Old Tomás knew the estuary the way he knew his own hands. Each morning the tide crept in from the east, one column of mudflat at a time, until the whole basin gleamed. He timed his nets by it. But the morning after the northeaster, something was wrong: the western sandbar had breached, and seawater was pooling on the far shore — the leftmost column of his grid — while the column just beside it, sheltered by the remaining bar, stayed dry. It was the only dry strip in the whole estuary. By the next tide the bar had mended and the old pattern returned.