The Penelakut woman laughed.
Not through that thing! Let the natural light touch you; feel its visions through your skin; let the pungency and fertility of soil penetrate and permeate your spirit; become aware of life’s rustling, scrabbling, snorting, roaring, and shouting. Sight is a form of touch, don’t constrict it through that metal tube.
Obediently, Martin scanned the surrounding ocean without the help of the captain’s glass. At first, he experienced nothing out of the ordinary except a sense of anticipation, which he attributed to the siem’s words and his desire to please her. The Reindeer sailed on. He redirected his gaze, looking down from the mast through the translucent water below, just past the vessel’s bow wave. The sea was ruffled, so he couldn’t discern anything in its depths. Besides, they were too far from shore for him to see reflected light from the bottom, but…
What’s that?
Hallucination, surely, but somehow it didn’t bother him that his senses were becoming attuned to things that couldn’t be observed through a telescope, or in this instance, perhaps a microscope would have been the proper instrument to set aside. With his own naked eye—as if by what the blanketed woman had called the touch of vision—he sensed movement.
There! And there! And there! Suddenly, the netherworld over which the Reindeer skimmed came alive with winking lights, jiggling and dancing like an immense swarm of fireflies. Martin had never experienced such a thing. He gasped, barely able to keep from shouting out to the crew below, who would be alarmed at first, then angry at the lunatic the captain had sent up the mast. All around them, the sea glowed, a vast metropolis glimmering beneath the waves.
Inside the living constellations, shadows moved: the sleek form of a salmon, shimmering through the deep; a sea lion in pursuit; the tentacled form of an octopus, which loomed like a submerged Medusa that both fascinated and awed Martin; the massive elegance of an orca making its stately way northward…
And the land! Look to the land! his mentor urged.
That she’d become his mentor, Martin could not doubt. Her insistence had no purpose other than to waken his body and spirit to the wonders that could not be appreciated or defined by any mode of abstract human calculus.
The trees! They live!
There should have been no surprise in that. But the true nature of a living forest could not be understood through theories and diagrams alone. That chemical reactions and biological sequences were essential aspects of life, Martin admitted. But this! For the first time, he was actually being amidst the very essence of a forest. The trees’ needles craved light; their branches reached out for it. And below, he could feel their roots burrowing through the soil in their perpetual search for nourishment.
Worms contracted and pushed forward through the humus too, inching toward… Martin couldn’t fathom it—the earthworm’s desire to be, to perpetuate itself, and, in its own way experience all there was within its realm. He heard the tread of paws above and knew instinctively that it was a wolf, padding through the forest in search of prey. He imagined himself up there, in the wood again, as a deer, nose twitching, ears cupped toward the slightest vibration of the atmosphere ahead and behind. And then he imagined himself transformed into an eagle…
“Cuthbert!”
The captain’s voice cut through his reverie like a cannonade.
“Cuthbert!” he bellowed. “I didn’t send you up there to daydream! What do you see?”
Glancing quickly round, Martin shouted down, “Nothing, sir! Nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Well, try looking through the glass, boy,” Captain Kennedy ordered. “We’re nearing the entrance to the bay. Look sharp!”
Being ordered back to his duties came as a shock. Martin looked around, experiencing the world exactly as usual—that is to say, a place he could see and hear and touch and smell but which he wasn’t really part of. The creatures on the land and in the sea were no longer kindred spirits. They were beings you could point at, admire, or even marvel at, but you were always looking at them, not living with them or through them.
Your kind will use the land and its creatures, but never be a part of it, the woman predicted.
Twisting round, Martin looked toward the point where she had stood, watching the Reindeer sailing into Horseshoe Bay. She was gone, and he wondered: had she ever really existed? Or if the whole episode had been an hallucination?
Did it matter, even if the revelation had been a mirage—a contortion of mind?
What am I to think and do now? Martin wondered.
A fluster of wings and the tingling grip of claws at his shoulder startled him out of these confused ruminations. He yelped, and turned to face whatever it was that attacked him, and there, inches from his nose, perched a dazzlingly white creature, a bird…
A raven!
His companion stared right back at him, inquisitively through the two impenetrable black beads of its eyes. Martin laughed, and it seemed to him White Raven had always belonged there, next to his right ear. “I’m sure you will advise me when needs-be,” he said.
White Raven clacked.
Because no one on deck said anything about it when he clambered down, Martin didn’t doubt the spirit bird was only visible to him.
That doesn’t make you any less real, he assured. White Raven let his comment pass without acknowledgment, as if he had said something too obvious to be worth noting. “You will understand, though, that I won’t always be able to pay you the attention you deserve or respond to your presence as you might expect.”
White Raven made the kind of gargling sound only a raven can produce by way of answer, which Martin took to be an affirmative.
“Who’s that on your shoulder?” Seaman Foster said as Martin passed him by, still mending sail.
“What?” Martin recoiled, alarmed.
“Looks to me like you’re talking to someone, Cuthbert. Thought you might want to introduce me so I can get an idea just what kind of madness you’re courting.”
“No one,” Martin flustered. “Just talking to myself, that’s all.”
“Ah,” Foster teased. “You know, of course, that when a madman starts talking to hisself, he’s twice as mad as he was before.”
He laughed at his own joke, and Martin smiled politely, then carried on, returning the captain’s glass to its rightful owner.
“Thank you,” Captain Kennedy commended. “That was the best report of nothing-in-particular I’ve received in a long while. I do hope everyone’s watch in the crow’s nest is equally as uneventful in future!”
Then he passed the order on to his First Lieutenant and the signal was given to furl sails and prepare to drop anchor.
NEXT: Knock, Knock