Nobody knew how old he was. The visiting vet, who took the ferry over from St. Thomas once a week, and treated him for free, guessed he must be 17, the equivalent of a hundred-plus in human years.

Old Luke looked it, gaunt, sway- backed, arthritic, with loose folds of skin hanging about his neck and jowls, and his mournful, clouded eyes peering out from deep in their sockets. When he had to move he would heave a reluctant sigh and lift himself with visible effort onto shaky legs and stand there for a moment steadying himself before moving off. Soon he'd be back to resume his vigil, his sad eyes always looking wistfully out to sea.

He was waiting for Andy, his master, to row up in his dinghy and tie it once again to the same rusted black iron cleat he had always used. The old dog waited patiently for years, becoming a fixture on the Coral Bay dock but he waited in vain. Andy was dead. At least, that's what everybody thought. His body was never found but one morning his sailboat was washed up in the surf at Drunk Bay where its shattered hulk lies today, high and dry on the exposed rock beach where hurricane swells eventually lifted it.

Andy had been a reclusive, grey-haired drifter with a face that had been battered by hard living. A skein of tiny red capillaries laced his nose; and his hands, normally clasped around a green Heineken bottle, shook slightly. He had sailed in with his dog one day on a battered old fiberglass sloop -- and ended up staying for a year or so. Not many people got to know him, though. He mostly stayed on his boat and drank a bottle of rum a day, sometimes on a bad day, two. To his credit he wasn't a loud roaring drunk, determined to give the sleeping harbor the benefit of his drunken epiphanies -- unlike some. He kept his boat apart, at the outer edge of the mooring area and rowed to shore with Luke always sitting in the bow, to buy supplies. So far as anyone could remember he never left the anchorage until the day he died.

That day he left the harbor under full sail, too late in the afternoon, headed for St. Croix, forty miles south. The passage between the islands can be rough and Andy’s boat was not particularly seaworthy, but on this day it didn't matter because he never even made it out to the open sea.

It was Ram’s Head that did for him.

Ram's Head is the southernmost tip of St. John, a great knob of rock at the end of a long, low peninsula that reaches far enough out into the Caribbean Sea to disturb the sweep of the oceanic swells that the trade winds have driven all the way from Africa.

Out on the deep ocean these waves are uniform and steady and roll harmlessly under a vessel's stern but once they enter the shelf of shallow water that bears the Virgin Islands they grow unsettled and confused. They sense the bottom rising and feel the shock waves rebounding from the wall of rock that lies ahead, death throes of their comrades before them. They end their free frolicking run across three thousand miles of open Atlantic in an ugly, violent mood, exploding in such a fury against Ram's Head's implacable rock that a hiker standing atop it can feel the vibrations of the impact.

Perhaps he missed his step in the steepened seas, the edge of his balance blunted by a long spell at anchor and too much rum. Perhaps he stepped over on purpose. But most likely he lost his grip on the rigging when he used both hands to unzip his fly. Falling overboard is the most common cause of accidental death at sea; and they say that most drowned men who have fallen off yachts are recovered -- if they ever are -- with their flies unzipped.

At any rate, his boat washed ashore at, appropriately, Drunk Bay, where white-shouldered ranks of rollers shattered it against the rock beach. The beach is a long gradual curve of smooth shiny rocks about the size of a fist that tumble over each other in the surf...nature’s rock polisher.

The noise of that dense clattering, the rock rolling over and over, countless tons of granite in motion, may have been the last sound Andy heard on this earth as he drowned -- if that’s what happened. His body was never found.

Luke was found next to the wrecked hull, howling a woeful lament. Kind souls brought him back to Coral Bay where he colonized that spot on the dock, where Andy had always tied up his dinghy, and waited patiently, determined to be there when his master might arrive.

He was such a dear old soul, the epitome of a faithful dog that the boating community took him under their care. Several ladies who lived on boats made a point of remembering him when they had bones to dispose of; and there always seemed to be leftovers in his bowl. Sandy, the proprietress of the marine store at the head of the dock, made sure he had water, and Chutney her six year old daughter would occasionally sit with him and brush his coat, then give him a hug, her little blonde head laid against his neck. Only then would Luke forget his vigil for a moment, turn his anxious gaze from the harbor to give Chutney a touching look of gratitude, his ears back and a grimace of a smile on his face as he panted a little louder, before returning to his watch.

Then one day the good old heart cracked and at the cumbrous age of 18 he was gone. The next day someone had painted on the dock the outline of Luke's body in its usual position and written within it "Luke R.I.P." That image lasted a couple more years before the elements and people's feet wore it quite away.