On clear days golden light shines across the Atlantic Ocean onto the island of Pico. The light bathes the red roofs of the village houses, the rocky black coast, and the dark flanks of the volcano for which the island is named. At Lajes, Mount Pico rises so sharply the villagers must crane their necks to see the bare summit with its thin stream of smoke spiraling into deep-blue sky. Below the summit, on the volcano’s wide middle slopes, green pastures and fern-laced laurel forests spread over the cloud zone. On the lower slopes, rock-terraced fields of grapes, potatoes, and maize descend slowly seaward to dense patches of blackberry bramble and the cave-riddled coast.

As the farmers walk home, small bats have yet to emerge from the cedar forest and from beneath cottage eaves. Instead an açor flies along the coast, hunting rabbits, rock pigeons, or puppies. The hawk is older than the ways of the farmers, and its presence unsettles the men. A herald of death, it reminds the farmers of an ancient force at work throughout the natural world—a force that triggers change and, unmindful of habit, transforms lives. One such life belonged to Joaquim.

On a late afternoon in June, Joaquim sat in the open doorway of his family’s cottage. The cottage stood on top of a small rise near the east edge of Lajes do Pico, and Joaquim lived there with his grandfather, his sister, Fátima, and Fátima’s baby, his godchild. On that afternoon, as on many, he propped his lame right leg on the step and held a telescope to his right eye. His father, a whaler who drowned at sea when Joaquim was a young boy, had given him the instrument. Through the telescope lens the west end of the village loomed with its small harbor, salt-water tidal flat, and headland. Gulls and terns careened over the ocean. On the tidal flat an açor flew over rush and grass.

At the cottage, sunlight poured through the open doorway and onto the packed-dirt floor. It warmed Joaquim’s legs and cast a mote-filled path of light into the dim interior, where a bantam hen poked around the cold hearth filled with spent morning ashes. Fátima and the baby were napping in the back room. In the front room Lucas, Joaquim’s grandfather, sat with his friend Manuel. The two men faced one another, each astride a boxlike wooden stool. Lucas spoke softly, his voice filling the small room with a low, beelike rumbling that was occasionally broken by a sharp exclamation from Manuel.

Recently Manuel had taken to visiting in the late afternoons, his hair slicked back and smelling of pomade. Lucas’ junior by ten years and a lifelong bachelor, he had a straight back and an eye for the women. The two men would drink sour wine and tell stories, each tale more unlikely than the one before it. “This story caused a strong man to faint,” Lucas, famous on the island for his stories, would begin. And the two men would continue, until the bottle was empty or one or both of them had fallen asleep.

Joaquim listened to his grandfather and Manuel tell stories as he listened to wind blow and seabirds caw. Many afternoons, while his grandfather’s voice rose and fell like a wave, Joaquim sat in the doorway and trained the telescope on the gold-shot ocean, where fishes flashed in silver schools. Now and again, over deep offshore waters, he saw whales spout fountains of sparkling mist; and once, at the edge of the rock-bound cove east of the village, he glimpsed a sinuous solitary shape—a giant squid, which slipped out through the cove’s narrow outlet and in long smooth pulses jetted into open water. Joaquim longed to swim after the squid and never turn back. It was impossible, but that was what he wanted. His mother told him that at his birth the curiosa had pointed to a pattern of purple disk-shaped marks on his right inner arm and said, “Now and again a child is born with such a sign—he is from another realm and to that realm will return.” Another meaningless story, he thought, tracing with the telescope the flight of the hawk, like his mother’s stories of her many-times great-grandfather, a Spanish sailor who washed ashore in the aftermath of a volcanic explosion, and the stories of Lucas and Manuel.

Joaquim’s stomach growled. He was hungry, and he hoped his sister would start the evening meal soon. He would have helped her, but his grandfather would not have liked it.

In the front room Manuel began to speak loudly, his eyes on the entrance to the small room at the back of the cottage. “A house big enough for your needs and land as far as you can see,” he shouted.

