But she watches Thomas, her hands in her jeans pockets, alert, in case he falls into trouble. She is bound to him for life in ways neither of them understands. She is a strong swimmer, prepared to dive down and save him. He could hold his breath longer than her, but he was a weak swimmer then and now he has aged.

How strange, that he goes into the water nights—he who was born on the day the octopus walked out of the sea and into a cave on land. And peculiar, too, that at his age he is trying to do what his grandfather had done, like all the tribe’s men had once done as boys, seeing how long he could hold his breath underwater—diving after treasures on the bottom, old spoons found from whaling vessels, coins, once a pair of glasses that belonged to a Brit from a whaling ship. Ruth knows the stories of disasters on ships that entered these unpredictable waters or found themselves butted up against the rocks in a storm. Then there were the Americans who shot at the rocks that looked like sea lions, only to have their bullets return, sinking them.

But it is not strange at all. This man underwater among urchins and jellyfish, in kelp forests bending, is seeking to return to before the history of the white man’s whaling ship. It is instinct. He wants to go back, to understand the old ways, if not to live them. If they are ever to be whole again, his people, her people, he will do it right. For whatever reason he has taken this on.

Ruth recalls when the whales migrated by in the past when she and Thomas were children. Great numbers of them, spouting water, rainbows in the mist of their breath. On the northward journey would be the infants, small, dark, shining. Everyone watched their passage, the tails up from water, the spray, the descent.

Her mother had seen the last one killed in the traditional way, that day Witka came out of the water dripping seaweed. They found a harpoon made of stone in that gray whale and it had been there for at least a hundred years. Everyone was surprised. Then there was an absence of whales, as they avoided the place for a while after that.

Thomas has locked himself away, a bent man. Witka’s place is now the right place for him.

By the time he surfaces the last time, he is blue with cold, thousands of particles around him, in his light, each one something alive, phosphorescent. He pulls himself up, an awkward heave, difficult to lift his own weight. Ruth looks back and she sees him wrap the blanket around himself. He has never seen Ruth watching. Even if there is dew, he never sees her footsteps; he doesn’t look that closely at the world any longer.

He loves the blue-dark, but he doesn’t see it as his ancestors did. He no longer sees the jellyfish as the ocean pulse or heartbeat. Instead, one night, he sees them as parachutes floating men down from a plane or copter, revealing some poor man’s whereabouts before he even had a chance to land alive. A sky full of them. It was beautiful when he first saw it until he realized anyone could see them. Then there were the quick rescues, surprise attacks, men climbing ladders in the sky the way he’d heard angels did.