As the meeting drew to a close, the President said, smugly: “As for how we’re going to get ahold of the foxes, leave that to me, my dear friends. Having anticipated that you would decide in favor of this measure, just as you’ve done, I’ve already placed an order by satellite phone for twenty foxes, ten of them male and ten female. The villagers I used to go hunting with are going to send them over by ferry straightaway. We’re going to be free of this scourge very soon now. Thanks to your decisive attitudes, I have nothing but complete confidence in our ability to rid ourselves of this plague upon the island. I’m proud of the dedication you’ve all shown for its sake. Long live our island, down with the seagulls!”

  The crowd was still applauding and shouting “Down with the seagulls!” as we quietly left the scene.

  We were in the minority now, and though we weren’t admitting it to each other, it was also true that we had become afraid of the community; or, in other words, afraid of our neighbors and our friends.

  I ’LL NEVER FORGET the day you shouted at our neighbor friends, “What are you, stark raving mad?” Even your thinning beard seemed to quiver with rage as you held your hands out to either side, looked into everyone’s eyes, and cried out, “Have you gone mad? Have you gone completely insane?!”

  The only other time I’ve ever seen you so enraged was when you were arguing with the President. I used to witness your occasional bouts of anger, but never—apart from your argument with the President—had I seen you explode the way you did then. The intensity of your anger took us all by surprise. You were never a cheerful fellow, a shadow of grief forever wandering about your face, and you would have your tense moments, so I was under the impression that you had a secret you didn’t share with us, a wound you kept hidden somewhere down deep. Lara and I would even talk about it from time to time, asking each other what it could be that was such a source of heartache to our dear friend. But your anger this time was far different. That, I imagine, must have been the day you realized that we had lost our island forever, even as we had yet to discover what it meant to lose an island.

  Your reaction to the islanders’ lack of concern reminded me of the story of Jesus’s retreat into the mountains. You know the one—that wonderful story the two of us had once talked about. Seeing the Prophet running toward the mountain, bystanders were said to have asked him, “Oh, Almighty Jesus! Is it a lion you’re running away from?”

  “No!” Jesus was said to have replied.

  “Is it a tiger—or perhaps a dragon?”

  “No,” said Jesus again, then added, “I’m the Prophet. I’m not afraid of lions or tigers.”

  “Then why are you running?” they asked him.

  “I’m running away from the idiots,” Jesus supposedly said. “When it comes to them, I don’t stand a chance.”

  Our friends remained silent in the face of your irate questions—besides, what could they have said? They were bewildered by the events of recent days, with some wearing pots on their heads, while others wore saucepans. Skittish and frightened, they anxiously searched the sky every now and then as they listened to you speak.

  “Why don’t you try using your heads a little, my friends!” you continued. “Were the seagulls ever our enemies? In all these years, was there ever the least instance of conflict between them and us? Did you ever have the slightest problem with them before this man came to our island?”

  A few people slowly shook their heads “no.”

  And yet I knew, although they said nothing to your face, that many of them spoke behind your back. I would happen to hear people speak ill of you from time to time.

  “Well, now, wouldn’t you know it! The guy fancies himself the seagulls’ lawyer!”

  “Seagulls, friends? What planet is he on?”

  “And he thinks he’s fit to be a teacher to us?”

  “As if our friend laid up in bed weren’t our friend!”

  “The poor carpenter is dead.”

  “The nerve of him, actually defending those hideous, savage creatures!”

  “After all this injury, all this destruction…”

  Though I tried to defend you, I knew that it was pointless to expect they would change their minds. Fear had done such a number on their heads that getting them to see things any other way was no better than a pipe dream, at this point. They’d all invested their hope in the foxes, their “saviors.” The foxes would come, eat the seagulls’ eggs, and thus do away with these brutal creatures at their very roots, or so the theory went. Then the seagulls would get what they deserved. Though large numbers of them still thrived after the islanders had killed so many, it would be a whole other ballgame once the foxes arrived. And then we’d see if the seagulls could wear out the foxes like they had the humans.

  THE ISLANDERS spent that week in a state of suspense as they waited for the ferry that would come bearing the foxes. The long-awaited day arrived at last, and the grand white ferry came into view on the horizon. Feeling bolder after the cessation of the seagulls’ attack, we gathered at the pier. The President and his men stood at its edge, staring out at the motorboat as it brought in an assortment of supplies from the ferry.

  It drew up to the pier and, one after the other, cardboard boxes, specially protective wooden containers containing glass goods, and packages of food were unloaded onto the dock. There wasn’t a one among them that bore semblance to a fox cage. The President frowned, looking worried.

  His men asked the men on the boat where the foxes were. The ferry crew then hoisted up a large cardboard box and laid it at the President’s feet. He flashed an order with his eyes for the men to open the box and remove its contents. The frozen-faced men presented him with a row of fox furs. The box also contained a letter, addressed to the President. One of the men read it aloud: “Dear Mr. President, on receiving your order, our hunters took immediate action and caught twenty foxes. In order not to damage the furs, we killed them with poison, preparing these furs for you with the utmost care. As the people of the region, we hereby express our gratitude for your having remembered us after all these years and for allowing us the opportunity to carry out your order.”

