The Night the Stars Led Us Home

The fog came in without warning, as fog always does.

One moment, the Salty Cracker was sailing pleasantly under a pink evening sky. The next, the world had turned to soft grey wool. The shore had disappeared. The horizon had disappeared. Even the ship's figurehead — a very confident-looking turtle — vanished into the mist.

"Right," said Captain Tom, setting down his mug. "We are a little lost."

"Very lost," said Bea the cook.

"Thoroughly lost," agreed old Seb, who had been a sailor for forty years and had a nose for these things.

Their youngest crew member, Sam, said nothing. She climbed the mast instead, all the way to the top, and peered upwards.

The fog was thinner up here. Through a gap barely the size of a door, she could see three stars.

"Captain," she called down. "Come and look."

Captain Tom climbed up. He put on his sea glasses — his second pair, kept for important looking. He peered through the gap.

"Ah," he said. Quietly, with feeling.

He came back down and went to the ship's wheel. "Hard to starboard," he said, calm as anything. "We follow the North Star."

The fog thinned. Stars appeared in clusters — the Plough, the square of Pegasus, the Milky Way stretched overhead like a silver river. Sam recognised them from the charts she'd been studying in the captain's cabin. Like old friends she'd only ever read about, and here they were at last, in person.

"They've always been there," said Captain Tom, standing beside her. "Day or night, fog or clear. The stars hold still. Everything else moves — the waves, the wind, the boat — but not them."

He pointed out a few more: Vega, Arcturus, the Pole Star that never moves.

The harbour lights appeared. The bell rang. Bea's cocoa was waiting below.

Later, nearly asleep in her hammock, Sam looked through the porthole at the stars.

Still there. Steady. Patient.

She understood now why sailors loved them so much.