A green-dark stench of burned and rotting greasy death came out of the fog, up the rocky bank, over the cedar canoe, into the small bark shelter huts they had made, past and around and through everything, slithering into every nook until all the men who had been deep in safe sleep came awake with the smell clawing into their every breath.

Death smell.

Death smell from a large wooden ship that rode heavy with the wind on dirty sails, hanging now in sloppy, stained loop-folds, coming from and with and in the fog so the dark and ugly ship seemed almost an extension of the fog itself.

There was no wind. Not a breath of it. And yet the boat moved, had moved along and down channels from the open sea, coming in silence – dead silence – on the moon-currents as the wild tides changed and pulled and pushed the silent drifting wooden ship until at last it came into the cove in front of the camp, seemingly of its own volition.

And stopped. Meant but not meant, not planned to be there but there, sending its death stink, the stink from blood-soaked decks and rotted gore and rendered fat, boiled off small whales, seals, dolphins – anything alive that had fat on it and could be made dead and the fat cooked out – ahead of the ship like a silent, dirty scream of filth.

But something else, too: the smell of dying, rotting men.

For a time there was a silence. Non-sound. A complete cessation of sound. Not even a croak from the crows and ravens circling above the drying racks. Night moved away and light came and the fog dissipated slowly, streaking around and away in grey swirls until the source of the stink could be seen, sitting in the cove, squat, thick-heavy in the water, its bow nudging against the rocky pebbles of the shore. A silent horror.

Then came the men.

They were not clean.

As crude and dirty and stinking as the ship, four men lowered a small workboat from the side of the ship and climbed down into it. One man used two oars to push the boat to the pebble beach, and three climbed out with great effort while the fourth held the small boat against the shore.

Some in the camp later said of the men that they seemed to be made from scraps of parts of the ship. Indescribably dirty, as worn as old wood, with their skin hanging from their bones, eyes red and deep in their sockets, and when they opened their mouths to smile a greeting, it could be seen that many teeth were gone.