You stand where the fog-lane gives you a clean look east, and you let the Storm-Horse be what it is.

It is a breaking line. The bar is shallowest there; waves stand up, throw their manes, fall, stand up. From the quay it is a gallop. From here it is weather having a spine. Still astonishing. You understand every skipper who named it.

Pip whispers, “I wanted hooves.”

“You can keep the name,” you say. “You don’t have to put a bridle on the water.”

A gap shows, darker, between two white shoulders: the place a rip would run if you were foolish enough to be in it. Brine once said the kelpie’s ‘mouth’ is always the gap, not the pretty foam.

You can sit until the set chooses to move, and be a person in the picture.

You can step onto the bar because the legend still has its teeth in you.