Dusk- Wayfinding

He continued regardless, paddling his outrigger canoe until he drew a distance away—all around him was that same trembling ocean, not a speck of land in sight. He carried with him compass, map, and sextant…but today, he didn’t reach for any of those.

Instead he dipped his hand into the water and closed his eyes, reading the lapping of the waves to judge his position. Once, those waves would have been good enough for any of the Eelakin, his people. These days, only the trappers learned the old arts, the arts of the grand navigators from long ago. It was a mark of pride to him that he almost never needed the compass, and he had yet to encounter a situation where he had to rely on the new sea charts—given as gifts by the Ones Above during their visit earlier in the year. They were said to be more accurate than even the best Eelakin surveys.

He hated that such things existed. However, you could not stop times from changing. His mother’s words. You couldn’t stop times from changing any more than you could stop the surf from rolling. But he could remember. He pulled his hand from the ocean and got out his navigator’s book, where each day he recorded observations. The rising and setting of the sun, the locations of constellations, fish he’d seen and the direction they were swimming.

Wayfinding was a puzzle. In the old days, the great navigators would not sleep for as long as a week as they traveled—for they needed to record everything in incredible detail. Distance traveled, speed of motion, the angle of each day’s sailing as accounted by sun and stars.

Dusk fortunately didn’t need to be quite so detailed. So long as he passed shallows now and then, a modern anchor could keep him from drifting while he slept. And he knew that if he did drift too far, the compass, map, and sextant could get him back on track.

He still loved to do it the old way. He marked the school of slimfish, and knew—without needing to look—it meant he was getting close. The birds he’d seen in the distance yesterday had been enough. At night, birds headed toward land—and that had let him turn his course slightly. The snarl of seaweed—with a hook from some previous trapper caught in it—had been an obvious sign as well. Even the clouds could help, for green reflections on the bottoms of distant clouds meant land.

He finished his notations, then used his spyglass to scan for other signs. More birds. They’d be flying away from land this time of day… Yes, he was close.

Again, he dipped his hand into the water. Of all the ancient techniques, this was his favorite. For while you let your fingers trail in the water, with eyes closed, you could feel the waves…and large islands created different wave patterns. It worked best once you were close, of course, but with his fingers in the water…he almost felt like the islands were talking to him. Telling him, by how they interrupted the patterns, where they were.

He smiled and took out his old string map—made with wooden sticks on a board, used to show wave patterns and indicate how to find them around certain islands. He turned his boat with confidence—his birds chirping—and paddled straight on their new path.

It was not long, after the accounting of tides, before he was rewarded with first sight of an island. He’d done it, without picking up his compass a single time this trip. That was Sori: a small island in the Pantheon, and the most commonly visited. Her name meant “child”; Dusk vividly remembered training on her shores with his uncle.

Isles of the Emberdark Chapter 2