Linda Despres, the chief scientist aboard the Albatross IV, has a haunting memory of visiting Georges Bank as a 23-year-old scientist.

"I have this picture in my mind of Georges Bank at night and seeing the lights of over 50 ships going back and forth across the horizon," she says.

Capt. Gregory Mayhew, a Vineyard native and lifelong resident of Chilmark, runs the 75-foot steel dragger Unicorn out of Menemsha. This summer, for the first time in more than 20 years, he went sea scalloping. The reason, he said, is economics.

Pots and pans rattle. The television slides back and forth.

The Vineyard's first tularemia case of the year, a 50-year-old male landscaper, may have contracted the potentially fatal disease after handling a dead rabbit he found while working in Edgartown, state public health officials said this week.

It's the dinner hour on Tuesday night, and Luanne Johnson is tromping through poison ivy and switch grass on the duney hills of Aquinnah's north shore, holding a fold-out antenna in one hand, a receiver in the other and hoping she will find her quarry: a skunk named Pua.

The trees are tall and the foliage is thick in these woods. Shards of sunbeams break through the canopy of oaks, scattering light on the dense underbrush below. Ferns sprout up among huckleberry, blueberry and sassafras, hiding an occasional lady's slipper orchid. An old, winding foot path rises to the north beyond deer thickets, frog ponds and beech tree groves. Catbirds and dragonflies patrol the skies, and except for a slight breeze and the distant rumble of an approaching storm beyond Vineyard Sound, it is quiet.