Thunderbird design across upper back

The panel came up out of the silt on the third low tide, and Oskar was the first to see the bird in it, its wings flung wide the way they were painted on the old boathouse door. The black has held better than the red. The red has gone the colour of weak tea, and the pink bands have lifted in curls where the damp got under them, but the oval eyes in each wing still look straight at you, and the face in the middle still has its mouth set shut like it knows something about the weather.

We have it propped against the stove in the mess hall. Marta wants to sell it to the salvage broker at the mainland jetty, and I told her she can carry it there herself. Those talons are as sharp as they were the day someone cut them, and I keep thinking about who held the knife. Nobody here can say. The boathouse was empty when we took the roof down, and the only paper we found was a tide table from a year nobody counts anymore.

I have been cleaning the surface with oil and a soft brush, one segment at a time, because it seemed wrong to rush a thing that has waited this long. Last night I got to the lower feathers and found a line of small marks scratched into the black, twelve of them, the way you would keep count of days. I don't know what they tally. I left them as they are.

Tell Sami the bird is still here, and that I will bring it with me when the boats go south in spring, if the mainland lets us through the gate. Keep the lamp lit for me.

Yours, Teodor