They walk and walk, "past rusted boat frames, fish spines as thick as pipes attached to yellow skulls, a dead gull whose feathery white breast was freshly stained with blood."

In his hands he carried a small white gull, apparently dead, its wings neatly furled.

Smaller lines branched from the thicker parent line a yard apart, each one tied to a steel hook baited with a chunk of dead gull or other meat.

The other characters add clutter - Miss Joan Marie Moossy's suicidal Nina, who has a dead gull attached to her train; Helen Shumaker as "Fierz, the butler," who appears at one point in a tutu (certainly a first for Chekhov).

Seeing dead gulls, means wide separation for friends.

A flock of dead gulls found near a landfill in Cortland, for example, was initially thought to have been killed by West Nile; it turned out the gulls had been fed an obscure poison laced into bread.

Two of them race clumsily toward the dead gull.

I found a dead gull lying on the mainland face of a dune, opposite the island's centre.