She comes at low tide—Lummi, or Samish, or Songhees, I should think. I can tell by her woven robes, the basket fastened to her back, and her hair, black as cormorants.  She carries her rocks down to the water, never looking up, too moored to whatever it is she’s doing.

At first light, Sitka and I make our way down from the western meadow to the bluff that overlooks the inland sea. Sitka goes ahead and follows the path further down onto the beach where she forages around looking for God knows what. Deceased things.

My trading post was near the island dump, and if the wind blew in from the North, I’d get a strong whiff of everyone’s leftovers. Bald eagles swooped down around the garbage and burned-out refrigerators.

The carpenters and fishermen come into Ralph’s for breakfast. They used to eye me up and down, but with a baby growing in my belly, I guess I’m not good for that anymore. I have on the brown, canvas, second-hand coat I found at the Trading Post. A man’s coat, but it fits pretty well, and I can’t see me in cute dresses with bows on the front, or tops that say baby on board. 

Guy LaPorte had seen a little weather on the Inside Passage.  In eighteen years of commercial fishing, hadn’t he warned dozens of weekend yachters, moored on Nettle Island, not to let the innocent name fool them? 

In September the alternator goes on North LaPorte’s island beater. He gets a two-day suspension from school for drinking behind the gym and learns his girlfriend is seven weeks pregnant. She is only sixteen. They grew up here, chasing sea birds, plucking starfish from the water, stealing onto harbor yachts.