And now that he’d been shown how it was done, Isaiah added, Nathaniel would pull the remaining traps himself.

He was shocked by how heavy the first trap felt. Hauling the thing up against the resistance of five or six fathoms of water tripled its weight, maybe quadrupled it. He huffed and grunted, and the warp scraped against the gunwale.

“Heh, heh,” chortled the old man. “Now ye be learnin’ the value of a lobstuh, ain’t ye, young yachtsman?”

At last, the big trap surfaced. He reached down and yanked it aboard with both hands, recalling that Toby had done it with one. Thus, another lesson learned: There was a difference between muscles gained by lifting dumbbells and playing football, and muscles gained this way. There were no lobsters inside, only three huge crabs. He asked what he should do with them.

“Take ’em out and I’ll show ye,” said Isaiah Kent, and when the crabs were on deck, he smashed them to bits with a club and tossed the bits into the bucket.

“Inny sumbitch steals my bait gits to be bait,” he said.

They rounded up on the next pot, about fifty yards downshore, and, again, the shocking resistance, the weight, and the old man cackling “heh, heh” while Nathaniel huffed and grunted. The second trap was a harder pull than the first, and the reason was revealed when it surfaced: full as a jail cell on Saturday night. One of the lobsters looked big enough to eat a small dog.

“Ayup, second lesson in learnin’ why lobstuhs ain’t free. Ho! Was a time not so long ago when they wasn’t wuth a fart in a gale, on account of ye could walk out inta the eel grass at low tide and pluck ’em off the rocks. Stealin’ candy from a baby, but no more, no more.” Isaiah began to tap his foot loudly. “We’ll try to make it light work fer ye,” he said, and then sang out in a voice that creaked like rigging:

Goin’ back to Weldon, to Weldon, to Weldon,

Goin’ back to We-el-duh-unnn …

And then Toby joining in on the last line …

To git a job in the Weldon yards …

Nathaniel recognized the chantey, had heard it once in Gloucester, an old net-hauling song from the Grand Banks.

Cap’n if you fire me, fire me, fire me,

Cap’n if you fire me-eee …

Got to fire my buddy too …

The song somehow did make the work easier. By the fifth pot, he was into the rhythm of it, and even managed to sing along himself as he pulled:

Don’t want a woman, a woman, a woman …

Don’t want a wooomaaan …

With hair like a horse’s mane …

Goin’ back to Weldon, to Weldon, to Weldon …