  “Idiots!” barked the President, kicking the box. “Once they’ve been turned into furs, what difference does it make whether they’re male or female? Were your heads too thick for you to figure that out, too?!”

  Long suffering from days fraught with tension, we island folk actually laughed for the first time in quite a while, but that just incensed His Holiness all the more.

  “Get me that jackass who calls himself the governor—and do it now!” he shouted, and stepped into the motorboat that had been moored for days at the pier. The gadgets on the boat that we’d taken to be radar equipment apparently included a satellite phone, as well.

  A while later the President’s bellowing voice sounded from within the boat: “I asked you to get me live foxes, not furs…How, how…Yes, obviously, but…do you think I would have asked for ten males and ten females in that case? Since when have furs come in male and female, you fool!”

  His face had turned purple by the time he reached the pier a few minutes later. He shot us all a hostile glance before spitting out: “There’s been a minor delay in our plans. The foxes will be here next week!” Then abruptly, he took off.

  The next week passed without incident. The seagulls stood watch over their eggs on their own cove as usual, and carried on flying about, doing no one any harm. It was as though a cease-fire had been declared. In time, the islanders gave up carrying pots and pans over their heads. What’s more, thanks to the painstaking care with which our doctor had treated him, our guitarist friend was recovering more quickly than we’d expected. Though he didn’t take up his guitar, his flutist friend would visit him often and play for him.

  It was around this time that something happened to draw my attention. It apparently was of such little significance that it could easily have slipped my notice altogether. You remember the grocer’s son I mentioned a while back? The peculiar, hunchbacked boy was such a familiar figure to us that we hardly noticed his existence. But on this particular day, he’d caught my attention; he seemed to be hiding something inside his jacket, glancing furtively this way and that as he rushed on, apparently agitated.

  The boy’s behavior was so strange and unexpected that I wouldn’t have believed it if someone had described it to me. I was in the pines, in a location above the boy where he couldn’t see me. Unable to resist my curiosity, I quietly began to follow him. The youth disappeared behind the grocery shop; when he returned a few minutes later, he was no longer hiding anything, his arms swinging freely at his sides. After he was gone, I went to the back of the shop.

  Before me was a large chicken coop. The grocer would sell us the chickens and eggs he raised in the coop, from time to time cooking chicken instead of fish at the garden café. I wondered what the boy could be hiding there. I stood looking carefully, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. The chickens were wandering around inside the cage, clucking and pecking at their grains of feed. After looking a little longer, however, I noticed what they were busying themselves with was not only their food. They’d gathered around a few eggs. The eggs were a different shape and size than your ordinary chicken egg—they appeared to be rounder and whiter. Then suddenly it hit me clear as a bell what the boy was up to. I remembered the way he had crouched down and then stood up on the day of the seagull massacre. At the time, I hadn’t been able to make any sense out of his actions, but it was plain to me now that he had been trying to rescue the eggs, secretly carrying them to the chicken coop and placing them under the chickens.

  How strange the human species is, I thought. What you can discover in people in whom you would least expect to find it. Were the seagulls’ eggs being accepted among the chickens? I wondered. Were the chickens keeping them warm, incubating them as they sat on them? There wasn’t a single chicken on top of the eggs I saw among the straw, but I also couldn’t see what was beneath some of the sitting chickens. Naturally he would know the chickens better than I, considering that he was the only one who entered the cage and gathered the eggs. Maybe this covert rescue operation was in fact serving some good, who knows.

  “Good for you, kiddo!” I thought. “Clever idea!”

  I was itching to tell the Writer and Lara about my discovery.

  At any rate, here I’ve gone and digressed yet again…So, yes; as expected, the next week, the big ferry delivered a cage to the island. On seeing the foxes, restlessly circling around one another inside the cage as it was being removed from the motorboat, the President and the island community were in a state of rapture. You’d have thought it was rescue angels rather than foxes that had arrived, because such spontaneous gleeful applause resulted.

  Decked out in white, the President—his face more shark-like than ever today, and his eyes drawn even closer together—broke out into a victory speech. The reign of the seagulls on the island was about to end. The sophisticated strategy of pitting an enemy against an enemy would take care of the problem at its very source. The islanders would be able to breathe easily again and look to the future with a feeling of reassurance. Very soon now, every nook and cranny of the island territory would be secure, and our community would be free of the threat of terror.

  The President’s speech was interrupted by frequent applause. A ceremony then accompanied the opening of the cage door. The foxes first paused, awakening from their travel sedation, then slowly drew up to the door and tentatively peeked their heads in and out of the cage. Then, all at once, the ten male and ten female foxes rushed off toward the forest and disappeared. Another species had been added to the creatures living on the island.

  As the foxes ran, swinging their fat, bushy tails behind them, the President continued smiling, thoroughly pleased with himself, while the community applauded the rescuing heroes.

