His eyes fixed on mine and for a moment I had the sense that we were the only people in the world.

"The seal people," he said. "My family is said to have the blood of the seals in our veins. The selkies are a race of seals who can become human at will. Those who are kind to them while they are in their seal form get nothing but rewards, while those who are cruel to them meet their eternal vengeance."

He smiled slightly. "Occasionally, when a lonely fisherman is kind to the seals, a beautiful selkie woman will come from the sea to be his bride, forsaking her seal skin for that of a human. And the selkie blood is mingled with the human, in their children. But it is hard to keep a seal from the water forever, and selkie brides eventually long to return to their first and only home. But they cannot change back into their native form without their sealskins. Many stories tell of the fisherman unwise enough to destroy the skin so his bride can no longer return to the sea. When she dies of grief and yearning for her true home, her family comes from the sea for revenge."

"Revenge?" I demanded, as caught up now in the story as anyone. He did have a natural storyteller's gift, the cadence of his language low and even.

"The fisherman dies. A life for a life, you see. And if there are children, the selkies take those too and return them to the sea. And maybe those half-seal children can reach into the depths of their seal blood and somehow transform to join their mother's family, or maybe they cannot and simply drown. But no one knows for certain, for they never return."