Crow was no surfer: even wearing a man's skin, he still saw the sea with the eyes of a bird. He rode the currents of the winds without fear, but the thought of trying the same in the churning ocean left him feeling faintly sick. The sea was a realm apart, dark and airless and wild in a way he didn't quite understand. All in all, he felt safer paddling around the edges. Besides, his last venture over the Pacific hadn't gone at all well.
The beach, though, the beach he loved. The sizzling glare of the sun in the high summer, the briny air - carrying with it, when the wind was right, the faint but unmistakeable scent of the eucalypt trees, brought here a century earlier by Australians come to seek their fortunes in the goldfields. It was nothing more than the faintest of echoes of the land that had birthed him, but he breathed it in gratefully, and as he watched the waves swell and crash on the beach he could not help but think that this same ocean, these same waters even now lapped the shores of the home he had left behind.
And when night fell, though the campfires of the sky realm formed strange and different configurations, if he looked he could still find the Sisters, the Two Men, even old Eagle.
He wondered if they saw him, too.
He doubted it.
As he padded along the sand, shading his eyes with a hand against the brilliance of the sunset, he spied a woman, dark-skinned and beautiful. She was set up a little way down the beach, and the light of the dying sun played golden and crimson along the curves of her still-damp body as she moved gracefully through a series of yoga postures.
As he watched her the wind shifted ever so slightly, filling his nostrils with the scent of salt and - very faintly - of ash. He realised he'd stopped walking.
Crow canted his head, more birdlike than usual, and with a sudden, unexplainable impulse, he raised his hand in a wave.