The women waited all day, watching the sea, the helicopter, catching glints of light. Then came a light wind and Wilma, the oldest woman, her dress blowing, her skin lined deeply, sat down on the wet sand. In her dark, bony, veined hand was a white bald eagle feather given her as a girl by Thomas’s grandfather, Witka, who had been her lover for a time. He’d had that gift, attracting women. Back then, lovers were acceptable. She cried about what they used to be as a people and what they had become in such a brief passage of history. She’d watched all this history unwind like a thread, leaving an empty spool.

A whale sprayed and breached in the distance. “Oh my. It’s a whale. Do you see it? This is terrible. It’s going toward the men.”

“I know,” said Ruth, closing her eyes as if to ward off the sight.

“I hope the old white house people can’t see this.”

“A storm is going to come,” Wilma said, opening and closing her hands, holding her back. Her arthritis was acting up. Ruth sat down beside her and pushed back a strand of Wilma’s hair. It was the dusk of her life and Ruth could see that. The wind, with its own mind, blew the gray hair back again into Wilma’s face. Maybe the storm would disrupt the hunt.

It was so difficult to have to go against your own people who had already been wounded and persecuted and to want to see them thrive, to really be, like they once were, and to see how compassion had been taken away from their lives by their experience in the new and other world as if they’d been transported away from themselves. Now they were merely trying to fill themselves up but not with the heart, not the soul. They’d lost both those along the way, some of them. Yet Ruth and Wilma’s hearts ached. Ruth was most keenly aware of suffering and thought of the whale, hoping the men would not be there, that the spray was far from them, heading farther west, faster.

Wilma’s predictions based on her hands were always true. As the wind picked up, Ruth worried about the storm coming in, about Marco, even Thomas—yes, she admitted it—out there in wind and crashing waves. She was a fisherwoman. She knew what the ocean could do with a boat as large as her old Trophy, let alone a canoe. She’d heard the sound of a storm early that morning. And then, far out, even as the clouds moved in, she and the others saw the struggle begin. “Worse,” Wilma said, “I feel it from the body of the ocean,” which was now almost her body.

It was a sorrowful thing, to watch an old woman weep, giving up and letting her sweater, unbuttoned, be blown by the chilly incoming wind. Wilma placed her hands over her face, her body wracked with sobs. You’d think even the heart of the world, already broken, would ache just to see her. “They don’t know what this means,” she cried.