Before dawn, in the small village of Lorcado off the Mosquito Coast, Tobias broke from the lantern-lit funeral procession for his father and ran to the town's harbor. Feet pounding on the ancient wooden pier, family voices crying out behind him, "No, Tobias, no," he jumped into his small skiff and rowed out to sea.

Miles from the village, he laid down the oars to his boat and looked outward. The boat gently rocked in the lapping water as he turned his body westward so that the rising sun was behind him to cast light upon the dawning world. He watched; he waited in the solitude amid the ambient sounds of the sea.

Here, there was the lulling call of gulls and the arching hiss of flying sea swallows to break the stillness of the ocean's morning air; but nothing more.

From an early age, his father had taught him to read the signs of the gulf sea to find its valleys of peace. Sights and sound twisting together, threading in and out of the most common of days to become a tapestry to reveal its healing hideaways.

"And if you truly follow," his father had said, it has been said that God will grace you to see the billfish, and its dance of dignity in the air. And if you watch it without violence in your heart, then you will truly be humbled as its bill pierces the sky.   The heavens will open, the ocean will be stilled.  It will be as kneeling at the altar in communion with God and you will understand the dance of the billfish."

Now, as he rowed from the harbor, he cried out, "Let me find you - show me what my papa has said." He broke down in sobs.  "I will not harm you," he whispered.  "But show me."

His muscles soon ached from his movements and he let the currents bear part of the burden of his work. Moving westward, he watched the moon drop behind the horizon and allowed the smell of land to disappear.

Floating his skiff atop deep wells, he soon spotted ghostly schools of Bonita and albacore in the purple fathoms below. He gave ear to winging terns whose tentative cries and delicate bodies belied an inner tenacity that escaped men's understanding.

Sights and sounds, threads weaving in and out as a needle upon the helm of his boat, carried him forward to a fortress for his thoughts and very soul.  A solace that could only be found in the vastness of the sea.

Tobias was not naive to the cruelties of his world and those who made their livelihood from the bosom of the sea. He had been on marlin catches with his father to watch helplessly the beast's mighty struggle to live.

At night, troubling dreams would wake him. Dreams of the harpoon finding its way into the marlin's heart and dark blood spreading like a cloud through the surface of the blue water.

A red cloud, blackening what had once been the fish's home - liquid red ashes falling, to shut out light itself. Haunting dreams of the death of a defiant spirit defeated by the cunning and violence of men.

"I could never kill such a great fish," he once told his father.

And his father, placing a hand upon his shoulder, told him he understood. "There are three ways a man can live his life," he had told him. "By his hands, his head or his heart; and the hardest of them is the heart because with it, a man sees truth and truth is the heaviest burden of all to carry.  I am proud you are such a man, Tobias, but it grieves me as well."

With these words, his father had given him both a great freedom and a great burden as well and now alone in the skiff, his father dead, Tobias stood and shouted once again into the vacant air, "Show me!"

Suddenly, a spear-like snout shot out from the depths of the ocean. Pointed and black, it glistened as ebony in the dawn's light; and its upward thrust was as if borne as a trident wielded by an angered Poseidon.

Pectorals wide spread, a marlin exploded out of the waters, its dorsal fins pale lavender and its body polished silver with striped violet-blue bars. Its eyes were black and washed with the coppery reflection of the rising sun.

Rising above the sea, sixteen feet from bill to tail, weighing at least a thousand pounds; it bucked in the salty air; water flowing from its fins like a royal robe of crystal sequins.

It hung in the air, linking sky and ocean together in its soliloquized dance, and as suddenly as it had appeared, it plunged back into the dark depths of the sea.

Tobias stood breathless in the memory of the beauty, watching and praying that it would breach the water and its bill pierce the heavens once more. It did not surface again.

A hundred yards off starboard, porpoise jumped from the water as if to play tag with some darting terns. Fluttering wings pulling life forward.  Apart from the cry of looming gulls and the hiss of the wind in the valley of the waves, it was quiet. His boat rocked gently in the wake of the breaching Goliath and soon all was calm once more.

In this stillness, in this quiet, an inner truth awakened within him.  In a silent communion of the freedom and beauty he had seen, a great peace came into his heart and with it the heaviness his father had warned him of.

Truth being the gravest burden of all to carry.