Wheeling Gull Isle little star, tonight

“When beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it;
and would not willingly remember that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.”
—Moby Dick, Herman Melville

It was from those dark, tempestuous depths that a soul was cast, gleaming with all the placid splendor of sunlight on scintillating waves while deeper, subtler things unknown swirled beneath the surface. Unto the child of a sea nymph was this ocean soul bestowed, set sail into the land-bound world in a tiny vessel of feather-fine fur and insatiable hunger. Blind and deaf though he was, he uttered no cries as his mother cleaned away the grime from his frail body.  He was wrapped in the colors of salt-kissed rocks on wintry seas — dusty granite with pale legs and a collar of snowy white.  Despite his calm arrival, he fed upon her breast with the vigor of a ravening kraken and, ignorant of the siblings whose birth followed his own, knew contentment for a time.