The tiller bucked in his hand as one rose from the water and crashed down again, sending a wave surging beneath the Boojum's keel, and he laughed aloud at the children's delighted shrieks and the sheer pleasure of the thing.

"Look!" Marian called, pointing. "Oh, Dad, Mom, everybody, look!"

It was one of the small islets off the western shore of Nantucket proper, a low sandy dome rising a few feet above high tide. It was dark with a ring of what looked like moving spotted gray rocks, so thick that the sands were invisible. Jared Cofflin cocked an eye at the wind, craned his head to see by the color of the water if the shoals lay the way he remembered them, and steered closer.

The rocks lifted pointed whiskered noses and their hoarse cries made a rumble of thunder through the bright air. The summer-born pups were fairly large now, their whitish bellies turning blue-gray, craning to see the boat go by with wide-eyed curiosity. Young Marian sighed, and began to recite; then to sing, a tune made recently to suit the poem as it was taught in the Natural History classes of the Republic's schools:

I met my mates in the morning (and oh, but I am old!)

Where roaring on the ledges the summer ground swell rolled,

I hear them lift their chorus to drown the breakers' song-

The beaches of Lukannon-two million voices strong!

"There aren't two million there, are there, Dad?" Jared Jr. said.

"No, son, only a couple of thousand there," his father replied. Jesus, but standards change-a "couple of thousand" seals! "Those are harbor seals; they don't migrate much, just like to congregate. They have their pups in summer."

Martinelli spoke up: "I've seen easy two million-heck, seven or eight, maybe ten, the experts say-up on the St. Lawrence ice, when I shipped on a catcher for the winter harvest. Harp seals-saddlebacks. That's quite a sight, but it's bitter there come February-bitter cold."

Martha got out her guitar, and the young sailor joined in with the children on the next chorus:

The song of pleasant stations beside the salt lagoons,

The song of flowing squadrons that shuffled down the dunes,

The song of midnight dances that churned the seas to flame-

The beaches of Lukannon-before the sealers came!

I met my mates in the morning (I'll never meet them more!);

We came and went in legions and darkened all the shore.

Among the foam-flecked offing as far as voice could reach

We hailed the landing-parties-we sang them up the beach.

The beaches of Lukannon-the winter wheat so tall-

The dripping, crinkled lichens, the sea fog drenching all!

The porches of our playground, all shining smooth and worn!

The beaches of Lukannon-the home where we were born!

I meet my mates in the morning, a broken, scattered band,

Men shoot us in the water-men club us on the sand;

Men drive us to the Salt House like silly sheep and tame,

But still we sing Lukannon-before the sealers came.

"Dad, you won't let that happen, will you?" Marian asked anxiously. "All the seals gone, I mean, Dad."

"No, I won't." He caught Martha's eye. "That is, we won't- all of us-let anything like that happen again," he said. I hope. All we can do is our best. "The law is that people can't take more than the seals can replace, like the rules for whales or fish, so there will always be more." So your kids can see what you do, sweetness, he thought.

The girl's lower lip pouted slightly. "Why do we have to take any seals?"

Unexpectedly, Martinelli spoke up: "Because we have to eat, missy; same reason the seals take fish and squid," he said. "There's plenty of working folk who're glad of a seal-flipper pie, come February. We need fur and oil, too." He shook his head. "Still, that was really something, coming over the pack

»ice and them stretching out further than you could see-to the end of the world, ice and seals, seals and ice. Loud, too, louder 'n cannon-Lord thundering Jesus, but there were a world of them!" He shook his head again in slow wonder. "I'd hate to think of that… not being in the world, that sight."

Well, there's hope for the younger generation, Cofflin thought, and joined his hoarse bass to the final chorus; he'd gotten a lot less self-conscious about singing over the past ten years. You didn't get compared to recorded professionals anymore, just to the neighbors, or at most to buskers and semi-amateurs at the ceidhles and concerts.

Wheel down, wheel down to southern! Oh, Goover-ooska, go!

And tell the Salt-Sea Viceroy the story of our woe;

For like the empty shark's egg the tempest flings ashore,

The beaches of Lukannon shall know their sons no more!

There were other things to point out; two schooners running home from the Georges Bank with their dories stacked on their decks; the unforgettably vile smell and raucous noise of a cormorant rookery on a tiny island; lobster boats and timber barges…

"I recognize her" he said with a brief grin, four hours later.

It was a smallish craft, ketch-rigged on two masts and about twice the length of the Boojum, with a railed crow's nest on the mainmast. There was another railed enclosure forward of the prow, out on the bowsprit. No harpooner kept station there now; the Kestrel was homebound for Nantucket Town, with the tails of half a dozen giant bluefin tuna hanging in triumph from the rigging. The gutted bodies would be in the hold, lying on crushed saltwater ice…

Cofflin felt his mouth water; it was getting on for lunchtime anyway. "Martha, maybe we'd better fire up the galley," he said. Louder, with his left hand cupped around his mouth: "Ahoy the Kestrel, there!"

The man at the wheel-the tuna-catcher was just large enough to make a tiller cumbersome-nodded and shouted an order to his crew. The Kestrel turned, slanting further south of east, then turned up into the wind in a horseshoe maneuver; her sails came down with a rush except for the jib, and she lay with her bows pitching and pointed into the wind. The gulls who'd been following hopefully made a brief white storm of wings and raucous cries around the two craft.

"Neat as ever, John," Cofflin called as the catboat came close, and pulled on the tiller to bring her closer to the eye of the northeasterly wind.

Facing full into the wind the sail emptied and rattled, its loose edge thuttering-luffing. Two crew from the fishing craft caught the rail with hooks on the ends of long poles and held her steady. That wouldn't be safe for long.

"When're you coming back to real work, Chief?" John Kotalac said.

Cofflin shook his head. He'd spent the first harvest season after the Event harpooning bluefin; he hadn't been more ignorant than anyone else, and hadn't gotten anyone killed-not quite. Since then he'd done it most autumns, when the big fish ran up the coast. That was one of the ways you could pay Town tax, like lending a hand mining Madaket Mall, the old landfill dump, or working in some farmer's harvest gang.

"Time to let nature take its course," he said. "I'm just plain getting too slow. Not too slow to eat 'em, though. How'd it go?"

"Not bad at all," the skipper of the tuna boat said. "Got six-and Sweet can relax, not one of them under fifteen hundred pounds. Three are ton-weighters."

Cofflin nodded. Fifteen hundred pounds was the minimum legal size for bluefin; it meant they were all over thirty-five years old, fully mature and likely to have spent three decades breeding. And all taken with the harpoon. No drift nets here, by God. It wasn't a particular hardship, either. There were a lot of mature bluefin migrating up from the Caribbean spawning grounds in the Year 10. He'd seen a boat about the Kestrel's size knocked on its beam ends once, when it got between a school of them and the mackerel they were chasing.