The old singing man has white hair pulled back. “You will be here for a while.” Outside the seagulls were waking and beginning to comb the shores. “You are going to learn. The songs. You are going to gain strength. Here, eat this.” They place a meal of acorn mush before him.

The next morning, the man says, “Come.”

Thomas follows.

They go over the dark rocks behind their houses to the freshwater pools in the rocks and bathe, the wrinkled old dry darkness of the older man and the almost newness of Thomas.

Then, afterward, they sit in silent council, meeting together for a long time, and much is said through the silence, more than all the voices inside him could have said.

As it has turned out, there is another plan to go whaling. Thomas doesn’t know it.

Although Dwight had gone away for a while, to live up in Washington with a cousin, he had his friends and family still at Dark River and they made plans, connived and bargained with people from other places, other countries, other monies.

Dwight had covered his tracks. They were mere footprints at the edge of the ocean, filling in with water and disappearing, but they were there nonetheless. Though his house had fallen and his wife had left him and he had become something of an enemy to everyone, he only had to give it time. He only had to stay distant for a while. Everything blows over there. Everything is forgotten, at least on the surface, as if the people learned amnesia in order to survive. And so, he lets it pass over, like a fast hard wind across their bay. Then he will go back and start again, and they will whale.

In the meantime, there is a girl to consider. She lives in the apartment downstairs. He met her when she came to the door to complain about the noise. “Ho,” he said. “We are Indians. We drum and sing and dance. Come in.” She looked around, seeing they were all men, and said, “No, I have company, but maybe another time.” He thought maybe she would have come in if they were white men, but then thought, No, she wouldn’t. This is the city. She wouldn’t feel safe. At home the women sit and talk to the drunks that live in the driftwood at the beach. The men tell them the same stories over and over. “I keep hearing the women and children crying,” that’s what the old drunk vet, Smith, who lived on the beach, told Ruth every time she saw him, Ruth good enough to take him food and coats, sometimes even beer. Smith Tiny was the son of a good man, the grandson of a great one. A mountain had been named for him. Once.

Smith’s words are the reason Ruth doesn’t blame Thomas for anything he might have done, even though she knows he blames himself.

Thomas remains at the white house place. His bed is near the fire and during the night he watches the flames, the animals swimming in them, the way they billow and flow. Sometimes they are like the waves of morning water he crosses over with the elders, singing as he paddles.