Barn owl on upper arm

She came aboard in a crate with a sack over it, a barn owl with a face like a heart cut from paper and eyes black as the coal bunker. The captain swore she'd never see the manifest. The rats didn't care for paperwork. Every night she dropped from that rail onto the bread room, and every morning there'd be a little pile of grey fur by the flour sacks, neat as sorting. The men fed her scraps of salt pork and called her the second mate, which she took as her due.

Off the Horn the weather came down on us like a fist. The seas stove in the galley hatch and the water rose to the stove grate, and the cook, which was me, lost his footing and his nerve in the same breath. I thought we'd all go under. But when I found my way back up the ladder with the lamp, there was Mrs Pell, wings half open, dry as a bone on the highest beam, watching me as if I were the one who'd made a mess of things.

We raised Valparaiso eleven days later. When they opened the hatch to unload, she went out over the harbour in one long pale stroke and never came back. The rats came back too, and I've been keeping my flour sealed ever since, and it still isn't enough.

So when you hear something moving in the sacks tonight, boy, you leave it be. It's only a cousin of hers, come to see whether we've learned anything.