From out on the water, from in a dark canoe, Marco, so vividly alive and aware, looked back and saw the women on shore, knowing his mother was there. He understood his mother’s position every bit as much as she understood that he had a role to fulfill. The women looked beautiful standing together, he thought, like the figures of spirits the old ones carved. He smiled slightly at them as the waves moved him, but they, of course, could not see him.

The old people watched, also, from the white houses on the other side of the water. They could barely see the awkward men try to paddle amid the spectacle of speedboats alongside the two canoes.

“This is terrible. I hope I am not really seeing this,” said a man named Feather who recalled the days when people called out lovingly, bringing the whale in, promising to care for it and treat it with respect, to inflict the least pain, and to use it all to save themselves from hunger.

The new hunters didn’t remember that they should cover a whale with eagle feathers on land, how to make light with its oil, or how to make baskets with its baleen. Ruth’s mother, as a girl, had done this. In the old days, Aurora had gone to the whaling captain, Witka, and asked for permission to cut off the baleen from the gums of the killed whale. He would pronounce, “I give you, the weaver, permission to use the baleen,” Then she soaked that amazing part of the whale mouth which had strained plankton, algae blooms, and other green sea-rich life from the full waters, the small of the ocean drop by drop making the whale large. She remembered its purpose. Oh, baleen, its wonders, its thin strands of beauty and strength. They took it inland and at the edge of the lake she and the other women cleaned it with rags, scraped it. They soaked it until it was like fiber, soft and ready to weave the threadlike strands into baskets.

In those days, too, anything unused would be reverently sent back into the ocean, the men singing.

Now the men seemed to have lost their hearts and the women who still had them were against the hunters and the division was a desolate thing for a tribe, whose purpose was to be One.

Thomas’s mother had been named Martini, for the beauty of the name. No one then had heard of the drink. The word had just been said once. If Martini were alive, she would have been foremost against the actions of her own son, and especially against Dwight, a boy she’d never liked or trusted since he was a child, always sneaky, always trouble, a thief and a bully, and Dwight who had gone against Ruth, always, even as a child, as if jealous.

No one now even remembers the taste of whale meat. That’s what Martini would have said if she were alive and standing strong in her little frame with the three others on the shore.