They picture Vince, a cigarette in his teeth, talking and pulling in his nets all at the same time, cursing, and how he sometimes stepped on live fish but never fell the way they wished he would. Yeah, what were the chances that could happen? Would he lay down his nets? They were comforted even if what Wilma said didn’t fit the context at all.

Then one night in Linda’s café, the stranger with unusual eyes stands up, and in front of Aurora, Linda, Dwight, and the others he has avoided, simply and for no reason anyone could understand, he announces, “Everything here is out of balance. I have to leave for a while.” He leaves too much money on the table and walks straight-backed out the door, with everyone watching, thinking he is a crazy transient after all.

“The hell,” says one of the men.

Linda, towel in hand, goes over to the window and watches him walk away. Others join her. “No. He’s right,” she says. “It’s not just the drought. It’s something else. Something here caused it.” She feels it, too, the lack of balance. She doesn’t mention the whale hunt. It’s been the largest silence of all.

Vince, the best fisherman in the café, has ignored all the gossip about the man. He is smoking, his face pale, “You know, it’s true. Things aren’t right.” He blows out the smoke. “I just had a weird experience. My boat was just jammed up on a stone. The wood was going to crack if it stayed there because it’s so dry. You know how I used to work for the mines. I know how to take out a rock. Damned if I didn’t have to cut open that stone, and damned if I didn’t find fifty-three toads in there. Plus one I killed by accident. Toads. There weren’t no holes in it, either, for a toad to get in. They hopped away toward the river.”

“Vince, don’t creep out my customers.” Linda poured him more coffee. “Besides, the river’s a long way off.”

“It is. I know it. They’re probably still out there hopping and you don’t believe me.”

Ruth is up early in the morning, outside, breathing. The early morning songs of seabirds are gone, but the rose of light still comes to the land far away, as if starting at the bottom, coming from the earth. Then it rises.

The pilings of the pier look like black bones. Everything is skeletal. The large pile of stone, it looks like, made of cans from the factory, shines at the top, silver in the light. The rest has sediment and years of earth have turned it to rock. There are boat houses on sand. It should be salmon season, she thinks, hoping they will return one day and are not all dead.

Ruth is surprised when the police and the man she recognizes from the Forest Service come to question her at her mother’s house.

“Come in,” she says. Thinking at first that they are there about the whale or her son.