I lay on my back on the narrow teak deck, curving my body slightly with the line of the gunnel. The mast and rigging, a geometry in spidery black lines, penetrated the blue black sky. The night had the sort of muffled quality of cloud cover, starless.

Moonless, the water was an inky sheet of blackness under the deep sky, and across the water a forested shore was made of an even deeper, unknowable darkness.

Wolves howled, raw voices against the black. My sister and I howled back, questioning. A call-and-answer began. Eerie voices crooning animal wishes. In the stillness, the voices echoed from the coal dark shore, across the velvet smooth water, like they were whispering their mournful chant right into my ear. And I lay there, just my small girl’s head stuck out of a sleeping bag into the wild night air.