Most of all he wished she could see him, out there on the sailboat. He wished she had been able to know that he’d come to this place. That her pale, squirming son had grown into a man who could sail like she could. He wished she could watch him on this water, the way he’d wanted Bill and Toby to watch him on his little dinghy, all those years ago on the shores of Limberlost. Wanted someone on land to come back to.

The wind picked up. The temperature dropped. The rest of the day passed quickly as Ned helped the man wrangle the sail and steer the boat back to the jetty. That night Ned bought him dinner at the same pub where he was staying. Some of the man’s friends met them there, insisting that Ned try the local beer, the local pie. These other men were also sailors. Soon they were talking about their boats, their lakes, the things they’d done and seen on water.

To Ned their stories were both strange and familiar, and a good distraction from how he’d felt out on Windermere. After two pints he’d stopped imagining his mother, stopped condemning himself as a failed father and husband, and felt ready to slide into the talk, to tell them about the boat he’d bought and restored as a teenager. His hidden treasure of Huon pine. The quiet spell of it. What it had meant to him back then: the feeling that had flowed in the wake of all that green gold. He bought another round. Thought he had his words lined straight.

But back at the table, the conversation had shifted. Now the men were discussing the creatures they’d caught: all kinds of fish, from all kinds of waters. Trout and chub, sweet-fleshed grayling and fighting salmon. Hulking barbel and wolfish pike. Ocean fish too: rod-snapping cod, enormous white seabass, halibut bigger than a man. Monsters, the sailors said.

Ned, whose thoughts had tailed off before this fish-bragging entered saltwater, felt himself surge awake. ‘Monsters?’

And then he was away, words spilling, words running. You think you know monsters? he asked them. Have you ever met one? Have you sailed at night to a river mouth guarded by a leviathan? Have you seen its hump rear from the waves, a hump bigger than your boat? Have you reached for your brothers as you saw stars reflecting from a harpoon that had lanced into its blubbery head and snapped off in the wet meat of its brain? Have you screamed your throat numb? Have you seen the broad wedge of its tail erupt into the night, rising with hideous power to hang above your father’s head? Have you waited, starlit and voiceless, for its heavy flukes to fall? In all your grey-green lives, have you ever known a terror like that?

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