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Elizabeth reached inside her jacket for her radio to call Gregor. Just as she was about to thumb the dial, she heard behind her the sound of heavy footsteps crunching up the beach. Startled, but not scared—someone might have landed silently from a boat or skiff while she was preoccupied—she turned around, and came face-to-face with her second unknown species of the morning.

    At first, as before, Elizabeth’s perception tried to make sense of what she saw in terms of what she knew. The figure stood about two and a half meters tall, and about twenty meters away from her. It could have been a fat gigant in a black wetsuit. But the staring eyes and opening mouth and snorting nostrils were set in the same shining hair-covered skin as the rest of it. The rest of him. He had long hands and feet, and his neck sloped smoothly to his shoulders, but otherwise his proportions and features were human. She realized that he could be one of the marine mammals she’d noticed earlier.
    He said something, in a deep, barking voice, but evidently speech. He spread his broad hands wide, palms forward, and then walked towards her, staring with apparent curiosity all the while, and repeating his utterances. Elizabeth backed away. He stepped over the boulder she’d thought to shelter behind, and paused to look down at her gear, with a long sniffling snort. Then he strode forward again, to stop before the small excavation she’d made. The cliff face was pressing into her back. She could feel the revolver in her thigh pocket knocking her leg as her knees quivered.
    He squatted down and poked a long finger at the strange bones, stirring them gently. Then he stood up and looked straight at her. He pointed at the bones, then pointed to the sky, then looked up and slowly brought his arm around and down until it was pointing at an angle to the ground. He dropped his arm to his side, raised it and pointed at her, waved his arm about, and made a loud grunt.
    The only sound she could make in response was what came from her teeth chattering. He cocked his head, turning a small ear to her, then faced her directly. He rocked his head from side to side, shrugged, turned and walked back down the beach and, without breaking step, into the water until he was waist-deep, and stooped forward and was suddenly gone with barely a splash.
    Elizabeth’s thumb at last engaged the knurl of the dial, her fingers found the switch. Finding the right channel was easy; there was no other traffic here.
    “Gregor—”
    “Are you all right?”
    Deep breath. “Yeah, I’m fine. But I think you’d better come over here quickly. I’ve . . . found something interesting.”
    “Okay. Be right over. Signing off.”
    Hands shaking, Elizabeth opened the flask and poured herself some coffee, as if to return to her interrupted action, and therefore to her previous equilibrium. She kept looking out to sea—where the round black heads bobbed up as before—and over to her left, to the whaling station. She’d taken only a few sips and slurps of coffee when she saw the skiff rise from behind the tumbledown wooden buildings and the ochre boilers to skim along the beach towards her, its course so steady that it seemed to enlarge rather than approach. The lens-shaped, fifteen-meter-wide craft halted a few meters away and hovered. Its three landing legs telescoped out, their bases grinding into the pebbles as the field was powered down and its weight came back. The hatch on the underside opened, the stair ladder extended, and Gregor descended. He ran over to her and caught her in his arms.
    “I’m all right,” she insisted.
    “You look like you’ve had a shock.”
    “Um,” she said, pushing him away gently. “One at a time.” She showed him the thing she’d dug up. Gregor glanced at her, whistled, drew a long breath in through his teeth, and squatted down and poked at the bones with his forefinger, just as the other primate had done. He stayed looking for a minute, then stood up.
    “You know,” he said,