  After the ceremony, we quietly dispersed and returned to our homes. Now that the watch for an attack had ended, this meant the island’s period of violence was over. Everything seemed to be buried in silence. By all appearances, nothing had changed, and daily life went on as it had in the past, people greeting each other and making small talk. But there had been an unmistakably palpable change in the atmosphere of the island. There was no longer any trace of the lightheartedness and camaraderie there once had been, nor of the friendships that had been free of calculation and wariness.

  The difference was even more pronounced when it came to us; which is to say, very few people were honoring any ties of friendship with the Writer, me, and Lara—virtually ostracizing us by the way they acted in our company. Some evenings, we would hear of get-togethers taking place at our neighbors’ houses, but we were never invited.

  The Writer was waiting for a chance to take revenge on all of the islanders anyway, and had no wish to be in anyone’s company. It was as though his loneliness, reclusiveness, and anger had reached critical mass.

  Lara and I weren’t taking it so hard in the long run, because we were able to take comfort in the protective harbor we were to each other. But the Writer had no such comfort.

  The most significant event to add a touch of color to those otherwise uneventful days was the birth of two seagull chicks inside the chicken coop, which I’d been secretly visiting from time to time to see how things were coming along. So the boy had met with success. He’d saved the lives of two baby seagulls. How he’d been feeding these two knock-kneed creatures that opened their mouths wide with a ravenous hunger to consume everything was a secret I never found out.

  We never saw the foxes again after that day. They must have found lairs for themselves in the forest. Whether they were eating the seagulls’ eggs wasn’t possible for us to see, either. No one was in the mood to go and see the seagulls’ cove; and besides, the memories were still too painful.

  THE FOLLOWING EIGHT MONTHS elapsed in an uneventful manner. Basically, they were boring and monotonous, much like a blank page in a book. After so much drama, this break was a blessing…

  …UP UNTIL ONE AFTERNOON, when I awoke to a woman’s scream that brought back memories of the island’s days of terror.

  We islanders love to stretch out for a little catnap in the afternoons. Not having particularly busy schedules, we don’t think of the habit as being a waste of time. While some of us may stretch out on a divan or hammock in our gardens, others of us may take shelter in the serenity of our beds beneath a comforter.

  In the midst of our usual afternoon languor, we heard the scream and jumped to our feet. We scrambled off in the direction it had come from, noticing that people had begun to gather in front of the house at Number 22. When we got there, the doctor was drawing blood, with the aid of a small pump, from the leg of the elderly woman who lived there.

  A snake had bitten the woman as she was getting into bed for her afternoon nap. It had sprung out at her from within one of her bedcovers, which had been draped with a single fold over her bed.

  A few of our neighbors had gone in search of the snake in the meantime. They finally cornered it in the bedroom closet and killed it. Dangling from the end of the stick that one of our brave neighbors held in his hand to show it to us, it was a creature so mottled and alien that it sent a cold fear shooting into our hearts. It somehow occurred to me that the brightness of the snake’s colors meant that the snake was extremely poisonous. And I wasn’t mistaken, as it soon turned out. Our friends with expertise in these matters explained that the snake was indeed a highly poisonous and dangerous breed.

  Being unfamiliar with such cases, we were shaken by this news, being used to sleeping like babies with our doors unlocked and our windows open. We had never known any other danger since the seagull attacks, the bitter memories of which had begun to fade as time passed.

  We simply didn’t come across dangerous species of animals or poisonous plants to put our easygoing lifestyles at risk here. Or rather, that’s how we’d seen it up until that day. Seeing the snake swinging from the end of the stick that our neighbor had held in his hand, and the heart-wrenching state of the poor woman trying feverishly to rid her body of the effects of the poison, was shattering the sense of security we’d been living with. Now we would have to look beneath our covers before getting into bed, inspect the steamy ceilings of our bathrooms after taking baths, peer inside our closets, and, in short, take all kinds of unnecessary measures for the sake of living with a sense of security.

  But the thing was, where had this poisonous creature come from? How had it sneaked into the house? With our minds bothered by these questions, that night we slept fitfully and fearfully. We sensed an ominous course of events to come. We were not proven wrong.

  Waking up to the chilly morning air as Lara still slept, I stepped out onto the terrace and, looking off to the right as I stretched my sleep-stiffened body, I saw it. There before me was a red and green piebald snake, its upper half erect as it hissed at me, threatening me with each lick of its forked tongue. It was virtually identical to the one we’d seen the day before. Whether the fact that I froze in my spot proved the truth of legends concerning snakes or had more to do with feeling a shiver in my heart, I can’t say. I can’t remember ever having turned so limp and helpless as I had at that moment.

  The snake was swinging back and forth and making angry motions; I took this to be a sign it was preparing to attack. I wanted to run away as fast as I could, and yet it was as though we had some secret pact between us, standing face-to-face like this. My sense that if I moved it would move too made it impossible for me to act.

  And then a miracle happened. The snake was suddenly attacked and, with a blow to the center of its body, crushed. In the same instant, I saw Lara standing next to me in a shimmering white nightgown, a large garden shovel in her grip—the one she’d just used to deliver the fatal blow to the snake. I remember a dizzying mix of joy, relief, shock, and fear rising up in my throat in that moment. I hear my mind declare “How incredible! Lara just saved my life! She saved my life!”