Watercolour-style owl on upper back

The folk on the quay said owls brought bad luck to a house. Mags said that was the talk of people who had never had to count the boats twice. She fed it pilchards from the Thursday catch and it took them without thanks. Each night when the tide turned it lifted off the loft and flew low over the harbour mouth, and each morning it came back with the first grey light. Before long the men noticed that boats coming through the rocks in fog that should have sunk them were finding the channel clean.

In March the owl did not come back at dawn. Mags went down to the slip with the lamp and found a feather on the wet stones, slate grey and shot through with violet, and beyond the breakwater a hull she knew, riding empty, her husband's name still painted on the bow. She stood there until the cold got into her boots. Then, at the turn of the tide, the owl came in over the water with spray trailing from its feet, and behind it, one by one, the boats of Scarrow came round the point with their lamps lit, every one of them home.

Mags climbed back to the loft and set out a fresh saucer of pilchards. The owl ate them slowly, the way a man reads a letter he has been waiting for.