As Captain Murrey sat in a secluded corner of the strip club, he frowned until his face

creased with dozens of dismal trenches. The lines deepened and intersected to create a

roadmap leading to nowhere as he inwardly labored to find the path to understanding how he

had lost a man. He had always prided himself on being able to bring men home to their wives

and children at the end of the season. Leo had been young, and had no children

depending on him—but he had a girlfriend that he had spoken of often, one whom he had

hoped to marry. He also had loving parents. There had been an established place for him in

the world which had now collapsed.

No obvious, detrimental mistake had been made and no miscalculations could be

identified. There was no one to punish or blame. Trevor could not yell at the men to reinforce

or avoid a certain action in the future to prevent this from occurring again. There was nothing

to correct, there was no lesson to be learned. Nothing had really gone wrong. It had been a

random, quiet, shadowlike loss.

Had Leland just decided to dive off the side of the boat when no one was looking, just

for the hell of it? Had he plunged himself into the cold depths to see how far he could swim

down into the sea before he sucked in a breath of saltwater? These were the types of scenarios

that floated through the captain’s mind as he tried to imagine what had happened to the

deckhand. The situation seemed that crazy. Trevor couldn’t shake the feeling that something

had changed. There had been some kind of major change in the seas since he was a boy, and

he no longer knew the waters as well as he always felt he had.

The ocean was not usually quiet and mercenary-like in her brutality. There had always

been plenty of fanfare to announce her burgeoning rage. The sky would use its whole canvas

to display a bloodbath of remarkable colors in unmistakable warning. Trevor had always

interpreted the message correctly: “She is ravenous. Do not go out to fish today. She will rape

you.” It had very little to do with the weather—of course bad weather presented a technical

danger. Trevor was more concerned with some quality he could not quite describe, but could

intuitively feel and gauge—bad energy, perhaps.

Oftentimes the crew would call him silly and superstitious. Trevor would patiently

point out other signs of trouble as he sternly forbade the men to sail. Large, dark birds like

falcons and eagles would leave their secret roosts and venture out, flying in erratic and

confused patterns over the shoreline as if trying to discern the source of an unknown crisis.

There might be a certain mournful sound in the wind or a certain morbid chill in the air. It was as if everything on the planet was privy to some knowledge that escaped Trevain. Everything

was pulsating with the excitement of some indefinite impending carnage. Trevor felt that

being human automatically precluded him from being on nature’s mailing list for memos

about this sort of thing, but he would not allow that disadvantage to cripple him.

“We have all lost touch with nature,” Trevor would lecture threateningly, pointing at

his only Inuit crew member, “yes, even you Urius.” The accused man would shrug his

innocence and chomp down on his cigar nervously as the captain continued his tirade. “If

your greed for a few dollars is greater than your inclination to live, then by all means, go out

and fish! Be my guest, take the boat.” Trevor would turn around and march away from the

docks, with a parting wave and a mocking challenge, “Go out and fish!”

Of course, no one did.

One by one, the crew would lose their motivation for the intended trip. Without a

tenacious leader to rally them, they would disband within minutes and trickle off into homes,

bars, and hotel rooms. Sure enough, by the time they gathered again they would have heard of

at least one accident or casualty on another fishing boat. They would return to work with the

high morale that came from knowing they had escaped the ultimate misfortune. They would

hastily remove their hats when speaking of the lost or injured man, and have their faith in

their captain renewed to the greatest magnitude.

For decades, although men had come and gone from his crew, that was the way things

had worked. Until Leo. Until a few days ago when Captain Murrey had been unable to

inform his crew of impending danger. He had not noticed any distress in the birds, the sky, or

the winds. His usual indicators had failed him. It was as if even they had been unaware of the

ocean’s ire.

Maybe Leo was just mentally unstable, the captain thought to himself. I could have

overlooked something when I hired him—maybe he was hallucinating, and he saw or heard

something which caused him to jump overboard and dive to his death when we were all

occupied. Maybe it was just a singular event. Something out of my control.

As he tried to mentally reassure himself, he leaned back and drank deeply of his cold

beer. He did not feel very reassured. Smiling wryly, he imagined that he suddenly understood

what it was like to be a veteran master of some now obsolete technology: that which he had

been most intimate with had gone and innovated itself on him. Yes, he was fairly certain there

had been some kind of eerie change in the seas he had come to know so well, and he was

pretty sure that it did not have anything to do with global warming .