The two ships waited beyond the entrance to the bay with their lanterns covered. From shore they looked like two holes cut into the stars.
I was the youngest hand aboard the Night Heron, and therefore the one sent into the boat when nobody else wanted the job. Six of us pulled at the oars. Captain Vale sat beside a narrow chest, keeping one boot planted on its lid. He called our destination False Bay—the water people now know as Mission Bay.
“Quietly,” he said. “The tide is borrowing us this passage. It will want it back.”
We worked through the shallows until the keel touched mud. Beyond the reeds, a creek entered the bay from a dark opening between hills. Vale ordered us to shoulder the chest and follow it inland. Whatever else our captain had stolen, he had not stolen a pair of boots fit for mud; he slipped twice and blamed the moon both times.
The valley narrowed. Brush scraped our coats, and somewhere above us an owl gave one sharp call. Vale stopped so suddenly that the man behind him walked into his back.
“Our witness,” he whispered.
He had been counting. Not steps, as I first supposed, but bends in the creek. At the third bend he turned uphill. We came to a tree whose crooked shadow looked, by our single lantern, like a hand reaching toward the water. There the captain took a short spade from the chest's carrying straps.
I will confess that we were pirates. I will also confess that I never saw the treasure. When I asked if the box held silver, Vale said it held something silver could not purchase. That was just the sort of answer he gave whenever a plain answer would have served.
We buried it before the lantern burned low. The captain pressed the earth flat, scattered leaves over it, and took a folded scrap from his coat. On it he drew three marks: an owl, a stream, and a tree.
“A map?” I asked.
“A reminder.”
At the boat, he handed me the scrap. “If I fail to return, give this to somebody who knows how to read a place.”
By dawn the ships were gone. I had been left on shore with the boat, a crust of bread, and the captain's reminder. On its reverse I found one last line:
Begin where the owl watches. Follow the water. Let the oldest picture show you what the tree conceals.
Years later, when a farm occupied the valley, I still wondered what Vale had buried. Perhaps coins. Perhaps a confession. Perhaps the missing half of a story.
To be continued.
An imagined adventure set in the historic valley.