lone egret stood like a marble pillar. "And inside you, you've got
something Seth needs. Patience. Maybe too much of it in some areas."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
Ray sighed gustily. "There's something you don't have, Ethan, that you
need. You've been waiting around and making excuses to yourself and
doing not a damn thing to get it. You don't make a move soon, you're
going to lose it again."
"What?" Ethan shrugged and maneuvered the boat to the next float. "I've
got everything I need, and what I want."
"Don't ask yourself what, ask yourself who." Ray clucked his tongue,
then gave his son a quick shoulder shake. "Wake up, Ethan."
And he had awakened, with the odd sensation of that big, familiar hand
on his shoulder.
But, he thought as he brooded over his first cup of coffee, he still
didn't have the answers.
Chapter One
"got us some nice peelers here, cap'n." Jim Bodine culled crabs from the
pot, tossing the marketable catch in the tank. He didn't mind the
snapping claws--and had the scars on his thick hands to prove it. He
wore the traditional gloves of his profession, but as any waterman could
tell you, they wore out quick. And if there was a hole in them, by God,
a crab would find it.
He worked steadily, his legs braced wide for balance on the rocking
boat, his dark eyes squinting in a face weathered with age and sun and
living. He might have been taken for fifty or eighty, and Jim didn't
much care which end you stuck him in.
He always called Ethan Cap'n, and rarely said more than one declarative
sentence at a time.
Ethan altered course toward the next pot, his right hand nudging the
steering stick that most waterman used rather than a wheel. At the same
time, he operated the throttle and gear levels with his left. There were
constant small adjustments to be made with every foot of progress up the
line of traps.
The Chesapeake Bay could be generous when she chose, but she liked to be
tricky and make you work for her bounty.
Ethan knew the Bay as well as he knew himself. Often he thought he knew
it better--the fickle moods and movements of the continent's largest
estuary. For two hundred miles it flowed from north to south, yet it
measured only four miles across where it brushed by Annapolis and thirty
at the mouth of the Potomac River. St. Christopher's sat snug on
Maryland's southern Eastern Shore, depending on its generosity, cursing
it for its caprices.
Ethan's waters, his home waters, were edged with marshland, strung with
flatland rivers with sharp shoulders that shimmered through thickets of
gum and oak.
It was a world of tidal creeks and sudden shallows, where wild celery
and widgeongrass rooted.
It had become his world, with its changing seasons, sudden storms, and