He thought of Old Carl, would think of how he looked exactly, sitting on a coil of rope on the ship, or by a fire in the fish camp, one eye squinted because he was going blind in that eye and didn’t use it much. Telling stories around his pipe smoke, head held tipped to the side; stories of sea monsters and beautiful women and things not always beautiful but always something to remember . . .

Now.

To remember when your body was beyond all things real, sensible, endurable, and had to endure just the same.

Or he thought of Little Carl and how he was always smiling . . .

Or he thought of how his mother must have looked, dream-memories still, though he had never quite seen her face in his dreams. Could never get her to turn her head just that little extra bit so he could see her . . .

Know her.

And it was in one of these all-day-driving slogs – as he thought it – against slamming wave action that he went past exhaustion and into a state that had him seeing hallucinations.

Whale spouts that weren’t there . . .

Shimmering lights across the grey waters of the bay . . .

Clouds on the horizon in the shapes of buildings or monsters . . .

And, finally . . .

A blue ship.

He shook his head. The spray of the water hitting the bow of the canoe had constantly come back in his face and the salt in the water made his eyes burn and he wiped them, shook his head again, and tried to focus. For just that fraction of a moment he stopped paddling and nearly lost the canoe, had to jerk his body back to work and keep paddling before the waves turned him and rolled them up.

Look again. Stare into the distance. It was far off, but it was still there. Nestled on the far horizon, tucked neatly down in the mirror-mirage-light that shot across the waters, sat what appeared to be a bright blue ship with oddly misshapen white sails above it.

No.

No, it couldn’t be a ship, and no, if it is a ship I want nothing to do with it, and no, if it is a ship it might be there to hunt the whales . . .

The big family of whales. My family . . .

And he didn’t want them harmed. Taken. Killed. Melted down for oil. He knew that there were whalers, men that stank of burned flesh and grease – Old Carl said whale ships smelled as if they were made of rotten gut coils – worse than the dark ship that had brought death. And there was also that: this might be another ship of sickness . . .

So no. For so many reasons he didn’t want it to be a ship, and in the same moment, he thought, how could it be a ship? Who paints a ship blue?