He had a sudden intense memory of life on the many ships on which he had been shuffled one to the next as crew. Or more accurately, a kind of galley thrall. Always down below, working at menial tasks: sewing; cooking oily meat for the crews; emptying buckets of filth when the weather was too rough for the men to relieve themselves over the side and had to use the wooden buckets; dodging beatings that any man on the crew could administer to him for any reason whatsoever. One of the worst thumpings – it left him bent double for a week – was when he forgot to store the sewing needles in the cooking oil and they had started to rust. And always, always damp. Never dry clothes. Damp with salt in the creases so he had a continual rash in his armpits and crotch.

And here he could feel the cloth drying as he never felt it on the ships.

And no beatings now.

Danger, perhaps, or certainly. Bears and the ocean could kill. But no beatings.

And it was all up to him. He could eat or starve, depending on his own actions, his own thoughts, his own plans.

The same as the whales.

Or the ravens.

Or any living thing. From whales down to mice. All thinking. All taking care of themselves, by themselves, for themselves . . .

He stood to check the meat on the racks and was surprised to see that the cut slabs had dried considerably in the short time he’d hung them over the smoke and fire.

Seeing the pink meat brought his hunger roaring up once again and he tore away a sizeable chunk and bit off strips that he swallowed nearly whole. He was still hungry and thought of eating more but decided to save it for what he now considered it to be: canoe meat. Travelling meat. Something to eat while he paddled north.

Instead, while the meat was smoke-drying he took the spear and made his way to where the small creek, fed by seeping springs on the island, trickled into the sea. He found the water there as clear as sight and – as he stood in the shallows – colder than he had felt previously. Made his toes curl under. There were no salmon schooling in large numbers or trying to run up the creek, but there were always salmon nearby, moving in the shallows, and he learned to wait.

Wait.

With the tip of the spear down in the water, unmoving, and his legs and upper body as still as a rock, a tree, in moments the fish had come to believe he had always been there, was part of the bottom, and moved in close to him.

Closer.

Then, aiming at the bottom edge of a good-size silver he powered down with just wrist-and-arm movement, took the fish cleanly through the middle, twisted the spear to get its barbs in solid, and dragged the fish up onshore.