Its shores came down in blocks and tiers of tumbled granite, shelving off gradually underwater, so that around three sides of the island thrust out wicked snouts of rock, on which the sea loitered with intent, even in calm weather. From tidemark, ten acres of black ledges made off to the east and south, some underwater, some just awash, at different times of tide. Over them, the sea was always in motion. No matter how quiet the day, or how still the spruces baked in the summer sun, a slow, cool, sleepy sound hung over the island everywhere, a sound, it seemed, not so much of water as of air.

Perhaps on some such summer day, an early visitor to the coast, seeing the swirl of lazy green about the ledges, the rockweed lifting and falling like a field of grass, named the place The Pasture, though no one could say what pastured there, outside of crabs and cunners and south-flying sea birds. In winter, The Pasture was white water for weeks at a time. Big rollers lifted up green from across the gulf and smashed in on the headland, shattering the granite sometimes, shifting great boulders and changing the face of the shore. Sheets of spray roared up, twenty, forty, fifty feet high, drove in to freeze in white rime on the spruces, which on the eastern shore were stunted like trees at timber line.

The island was all granite, its peak a round hill a hundred feet high and naked as a cup. What grew there, grew where the land leveled out at the base of the hill, a wild tangle of northern coastal forest, on roots driven into the crevices of rock. Through centuries, it had made topsoil, deep enough on the island’s western end to grow a little grass, and on that side, too, a half-mile back from the shore, just before the hill started to climb, was a small, deep pond in an alder swamp of almost tropical lushness.

This pond was always full; it caught the wash of rain from the hill behind it, and, besides, it was spring-fed. From the high, dry, lichened ledges, no one would suspect that the island was a watery place, but deep within it flowed never-failing streams, surfacing here at the pond and trickling down, through crevices into the sea—in summer, a slow, steady drip dampening the rocks above tide line, in winter, great waterfalls of yellow ice.