Lucas sat with his head down, eyes on his swollen bare feet and the blackened nails of his great toes. “Hard bread is better than ripe figs,” he said, glancing at the family altar set in the corner of the room. The altar was a single plank of cedar supported by two large black stones of roughly equal size. On the wall above the plank hung a rough painting of Jesus, whose downcast gaze appeared to fall on the centerpiece of the altar—an eighteen-inch-high painted wood statue of the Virgin Mary, blue-robed and flanked by a glass jar filled with pink roses. Behind the statue Lucas had hidden a tobacco tin containing a few escudos. He had told Joaquim about the tin, and forbidden him to open it. The money was to buy more pasturage for cattle in the cloud zone. “To provide a living for you and your sister,” Lucas had said—for one useless grandchild and one in disgrace.

The last time Joaquim looked, there wasn’t enough money in the tin to buy ferry passage to the near island of Faial, which lay a scant five miles across the channel and whose low green hills were clearly visible from the port of Madalena. It might as well have been five hundred miles. His maternal grandparents lived on Faial, in the town of Horta, but he and his sister had not seen them since their mother’s funeral seven years earlier.

“Now this is a story that truly happened,” Lucas said, pitching his voice to tell a story. “It was right here at the village harbor. I was only a boy, but I remember it well.”

“How old were you this time?” Manuel asked. “You’re a different age each time you tell the story.”

“It was June, 1901. Forty-five years ago, and I was seventeen—as Joaquim is now, though unlike him, I’d already harpooned my first whale.” Lucas held his empty glass toward Manuel. “Not that it’s Joaquim’s fault,” he added. “But his father took his first whale at fifteen. What an arm he had!”

Manuel poured wine into Lucas’ glass and refilled his own.

“It was the day the crew from Alliança brought in the whale,” Lucas continued. “The clouds hung over the sea, and I could smell the smoke from the blubber pots as I walked down from the cloud forest after milking the cows. When I reached the harbor, the crew had already cut off the whale’s head and stripped most of the blubber. The men were wading in blood, just as they do now.

“The body of the whale rested on the slipway, and my father and two other men stood on a scaffold before it. With long knives they cut across the belly of the whale, and when they reached the end of the carcass, an arm large as a man’s thigh and long as a canoa shot out from the gut. One of the men tumbled off the platform and onto the ground. A second arm shot out, then eight more, followed by the head and body of a giant squid. The squid dropped onto the scaffold, and the scaffold collapsed—planks, men, and squid falling in a heap.”

Joaquim, who had heard the story many times, knew what was coming.

“Everyone was yelling,” his grandfather said. “The first man who fell was knocked unconscious. The squid grabbed him, along with the second man, and dragged them to the water. My father ran after them, but he was too slow. Waves of color rushed over the body of the squid—purple, brown, and gray. With his knife the second man cut through the arm that gripped him, severing it from the squid and freeing himself. Then the squid, taking the first man with it, plunged into the water and vanished in a cloud of ink.

“Days passed before the harbor cleared of blood and ink. The first man was never found. The second bore the marks of the squid for the rest of his life.”

“A devil-fish,” Manuel said.

“So some say,” Lucas said. “Others say it was a man who was bewitched by the sea.”

Manuel lifted the empty wine bottle, shook it, and turned to Joaquim.

Joaquim looked away. He picked up the telescope and watched the hawk fly over a cornfield below the cottage. Behind him footsteps sounded. He turned and saw Fátima entering the room. Her face was fresh and rosy from sleep, and an ivory-colored scarf held back her glossy black hair. As she walked past the hearth and toward Joaquim, her long full skirt swished against her bare ankles. In one hand she carried a mirror framed in tortoise shell. Through the open doorway, late afternoon sunlight illuminated the ebony and amber colors of the frame, glanced off the surface of the mirror, and fell on the whitewashed walls, scattering a spangled path before her.

The older men fell silent. Manuel brushed his hand across his hair. Lucas leaned his stool against the wall and closed his eyes.

“Is the baby sleeping?” Joaquim asked.

