A sea serpent silently appears on a sunny spring day; a shrieking "devil thing" wreaks havoc in a logging camp cookhouse; a wandering blind priest travels miles by boat, accompanied only by a young mute companion with an unearthly talent for throwing stones. These are the stories of a lost civilization. Its ruins peek out from alder thickets around ruined homesteads, or wash up as beached wreckage on the shores of deserted inlets.