Over time, Thomas makes himself at home. He is helpful to the old people. He gathers wood. He splits wood. He lifts stones and moves them to where the elders can better see the water. He fishes for them. He takes their dinghy out and catches the daily supply. “You better not spoil us,” says the man with his missing teeth, laughing. “Then we will forget how to take care of ourselves.” And so the man goes with him, and the women clean the fish. But Thomas doesn’t know that he will ever leave.

He says little. They don’t care. He has come to them and now he is there paddling the ancient cedar canoe, he is singing at night around the fire on the beach. He is sometimes dizzy and falling from the movement of the earth. This is all good.

The day of tranquillity is a day he will never forget because this day he hears the ocean. He hears the seabirds. He is free because of truth. He wakes alive, as if something is happening in his life, something unknown. He wakes up and he is not a halfhearted man and he can’t remember why he wakes this way, except that he hears the sound of birds and it is as if behind the human world something else is taking place. The ocean is peaceful, too, on this day, and he stands at Old Point and looks out at the light of morning, then with the excitement of a young man he puts on his boots and he walks from the rocks to the beach and he looks in the black stone for the creatures again. It is a still day, everything silent. Even the wind isn’t blowing. There is just a breeze of something living, like the breath of the universe.

THE MAN WHO KILLED THE WHALE

After that Thomas fasts. He scrubs himself with cedar boughs, scratching his skin. Thomas prays. He thinks of the story from the north about the whale that lived in the lake. It was a tiny whale. It gave the first hunter instructions on hunting and other details of living a good life. He places on the bow of the canoe an eagle feather and it does give him the power of wings to move through water, arms strong as wings, as if flying.

He goes into the water like his grandfather when women wore woven grass earrings and hats and shells and they all wrapped themselves in blankets. The man who killed the whale now holds his breath again.

Thomas is in the place where there is the only reef, in this place just before it drops down into the depths. And there is sand blowing like a storm in the water, which isn’t clear. Even so he keeps his eyes open and sees the fish that remain and the starfish hanging on like purple and orange hands to the rocks and the feelers of other creatures, maybe crabs taking a measure as if they can tell things by inches or feet, fin or tail. Then he sees a young octopus float by, silken, one-eyed, beautiful, and he moves toward it, but it changes color to white and vanishes so quickly into the smallest place in the reef between rocks.