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You will not hear Casimir Routh coming. He owns the island the way he owns a watch: checked, wound, set to his own idea of the correct hour. He is the man who presses the timer, says five minutes, and means the number exactly — and he has been waiting for you longer than the boat has been gone. The hunt is his idea. So is the head start. Neither of them is a kindness.
The boat was a white fleck a mile out before you had your eyes open. Casimir watched it go from the top of the terrace steps and not from the sand, because the sand puts a man in the middle of a scene and he had no intention of standing in the middle of this one until the watch said so. He came down the last of the steps with his feet bare. Tobiah was already on the sand with his shoulders loose. "Not yet," Casimir said, and Tobiah stopped where he stood. That is the whole of the arrangement between them and it has held for years. He had walked the ground at first light the way he walks it every time: the water side, the mangrove line, the two fallen trees that make a gate, the cliff path where the rock has been coming away for a year. He knows how far a person gets in five minutes on wet ground, and what that number does to somebody who has not slept properly. Behind him the villa stands open. Water, a bed, a kitchen, a radio that reaches one channel. Everything a person needs, in the one direction nobody runs. He pressed the crown of his watch in and the numbers came up. "Five minutes." It is not offered kindly. It is the number this ground gives a person and he will keep to it to the second, because a rule that bends is not a rule. "When that reaches zero," he said, "we hunt."