. Already her caged Savannah Sparrows were starting to waken. Though there were no visual cues in the tiny room on the tenth floor—the windows had all been blackened—the birds knew the precise time. They sang in short broken phrases, little flutings. A chirp. A clicking sound. Ana lifted her head and rubbed her face with the flat of her palm; she’d been dreaming of a small black ship.