A large parcel of land along the Edgartown Great Pond, which is now planned for an 18-hole golf course, was the subject of a legitimate and equivalent offer for purchase from a prominent and well-funded conservation group about 18 months ago, the Gazette has learned.

On a sunny and busy day this July, Oak Bluffs post office square was filled with the sounds of a man and a woman arguing angrily about whether or not the town should install a $14 million sewage system.

Houses were sold as soon as they came on the market, listings under $200,000 became an endangered species, and building lots were almost as hard to find as a heath hen.

That was Martha’s Vineyard real estate 1998, according to a random sampling of Island professionals in the field, and real estate 1999 is likely to be the same, only more so.

The Wampanoag Tribe will purchase Back Alley’s in West Tisbury for a price reported to be in the high six figures.

Howard and Susie Ulfelder, longtime owners of the up-Island bakery and deli, have already accepted the tribe’s offer and expect the deal to close in the next few weeks.

The purchase will consolidate tribal ownership of Back Alley’s with its management of Alley’s General Store, which the tribe leases from the Martha’s Vineyard Preservation Trust.

She was christened by the eight-year-old daughter of Jimmy Cagney. A truckload of 200 live quail once opened up her freight deck (“They were pulling them out of the rafters,” Donna Honig of Edgartown said of the crewmen that trip in 1991. “They were diving after them”). And once on a night back in the fall of 1972, an assassination nearly took place on her darkened hurricane deck when a man, angered by Robert S. McNamara’s role in the Viet Nam war, tried to throw the former Secretary of Defense over the side.

The first coyote may have arrived on the Vineyard, probably from the Elizabeth Islands. Naturalists have been saying it for years - the coyote is due to arrive someday.

Gus Ben David, the director of the Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary, said he had a conversation with a Lake Tashmoo resident who saw one. “She gave me a wonderfully accurate description. We’ve been awaiting but not necessarily anticipating their arrival,” Mr. Ben David said.

Carmel Gamble glared at the chain-link fence surrounding the beachfront lot next door to her Vineyard Haven cottage. “This is not the Vineyard Haven I knew,” said Miss Gamble, a veterinary technician and self-described “clown on sabbatical” who returned to Martha’s Vineyard two years ago after five years in Hawaii. “But this ugly steel chain-link fence, I mean, what we love about the Vineyard is that it’s beautiful. That’s why people come here,” she said.

President Clinton shed the defiance that characterized the televised address following his August 17 grand jury testimony for a more humble tone when he spoke about forgiveness to a diverse gathering of more than 500 Vineyard residents and visitors at Union Chapel in Oak Bluffs on Friday.