Beyond the Bright Sea

When Crow turns 12, she hears from Maggie that Penikese has been turned into a bird sanctuary monitored by a gamekeeper. This comes as a surprise, since Penikese has been uninhabited and unused since the leper colony and hospital closed several years ago—most people, knowing the island’s past, want to stay far away from it.

Roaming the beach one night, Crow sees a light burning on Penikese. The gamekeeper must have lit a bonfire, yet she and Maggie cannot come up with a reason why. She thinks Osh would brush the incident off, because he seems uninterested in what goes on beyond his small world. Maggie tells Crow that when Osh first arrived on the island, he smashed up his boat—the “[f]irst time [Maggie] ever seen a captain wreck his own boat” (41). Now that he has Crow, he has no plans to leave the island. Crow’s curiosity gets the better of her, and she watches as another fire burns on Penikese the next night. Just as she and Maggie suspected, Osh is uninterested, attributing the fire to a treasure hunter or some other casual visitor.

Maggie tells Crow more stories about Osh’s rugged beginnings in the Elizabeths. At first, he did not speak at all, and ate “starfish soup,” or water flavored with