Lost Children of the Far Islands (27 page)

“She’s special,” Gus said, making quotation marks in the air. She was smiling as she shrugged into what was starting to feel like her real body, the one that waited under her human body like skin under a set of clothes.

The three seals dove into the sea where the wounded seal waited for them.

“Welcome,” she said.

There was so much to say! Gus struggled to begin the seal language. But before she could speak again, the old seal began swimming away, slowly but steadily. After a brief hesitation and one last look back at Loup Marin, the three seals followed her. Behind them, the other seals spread out in a loose V, flanking and protecting their journey. Along the way, strange, foamy rollers appeared and disappeared around them. Gus thought she heard a scrap of singing somewhere not very far away, but she could never be sure of that.

* * *

They swam through the night, reaching their destination as morning began to pinken the sky and warm the top layer of the water. When the four seals surfaced, they could see a rocky shoreline and, above that, a long lawn that sloped upward to a small white house whose windows all looked out on the sea. In one of the windows stood two figures, waiting.

The Móraí swam to Leo and touched his nose with her own. She did the same to Gus and finally to Ila, who let out a little bark of sadness.

Then, with one last long look that took in the three seals, the rocky shore, and the house with the two human silhouettes in the living room window, the seal drew in a breath and dove. And as she did, all of the other seals did as well, so that the water went from lumpy to as flat and unmoving as a pane of glass.

Gus felt a sharp, keen thing in her heart. She knew they would not see the Móraí again.

Ahead of her, Ila burst out of the water in her human form and began to scramble up the rocks.

Leo and Gus looked at one another and, with a strange feeling that was a mix of joy and loss, they slipped out of their seal shapes and splashed out after their little sister.

“I wonder what we’ve missed,” Leo said as they began to walk slowly up the back lawn. He felt like he was waking from a long, complicated dream.

“I don’t know,” Gus said. It seemed so distant. School, friends—all the things of their former lives seemed very far away.
This must be how adults remember childhood
, she thought.

“Do you think we’ll ever be able to Turn again?” Gus asked.

“I don’t know,” Leo said.

Gus felt a pang of loss, and thought one more time of the Móraí, and the little cottage nestled in the shadow of a lighthouse on one of the Far Islands. For a moment, her eyes swam with tears.

Then the back door of the house was flung open and their father burst out, calling their names, and behind him came their mother.

Ila shouted, “Mom!” her voice carrying clearly across the lawn and all the way to the sea. Their mother laughed to hear her speak and then began to weep and took her into her arms. Their father stood next to them with his hand on Ila’s head, his eyes on Gus and Leo. Leo took Gus’s hand and squeezed it hard. She squeezed back, and then they began to run up the lawn, to where Ila and their parents waited for them.

And in the small library at the back of the house, hidden behind a pile of old and dusty magazines, a brown leather book breathed gently, waiting.

Selkies, it seems, have been around for as long as we have had stories to tell about them. I started thinking about them several years ago when I saw the film
The Secret of Roan Inish
, about a girl in Ireland who is searching for her brother, Jamie, who she believes was taken by seals when his cradle washed out to sea. That film is based on a novel for children by Rosalie K. Fry called
Secret of the Ron Mor Skerry
. The book is (sadly) out of print, but you might be able to find it at your library.

Selkies (also called silkies or selchies) can be found in the stories of people living near the sea in Ireland, Scotland, England, the Faeroe Islands, and even Iceland. Selkies are “seal people,” creatures that can exist in either human or animal form. You may have heard the story of the seal wife, which is told in many different ways and in many cultures: a fisherman finds the sealskin of a selkie woman and steals it, forcing her to come with him and be his wife. Many years later, one of the woman’s children finds the sealskin hidden away and asks his mother about it. As soon as the seal wife spots her skin, she rushes to the sea and throws it on, turning instantly back into a seal. The seal wife never returns to land, although many of the stories say that she visits in seal form every so often to bring fish to her human children.

So there I was, thinking about selkies, when I came
across a book at my local library. It was just a small, tattered paperback, but something about it caught my eye. The book was called
The People of the Sea
, written by a man named David Thomson. It recounts Thomson’s actual search for tales about the “seal people” among the inhabitants of the coasts and islands of Scotland and Ireland. The book tells of dark-eyed people with webbed fingers, of seals who came into kitchens looking for their lost children, of fishermen rescued from drowning by seals. I signed the book out again and again, and finally got my own copy.

The People of the Sea
describes more than selkies. It also tells of a creature that I had never heard of before—the Dobhar-chú, or “King Otter.” I started to research the Dobhar-chú—which is pronounced DOO-
wuhr
-
coo
—and found stories of the creature all over Ireland. Also known as the “water hound” or “hound of the deep,” and, occasionally, the “king of the lakes,” the Dobhar-chú lives in lakes, rivers, and the depths of the sea, is pure white with a cross of brown on its back, and can tunnel underground through rock and earth. The Dobhar-chú is a cryptid (from the Greek
kryptos
, meaning “hidden”)—that is, a creature in whose existence many people believe, although it has not been proved by science (like the Loch Ness monster, the yeti, or … selkies!). For those who doubt, there is a grave in a cemetery in County Leitrim, in Ireland, of a woman named Gráinne, who, according to her gravestone, was killed by a Dobhar-chú in the seventeenth century. And an Irish artist named Sean
Corcoran says he saw a Dobhar-chú in 2003 in a lake in Connemara, in County Galway.

I could find no sign of the Dobhar-chú in America, and we do not have many stories of the selkies, even in our coastal towns. So for
Lost Children of the Far Islands
, I decided to bring the selkies and the Dobhar-chú to Maine.

If you want to read more about selkie myths, here are some books that were useful to me:

If you want to read more fiction in which selkies are featured, try these books:

The idea for this book began in two places: at the Ragdale Foundation Artist’s Residency in the form of a conversation about selkies with Brendan Isaac Jones, and within the hallowed walls of the Flying Pig Bookstore in Shelburne, Vermont. Thank you, Ragdale; thank you, Brendan; and thank you, Josie and Elizabeth, for running the best bookstore in America! The actual book was written in many, many places. Thanks to both my parents and my parents-in-law, who offered up quiet places in Vermont and Ireland where I could hole up and write. Thanks also to the Ryan barn in Springs, the Society Library in Manhattan, and the Ost coffee shop in the East Village—you guys may not know it, but I wrote the final draft of this novel in your warm and welcoming space, fired up by your perfect cappuccinos!

My brothers and sisters read drafts, sent encouragement, ran story lines by their own children, and most important, believed in me from the very beginning. I love you guys. Many, many thanks to my agent, George Nicholson, whose enthusiasm for the early draft of this book changed my life. Thanks also to my incredibly talented editor, Michelle Frey, who pushed me (gently) to fill in every gap and do the hard work, and her assistant Kelly Delaney—you two are a great team! And finally, to
my husband, Paul, who worked tirelessly on this book as combination Head Cheerleader/Strength Coach: I could not have done it without you.

In writing the story, I drew on a wonderful little book called
The People of the Sea
by David Thomson.
The People of the Sea
gave me not only my seals but my monster as well.

Emily Raabe is a writer and poet who lives in New York City with her husband.
Leave It Behind
, her first book of poems, was a finalist for the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize. She is the author of several nonfiction books for children.
Lost Children of the Far Islands
is her first novel.