The sail tested the movement of the spars and found that they were well greased in their sockets, and that there was little scope for slack movement between the three masts. Pulling on the reefing cables, he released the fore and aft sails and checked the movement there. Again, everything seemed fine. He lowered his head so as to inform the Captain, then abruptly pulled away from the smell of charring meat. He had never quite understood this human preference for incinerating perfectly good fresh meat prior to consuming it. It was like so many other things the humans did that he could not quite get a handle on. As he watched them eating their food, he thought back again to a time long ago.

Windcatcher had been the cleverest of all the sails and the most curious about these strange creatures that had descended from the sky, but the autoguns and intruder defences they had installed around the island they occupied had been enough to deter the most inquisitive, and thus the situation had remained for a very long time. Then had come internal strife, after the arrival of more of the same creatures, and the defences were gone and these creatures, these humans, came out into the world. Windcatcher’s curiosity became almost a painful thing when these humans built movable shells out of peartrunk and yanwood timber in which to float about on the seas.

At first he had flown at a safe distance, but sometimes close - especially in the night - and listened to the sounds they made to each other. He’d realized from the start that these sounds were a language much like that of the sails, and had quickly memorized it all. Learning what the words actually meant had taken somewhat longer, nearly one human century, and even then it had been difficult to grasp that they only had so few words to describe the wind. And as for names ...

When Windcatcher had seen a ship drifting in the sea, without its sail of normal fabric, he had quickly grasped the opportunity this presented. Settling on the spars of the ship, he had gazed down upon the bemused crew and told them, ‘I am wind catcher.’ And so it had all begun. The other sails had soon joined him in this diversion - it was substantially more interesting than sitting on a rock discussing the weather. They, like the then original Windcatcher, had not grasped the concept that individuals could possess individual names and by the time they did, the tradition of them being called ‘Windcatcher’ had been established. The first sail to break with this tradition had been the original Windcatcher himself, when he had changed his name to ‘Windcheater’. But then he had always been one to break new ground.

After reminiscing, he accessed, through his aug, a communication channel that had been opened in the night. The first communication then being, ‘You still into dodgy artefacts, sail?’