7. On occasion, the men would bring dogs in wooden boats and let them loose across the landscape. Any animate thing, a stray horse, a fox with four red pups, a snake raveling through the grass, was torn to carmine threads. Then the Emir bought the island and put a stop to this bloody sport. An old man who’d been in prison 30 years for bludgeoning his wife was released and given the job of watching the island. Each day a chair was set on the shore for him and a metal stove to boil tea and bake biscuits. He had a tablet of gray paper, and he drew exquisite pictures of tiny crabs, the ones that skittered all around him in the sand.