The side decks were also embellished with gulls, so too with the tiller and aft rail. So soothing was their company that I tried to retreat below without noise or disruption, but the gull I’d first startled—who must’ve been sitting on the hatch as I opened it—said a small phrase, murk murk, and quietly lifted himself in the air. At this the others took notice and, still without panic, decided en masse to go rest someplace else, someplace without a greasy emerging behemoth. They got up in a small cloud of twenty or thirty birds and flew off with faint questioning cries. How easy and unworried
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