EXCERPTS
This was how sailors knew Pomquet Island. It could be found at latitude 45⁰ 39” 40’N, longitude 61⁰ 44” 30’ W.
Mariners knew it as a “fixed red light”
Every morning there was prayer. The children knelt before their chairs and—quiet as mice—contemplated the words their
parents read aloud from the Bible.
“The Ugly Man and Mrs. Millar are gone to New Annan to bury your grandfather,” she told them bluntly. The sisters looked
at each other and their eyes widened in unison as they both realized the significance of the box they had sailed with the
night before.
Already, wisps of snow were drifting across a thin membrane beginning to form over the hole. If there were rifts caused
by the pressure of wind and sea on the ice of the bay, George and Ruth might never see them.
Malcolm felt himself sailing through the air, past a bird’s eye view of his tumbling horse’s underbelly, and smack into
a deep bed of old seaweed, now dry and buzzing with flies in the sun.
All his life, George had been casting off the weight and running the race of life with patience, just as it said in his
daily prayer. He couldn’t cast off the weight today, though. He needed Ruth to help him do it, and she wasn’t there.
