Nevertheless, the mother of Thomas, in a plain white dress, took the baby Thomas daily across the sand to the cave when the tide was out.

Then, one night, without any sign, the octopus disappeared from human sight and went back into the water.

As closely as they watched, no one saw its return to the ocean. It must have been three in the morning, they decided, because early each morning the old people were on the beach singing powerful, old, and still-remembered songs. They sang around four each morning when the atmosphere is most charged with energy. They could say this now that they lived in measured time. Also, they could remain and pray and watch the reflected red of dawn on the rocks and sky. Drinkers might have seen it at two in the morning as they sat on the beach drumming and singing their newer songs. Of course, they may have missed it while kissing a lover or, like Dimitri Smith, the man who never tucked in his shirt and slept often on the beach, while gazing only upward at the sky, searching out and naming the constellations: Whale. Sea Lion. Octopus. Yes, that was one of them.

With the departure of the octopus went their gifts. The octopus, by accepting the Smiths’ gold ring, Witka’s pearl, gems, the pieces of silver, even a pair of glasses, knew it was loved by them and it would help them as it went back under the sea and stayed there, maybe giving them good fishing or good deer hunting, whaling money, love medicine, all things desperately wanted by humans and shifting in their value day by day, moment by moment, depending on their needs.

Thomas’s grandfather was the well-known whaler named Witka. He was the one who told them what gifts the octopus loved. He was the last of those who could go under the sea holding his breath for long times and remain, so he had a great deal of knowledge about the ocean and all sea life. He was the last of a line of traditional men who loved and visited the whales to ensure a good whale hunt, along with his friend, the great-grandfather of Dimitri Smith and a man named Akita-si who could also remain beneath water for briefer times than Witka, but long enough to sew a whale’s mouth closed when they killed a whale. This sewing was important so that the lungs wouldn’t fill with water and the whale sink to the bottom of the ocean.

Witka’s wife lived most of the time in the white town. His other women lived in the wooden houses that used to be up against the mountain before the tidal wave washed the places away, but he himself stayed and dreamed much of the time in the dark gray house he built on top of the thirty-two-foot-high black rock where his grandson, Thomas Witka Just, now dwells, thinking of his grandfather, whose watch on the sea had been constant, that man who spoke with the whales, entreated them, and asked, singing with his arms extended, if one of them would offer itself to the poor people on land. He beckoned and pleaded when the people were hungry. The rest of the time Witka watched their great numbers passing by, spraying or standing in water to look around, or rising and diving, their shining sides covered with barnacles. The infant whales were sometimes lifted on the backs of the mothers. They were such a sight for him to behold, the man who lived between the worlds and between the elements.