Another delivery took place towards evening, a neighbouring island. Four animals this time. The people on the shore shouted out to them. The animals struggled through, stumbling out of the sea, hides glistening, streaming. Lacroix thought they might shake themselves as dogs do but they simply stood, patient, good-natured, perhaps already forgetting the sea.

They did not sleep at anchor but spent another night in open water. Lacroix, on his barrel, thought he saw all of it, for the laudanum brought him repose rather than sleep. At some hour, very late or very early, when even the western sky was dark, he fancied himself on picquet duty—the outlying picquet, that uneasy station, tensed between armies, listening for alarms. Later, he saw things etched on the sea. A woman in a white dress turning like a star, then a whale, immense and silent, its black skin slack as a coat. A whale imagined by a man who had never seen one . . .

But he must have slept eventually, for he was woken—or startled into some new sense of himself—by one of the sailors offering him a bannock. He was grateful for it; there was no more fish in his pockets. He washed it down with whisky then studied the land ahead of them, a long island faint as a cloud, or else several islands, like stepping stones, north to south. They sailed towards them for hours. They lost the sun then had it back again. The boat nosed her way through the swell, the prow sometimes shattering a slab of green water so that the spray flew back almost to the feet of the helmsman. The cows ate damp hay. When they looked up, chewing, they were the most resigned creatures on earth.