He found that he was glad of the company, but did not see any killer whales or dolphins, and was ready to chuck it all and head back to more open water and inlets. What if, he thought, it was all like this from here on north? Just rock walls and the long work of not really getting anywhere. It seemed at times that what he was doing was sitting in one place paddling while the water moved beneath him. When he grew really tired, the rock walls seemed to also be moving, just sliding past the canoe while the water moved beneath.

His body started talking to him. His arms said they wanted to stop this endless working north, his back agreed with his arms, while his stomach grumbled because it had no berries. And he told them all to shut up. But he was near his end, and perhaps would have stopped, except he remembered something that Old Carl had told him.

It had been at his twelfth-year time. Leif had come to a part of his life where he couldn’t stand it any longer. He had been captive, had been sold and traded from ship to ship, had been mistreated and beaten and was done. He thought he would go to the edge of the ship and jump over the side and let the sharks have him. They always followed the ship waiting for rubbish and that’s what he felt he had come to be: rubbish.

But Old Carl had stopped him.

‘It might get better,’ the old man had told him, ‘or it might get worse. We never know what is coming. All we know is that it will change – and what if it’s something good that you miss because you gave up? Remember, it’s only the water around your boat that counts. Everything else is just spit.’

And Leif smiled now, thinking on it. No matter how his arms ached – it was still better than his life had been on the ships.

So he kept going, another day, and one more sleep, and the next time he awakened, he sat up in the canoe and looked ahead into thick fog. It was not something new – fog – and he disliked it for the way it blocked his vision.

He began to paddle, pointing ahead northwest up into the narrow channel and felt the tidal current pick him up and carry him along. He could see almost nothing – barely visualized what was directly in front of the canoe – but he sensed a change in the water around him. Felt the channel widening and the current that was pushing him slack off with the water becoming more spread out.

He could hear the birds – squawking gulls, gurgling ravens, overhead – thinking they must be above the fog or (more wondering) would they fly in fog as thick as this? Could the fog be that shallow in depth?