Their father dismounted and came striding toward the land’s edge, his head lowered slightly, not like a man’s lowered in thought but like a bull’s, and they went at their tasks as if they were fleeing an attack of cannibal islanders. Eliot and Nathaniel leapt to the pinrack, uncoiled the main sheet and halyard, and hauled away, the bamboo hoops squeaking up the mast. As Nathaniel went to the wheel, Eliot hopped forward, hoisted the jib, and then tugged on the bowlines, pulling the schooner toward the mooring post to put slack in the lines and make it easier for Drew to cast off. Drew reached out, shook the lines from the notched bracket on the post, and called out, “She’s away!”

Nathaniel spun the wheel, the main formed a shallow arc, and Double Eagle fell off to a broad reach, barely moving in the listless morning air. Glancing astern, he saw their father at the end of the dock, one hand on his hip, the other pointing. He looked a little comical in that pose, like a character in a melodrama. But Nathaniel realized that this is what he and his brothers had been waiting for: their fear of him to overcome their fear of launching out into the unknown.

For the next ten minutes, they were busy setting the foresail and the topsails. They had done this many times in the past, but were rusty after a year ashore, lacked the liveliness and crack they attained at the end of a summer’s racing season. When all canvas was set and trimmed, Nathaniel came about and sailed by Mingulay for a last look. The carriage was gone and their father with it. The flag had been lowered from the staff near the corner of the south wing, as if Mingulay were a ship that had struck her colors. Except for the solitary figure of Gideon Carter, winching the dory up the rollers of the launching ramp, there wasn’t a sign of life. He looked up, and the boys waved at him, but he did not wave back. The house passed slowly by: the long tawny rectangle of its shingled face, windows and dormers darkened behind seagreen shutters; then it fell abaft their beam, and after they rounded a headland, out of sight.

Double Eagle’s hull whispered through the water. There were few sounds beyond that: the flap of a languid sail, the far-off choral of fogbound ships. Once a crow’s call, harsh and forlorn, reached them from deep inside the woods, crowding a stretch of shore that looked as unpeopled and wild as all the coast had been in the forgotten time.