The moment a loon emerges from the egg and takes its first shaky step into the water, it is at home. Born to live their entire lives on the waves, loons will never stray far onto land. Even during nesting season, they choose to build their roosts out of lake mud and old reeds in marshy areas just at the water’s edge. A loon will only touch dry ground twice in its life: once as he climbs from the nest to begin his watery journey, and once as he climbs ashore to end it.

This past summer, my brother, Jonah, and I were spending one golden afternoon of countless hundreds by the shores of Toddy Pond. The dying warmth of a hot August day enveloped our skin as we sat, side-by-side, on the slippery pebbles by the dock, dangling our feet in the water. We lingered, chatting amiably and watching the shadows reach their trailing fingers across the water until they had swallowed the cove.

A sudden but quiet splish! just to our left startled us. We looked up, scanning the water. Jonah saw it first. He gasped, clasping his hand on my wrist.

“Where?” I breathed.

“There,” he whispered. Slowly, cautiously, he nodded to a shady spot, mere inches away, at the base of a wild blueberry bush growing out over the water.

I saw nothing at first, but as I looked, the shadows beneath the branches began to materialize, and shapes emerged — first, a soft, gracefully curved body, black with a speckling of white; then, bright red eyes and a sharp glinting beak. I had seen one before, of course, dancing along the surface of the water, flapping and laughing in a glorious tremolo. But to be this close, so close I could reach out and touch the velvet slope of his throat, was something I had only dreamed about.

We sat motionless as he emerged from beneath the bush and paddled closer. We barely dared breathe; what if he noticed us and fled? Yet there was something, some sharp awareness in his scarlet eyes, that made me wonder if he had already noticed our presence, and had decided to continue onward anyway — to continue, in the trust that these two curious creatures, gazing at him with wide eyes and stilled breath, would not hurt him; that they were just as enthralled by his presence as he was by theirs. He came closer. Frozen in that moment, the world gone silent around us, we stared, transfixed.

Then it broke. The sunlight glinted off his sharp black beak in just the wrong way, triggering some base instinct telling him that our proximity was not natural, not safe. I twitched before I could stop myself. He blinked, retreated, and vanished into the lengthening shadows.

That was it. He was gone. Still, we remained frozen in that moment, watching as its remnants crumbled around us and reality, with an almost tangible impact, returned. I shook my head as if to clear it of water, and with a shock realized the sun had already begun its descent over the horizon. Night was falling. It was time to leave.

“Jonah,” I ventured at last.

He nodded.

“What was he doing?”

“Coming ashore, I think,” Jonah responded.

“Coming ashore? But—” I stopped. We looked at one another. Paused. We both knew, all too well, what “coming ashore” meant for a loon. Yet neither of us seemed quite able, at the moment, to voice it.

As we made our way back to the house, Jonah ahead of me on the path, I turned back to look at the soft sand by the water’s edge where we had been sitting just moments before. Perhaps it would be later tonight, when we had long been curled up in our beds with the fans pulling the cool summer air in through the window, and when the shore was once again undisturbed, that he would return. He would nestle himself into the sand just as he had burrowed into his mother’s feathers when he was a chick. And the waves would wash over, pulling him from the sand. He would settle at the bottom, his bones to be washed by the soft, teal waters of the lake, rolling in the currents, back where he belonged.

Emma Levy, a senior at Mt. Ararat High School in Topsham, wrote “Wake” as a submission to The Telling Room Writing Contest and it was published in the organization’s 2015 anthology When the Sea Spoke. During her free time, Emma loves to ski and run, play pop songs on the flute and piano (especially those by Maroon 5), and curl up with a good book and a crafting project.