When he’d lifted it onto the boards, the doctor picked it up and neatly wrung its neck.

‘Moonbird,’ said Argyle, peering over his shoulder.

‘Our namesake?’ I asked.

‘Indeed.’

‘The natives eat them,’ said the doctor, ‘and so do the sealers. Made an industry of it. Full of oil, tastes like tar. These here, you see’—he pointed to the raised nostrils along the top of the bird’s beak—‘they have a sense of smell. Most seabirds don’t. They go way out, across the Pacific, and come back to the very same burrow. Smell their way home.’

We looked out at them on the water, forming a raft that rose and fell and rearranged itself with every movement of air and water. A ripple through them would raise a thousand birds to the air, only to settle again en masse.

‘Flyin sheep,’ muttered Declan, and Angus laughed.

‘Shearwaters, curlews, godwits…’ Gideon was speaking quietly, just beside me. His voice had a dreamy quality to it, the sound of a man putting words to an inner vision. ‘All of them are moonbirds because of their migration. The Pacific is the moon void of the world, as you know…No? The great crater formed when the moon tore itself loose from the earth, hmm? And every island on the rim of the void has a great migratory bird. This one is ours. So far they go, further than a man might sail in an entire lifetime, and they do it every year. Same burrow, same mate. They live many years and fly a long way. Multiply the years by the miles and they’ve flown to the moon, Eliza. Therein lies the name’s origin.’

Eliza, he had said. No amount of scientific rhapsodising would excuse it.

‘I am interested to know your thoughts,’ he went on. I had a feeling he was not; that he was, rather, entranced by his own. ‘Here in front of us you see the collective unspoken will that unites the birds. I’ve known fish to be the same; livestock, to a lesser extent. Somehow they surrender individual choice to something collective, and in return they receive the protection of collective thought. Imagine if humans lived like that—if we acquiesced all the time in what was being done around us. There would be no science, no discovery of new lands, no defence against tyranny.’

Good Lord, the pomposity of the man! ‘And why do you suppose they might behave that way, doctor?’ I asked.

He had his elbow on the bulwark rail, his chin cupped in his hand, and the breeze lifted the silver hair at his temples. He failed to sense the irritation in my voice, or he ignored it. ‘I imagine it is the existence of predators. The individual is vulnerable, but the aggregated mass is safer. We humans don’t behave that way because we have no predators.’

‘No,’ I countered, ‘but we do have tyrants.’