Drukker stood on the deck of the ship, his small frame wrapped in an almost comically oversize greatcoat. He pulls the coat tight about himself as he watches the sailors hustling about him, hard at work. Surly looking men are running toward the bow: the foreyard loosers and furlers, and the headsail loosers and stowers. They take up positions on the forecastle or shinny out onto the bowspirit, but politely step aside for the wiry foretopmen who begin their laborious ascent up the fore shrouds to work the topsail and things higher up the foremast. It is a bristling and tangled thicket of nautical detail. Like watching fifty surgeons dissect fifty different animals at once--the kind of stuff that thirty years ago, would've fascinated Drukker, sucked him into into this life, made him a seacaptain. But like a captain reefing and striking his sails before to strong a wind, lest it drive his ship onto the shallows, Drukker ignores as much of of this as he can get away with, and tries to understand what is happening, the general outlines: The ship is coming 'round toward the changing wind.
A panic of luffing and shivvering spreads through the ship as all the sails change their relationship with the wind, then everything snaps tight, just as the sailors knew it would, and she's running close-hauled as she can, headed northeast. The rigging of the ship put Drukker in the mind of the muscles of the face. He had disected more than his share of dead men's heads durring his early years as a physician, and knows that the hull of the skull is all wrapped about with squishy rigging: hauly-yards of tendon and braces of ligament cleated to pinrails in the jawbone and temple, tugging at corners of spreading canvases of muscle that curve over the forehead and wrap the old Jolly Roger in as many overlapping layers as there are sails on a ship of the line. As Drukker watches the city of Port-a-Lucine fade from view he feels all that muscle and tendon tighten up, steadily as if the sailors were turning capstans inside his skull, as the ship took him away from the war torn country.