Fátima nodded and knelt on the floor beside him. The hen followed her and stood with its head cocked at the reflection in the mirror.

The mirror had appeared early in Fátima’s pregnancy—a gift from her lover, she’d told everyone, a golden-haired man with sky-blue eyes who’d walked out of the sea. More likely, Lucas had said, the man was one of the Allied soldiers who came to the Azores during the war. Joaquim thought both stories were true.

Fátima turned the mirror toward the doorway. In the reflection Joaquim glimpsed clouds on the twilit horizon and, for a moment, the açor flying low over the deep-green foliage of a nearby stand of cedar.

“What’s for dinner?” he asked.

She shifted the mirror, and the horizon disappeared. “I don’t know.”

Lucas sighed.

“Kale soup and maize bread,” Manuel said. “Some fresh cheese. These are best for a man’s estomago. Now and again, some fish stew or linguiça with yams. I am not a fussy eater.”

“There’s soup,” Fátima said, “but not enough for four.”

Manuel, hands on his knees, stared at Lucas until Lucas looked up and, with a shrug, nodded toward the door. Manuel got up, almost stepping on the hen, which had wandered toward him. The hen skittered into the open doorway. A swift dark shape cast a sudden shadow onto the floor. Fátima dropped the mirror, and Manuel cried out. Joaquim and Lucas stumbled to their feet. Swift-winged, the açor caught the hen in its talons and then was gone, in seconds vanished into the stand of cedar.

In silence the sun slid onto the horizon and bats flew from under the cottage eaves to sea. On the floor chicken feathers mixed with glittering mirror fragments. Lucas and Manuel made the sign of the cross. “Did you see that?” they asked one another as they peered through the doorway into deepening dusk. Fátima, surrounded by a pool of broken glass, stared into the empty frame of the mirror.

“Be careful!” Joaquim said.

Dragging his right foot, he moved toward his sister. His whole leg felt numb from sitting. Each day it grew heavier, weighed down by the useless foot, whose toes in the past year had begun to club. Lucas claimed someone had given Joaquim the evil eye; the curiosa said Joaquim had poor circulation. Whatever the cause, each day the toes and nails of his right foot grew more curved and blunted, the skin bluer-tinged. Slowly, he made his way to Fátima and put his arms around her.

“He told me to look for him in the mirror,” Fátima said.

Joaquim’s voice was rich, quiet, and clear. “You have the frame,” he said. “You don’t need the glass,”

“It’s bad luck.”

“No. There’s the frame. You can imagine the glass.”

She looked at him and smiled, one corner of her mouth awry. “It’s a shame the hawk took the hen and left Manuel,” she said softly.

Joaquim laughed. “Now that would be a tale to cause a strong man to faint.”

At the doorway their grandfather turned back. “What’s so funny?” he said. “That was a damn good hen!”

Later, after Manuel had gone home and the soup had been eaten, Lucas said to Fátima,“How will you find a husband if you fail to respect family friends? Bearing a stranger’s child is bad enough.”

“I don’t want a husband,” she said.

“You will.”

At daybreak when Joaquim left the cottage, Fátima and the baby were still asleep and fog drifted over the sea. By the time he reached the rock-bound cove east of the village, the fog had lifted and a diffuse light washed onto the shore. Beyond the cove the lead-colored sea edged into mist, and inland low-lying fields spread under gray clouds. He sat alone on the black sand-and-pebble beach and ate a breakfast of cold broth and maize bread.

After eating, he lay on the beach and propped himself on one elbow, with the telescope scanning the sea currents and swift diving birds. He saw no whale blow on the open water and no sinuous shape at the edge of the cove. Rolling onto his back, he stretched his arms above his head. Sunlight broke through the clouds and warmed his bare chest. He took off his pants, wrapped the telescope inside them and set them on the sand above the tidemark, then limped into the cool sea. With powerful, slow strokes he swam to the far edge of the cove. He dived, turning heels overhead in a smooth swirl of motion before rising to the surface. Now that the water buoyed him, his lame foot was no burden.