covering me with their filth, leaving droppings in my hair.
At last they were gone. I held still a while longer, curled tight, my hands over my head. Then I opened my eyes.
In front of me was a horrid sight. My camera lay on the ground. Dented and smashed. Shattered glass everywhere. I cried out. This hurt more than the wound in my side. Evildoer was broken beyond repair.
MICK STITCHED ME up in the kitchen. It was evening, the sky darkening, the wind roaring. The others were all around me. Making dinner. Chatting about their day. Six people, slightly out of focus. They seemed unmoved by my predicament. I had lost one of my dear cameras. My thigh was purple where the boulder had struck me. I had scrapes and bruises all over. Mick was working a needle through the flesh of my torso. But the biologists seemed to take the whole thing in stride. They did not offer me sympathy. They merely handed Mick the first aid kit and went about their business, as though blood and mouse attacks were a part of normal life.
He had given me a shot of some numbing agent. Still, I did not look down as he shoved the needle into my skin. Mick had clearly done this before. The first aid kit on the islands was as well-stocked as an emergency room. Cuts, sprains, and dislocations could be dealt with right here. No fuss, no muss. If anyone suffered a serious wound—a broken bone, a head trauma—it would, of course, require a response from outside the islands. Captain Joe. A helicopter. Nobody wanted that. It was expensive. It was time-consuming. My injury was not worthy of such extreme measures.
Mick took up a pair of tiny scissors. With a flourish, he cut the thread.
“That should heal fine,” he said.
“What if I get an infection and die?”
He smiled. He had a pair of reading glasses perched on his nose, at odds with his rugged bone structure and shock of unruly hair.
“You’ll have a scar,” he said. “But we’ve all got them here.”
“Really?” I said.
“I slashed my thigh open a few years ago. All the way open. Knee to hip. And Lucy nearly took her ear off when she fell down Lighthouse Hill. Galen and Forest have got too many to count. You should see them naked.” He whistled between his teeth. “Marks everywhere. Like a road map.”
I glanced down and realized my hands were shaking.
“Why do you all live here?” I said. “Why the hell did you come to this place?”
There was a silence. A feeling of tension. Lucy paused on her way to the kitchen. Galen, seated at the table, froze. But I persisted.
“I’m really asking,” I said. “Why did you all come here? I want to know.”
The silence intensified. Galen stood up, unnaturally tall, his head nearly brushing the ceiling. No one was looking at him. Or at me.
He turned and left the room. Mick reached into the first aid kit and removed a pad of gauze. He began taping it over my side. Then he gave me a wink.
THE NEXT DAY, I went out and dug a grave for my camera. I found a shovel in an old shed. I cut right into the granite, the stone giving way before my blade. I laid Evildoer in the hole. It was terrible to see—the LCD cracked, the lens gone, the mode dial chipped, the casing fractured. I covered the poor thing with earth. I knew better than to make a headstone. It would not last, not here.
A mouse flitted past me down the hill. At once, I lifted the shovel and swung it. I wanted to smash the creature to a pulp. I aimed for the furry spine, but it was too quick for me. I made contact with the granite instead, sending a ringing jolt up both arms.
THE FARALLON ISLANDS have their own ghost story. I heard it for the first time today when Mick steered me outside for a walk. I did not want to go; my leg was cramping, a residual soreness from my fall, a deep ache. My side had not yet fully healed and was giving off twinges of pain. I had been overdoing it on the slick, rocky terrain, unaccustomed to this new topography. Still, I couldn’t say no. In the weeks that I’d been here, Mick had become my favorite.
I imagine you flashing that wry, maternal smirk—and I won’t say that you’re wrong. Mick is not quite handsome. He has a rough-hewn frame and a lantern jaw, and it seems that he was manufactured on too large a scale. He gestures while he talks, his burly arms sweeping through the air. He is kind. There is an easy, generous sweetness about him, a characteristic I have not found in any of the others here—a trait I would like to possess myself.
Today he showed me the coast guard house. I have been curious about this structure since my arrival. It stands perhaps a hundred feet from the cabin, and from the outside, the two buildings are as alike as twins. They share a geometric symmetry; both were clearly constructed for longevity and sturdiness rather than beauty. They have gray, drab walls, cloudy windows, and black roofs—all the color beaten away by the wind and rain. Mick and I circled the coast guard house several times. Until today, I had not understood why it was uninhabited. It seemed wasteful to cram seven of us into one tiny cabin while another option sat right next door, empty.
Once I got a closer look at the coast guard house, however, I began to understand. Its walls had an uncertain aspect, like soldiers who no longer felt the need to stand at attention. Every window was cracked. The door sagged on its hinges. The porch was rotten. The only inhabitants appeared to be bats. Their droppings were splattered across the walls and windowsills, curdling the air with the stench of ammonia. I found myself standing at a distance, as though the whole thing might suddenly collapse. Mick shaded his eyes with a hand, looking up at the dingy walls with something like fondness. He explained that the coast guard house was a relic from another age; it had been constructed over a hundred years ago. Our cabin was equipped with modern comforts like heat and electricity, but the coast guard house never entertained such luxuries. It sat untouched and ignored by the current population, like the ruins scattered around the city of Rome. A dying place on the Islands of the Dead.
As the afternoon wore on, Mick and I wandered. You might not believe that anyone could walk so far on such a small island, but we roamed for hours. Mick led me across Blowhole Peninsula and Cormorant Blind Hill. We passed the helipad, a slab of pavement, crisp and out of place on the plateau. (Its presence there always irks me. Only an emergency of the direst sort could summon a helicopter from the mainland. A medical crisis. Life or death. The helipad is a constant reminder of menace.) Mick and I passed Sea Pigeon Gulch, where birds floated serenely on the tide. He was able to identify them for me—an auklet, an oystercatcher, a puffin. It was a bright, cloudless afternoon, the sky an almost painful shade of blue. The ocean was so flat that my depth perception disappeared from certain angles. It looked as though the water had been pinned up like a blanket from a clothesline, a vertical fall of cloth.
I have yet to make sense of the islands’ layout. There is a map tacked to the living room wall, and I have often examined it—an image that gives the impression that a chunk of granite has been dropped from a great height, shattering and strewing islets every which way. The oddest names are printed on that map. Garbage Gulch. Funky Arch. Emperor’s Bathtub. Some of the landmarks have more prosaic, shape-oriented titles: Tower Point, Low Arch, the Tit. The rest are named after the creatures you might find there. Sea Lion Cove. Mussel Flat. Great Murre Cave. I have studied that map often enough to memorize it, yet I can never seem to get my bearings when I am out on the grounds. In fact, I am half-convinced that the islands are not rooted at all, but move around whenever my back is turned, taking up brand-new positions elsewhere.
Finally
