“Traps is set close in, won’t take more’n two, three haours.”

Nathaniel said the man had a deal, waved his brothers down to the sloop, gave them the lobsters with instructions to bring them to Mrs. Williams right away—no detours or tarrying.

He was impressed by how beautifully the little Friendship sailed, and how skillfully the fisherman—his name was Isaiah Kent—handled her, threading a path through the vessels crowding the thorofare, then ghosting along the north shore of Vinalhaven, where his traps were set. The sloop did not go to wind’ard very smartly, Isaiah said, without apology, she was made to be sailed off the wind, and built for work such as this: well-balanced, her mast stepped forward so she could sail well on the main alone, her deep draft and full keel giving her the stability of a vessel half again as big (she was thirty feet on deck).

The shoreline resembled some Yankee farmer’s stone fence, only it was much higher than any fence, and the stones were as big as wagons, big as houses, some of them, and reefs and ledges jutted from the shore and showed through the water a fathom or two below, tresses of olive-green seaweed trailing in the current. Isaiah Kent approached the first of his white and green pots and, swinging the tiller hard over, rounded up, and let the main go, the sloop holding as if she were moored. Toby leaned over the leeward side, snatched the warp with a boathook, and then hauled, while his father told Nathaniel that leeward was the side you pulled from. Weren’t no trick to it, all it took was a strong back and a feeble mind, ain’t that right, Toby, ain’t that you, son, strong back, feeble mind? Sure is, Dad, Toby grunted, with good humor, the muscles in his forearms twisting like hawsers as, leaning backward, he pulled, hand over hand. With one powerful heave, he brought the dripping trap aboard, flipped opened the little door on the side, and pulled out two lobsters and dumped them in the live well. That done, he opened the bait bucket, tossed in a stinking mixture of menhaden and ground-up flounder, and heaved the trap back overboard, Nathaniel watching the warp plunge away into the jade-green depths and the pot skim along the surface until, the trap hitting bottom, it stopped abruptly.

“See wheah he put the bait?” said Isaiah. “Call that the kitchen. Lobstuh walks in, eats his fill, but can’t git back out, so he goes for’ard, into the second part, that’s the pahluh. Figgers he kin escape that way, but he can’t on account of the funnel shape of the net. There he stays, till we come along, and put him on his way to gittin’ et himself. That is the way o’ the world, ayup, way o’ the world.”