White Shark (28 page)

24

"I can't hear them," Max said.

Two hundred yards ahead, a pod of humpback
whales was moving leisurely northward.

"You might if you were
underwater," said Chase.
 
"You
could hear them for miles."

"But if they sing..."

"It's not really singing, we call it
that because we don't know how else to describe it.
 
They don't actually have voices.
 
They make sounds with a mechanism inside
their heads.
 
And they don't do it all
the time."

They stood on the flying bridge.
 
The boat was idling in neutral, bobbing
slowly in the ocean swells.

The great gray bodies rolled through the
sea, displacing mountains of water with their huge bulbous heads, displaying
vast flat tail flukes fifteen or twenty feet wide, spouting geysers of misty
breath into the warm air.
 
There were
adults and young, males and females, but it was impossible to count them, for
every so often one or two would slap the surface three times with their tails
and then disappear in a deep dive, to reappear long minutes later in some
unpredictable position among their fellows.

"What does their song say?
"
Max asked.

"For a long time, nobody knew; all
they knew was that the whales were communicating, maybe talking about where
they were going or where there might be food or if they sensed any danger.
 
All whales communicate; I've heard that blue
whales can keep in touch with each other over a thousand miles of
open ocean
.
 
Humpbacks, though, are the only whales that sing in such a complex
series of sounds and tones.
 
Now
scientists are pretty sure that the song of humpbacks is sexual, that the males
sing to attract the females."
 
Chase
smiled.
 
"I like to think they're
wrong, that the song is still a mystery."

"Why?"

"Mysteries are wonderful things.
 
It would be boring to have all the
answers.
 
It's like the Loch Ness
monster, I hope they never find him, either.
 
We need dragons to keep our imaginations alive."

"Max!
"
Amanda
called from the stern.
 
"Come on
down and get Harpo ready."

Max walked aft on the flying bridge and
climbed down the ladder into the cockpit.

Three of the sea lions had been fitted
with harnesses, and secured to each harness was a video camera whose lens
pointed forward.
 
The fourth animal
shifted nervously from side to side as if confused.

Amanda handed Max the fourth harness and
showed him how to fit it around the sea lion's shoulders, along its belly,
behind its flippers and over its back.

As Max slipped the leather straps over the
silky skin, the sea lion nuzzled him with its icy nose and tickled him with its
whiskers.

Amanda attached the camera and called up
to Chase.
 
"All set."

Chase looked out at the ocean.
 
Everything seemed normal, peaceful.
 
And yet..."

"Are you sure you want to do
this?" he asked.
 
"We have
three months."

"Yeah, but we won't get whales every
day.
 
Let's go."

"Okay, it's your call.
 
How close do you want me to get?
 
I don't need to break federal laws about
harassing whales."

"Not too close.
 
The important thing is for us to get in front
of the whales so the sea lions don't get pooped trying to catch up with
them."

Chase put the boat in gear and
accelerated, keeping well away from the whales so as not to alarm them with his
engine noise.
 
On a
 
day this calm, there would be no problem
keeping the whales in sight; their tail flukes and spouts would be visible for
a mile or more, so he traveled what he judged to be five hundred yards in front
of them before throttling back and letting the boat idle.

In the stern, the four sea lions were
poised behind one another like school children lined up for lunch.
 
Amanda spoke to each one and made a series of
gestures before switching on the video camera and sweeping her arm toward the
opening in the transom.
 
Max stood behind
her, mimicking her gestures.

One by one, the sea lions waddled to the
stern and flung themselves into the ocean.

When they had all surfaced behind the
boat, Amanda raised both arms and pointed at the approaching whales, and swept
her arms downward.

The sea lions barked, turned and vanished
beneath the surface.

"How long can they stay down?"
asked
Max.

"About ten minutes on each
dive," Amanda said.
 
"Not as
long as the whales, but they can dive over and over again, and they can go to
six or seven hundred feet."

"Deeper than a
person."

"Much.
 
And they don't have to decompress, they don't
get bends, don't get embolisms."

From the flying bridge, Chase said,
"You want the boat to follow them?"

"No, we'll stay here.
 
I don't want the whales to think the boat's
chasing them.
 
You can shut the engine
down if you want.
 
The ladies know where
we are."

"But how can you be sure the sea
lions will come back?
"
Max asked.

"Because they always have,"
Amanda said, and she smiled.

Chase came down from the flying bridge,
turned off the engine and took a glass from a cabinet in the galley.
 
"Come on," he said to Max.
 
"Let's see if we can get lucky."

"Where to?"

"These aren't breeding grounds, and
humpbacks usually sing only on their breeding grounds.
 
But maybe, just maybe, we can hear a little
concert."

He led Max below, into the forward
cabin.
 
He lifted a corner of the carpet
and rolled it back a few
feet.,
then dropped to his
knees and put an ear to the cold fiberglass deck, motioning Max to do the same.

"What do you hear?
"
Chase asked.

"Water," Max said, "sort of
slopping
around,
and... wait!"
 
His eyes widened.
 
"Yeah, I do!
 
But it's really weak."

"Here," Chase said, and he
lifted Max's head and placed the bottom of a glass under his ear, the open bell
against the deck.
 
"Better?"

Max
grinned,
and
Chase knew what he was hearing:
 
the
ghostly hoots and avian chirrups, the whistles and tweets, the lovely, lilting
conversation between leviathans.

"Cool!
" Max
said, beaming.

"It sure is," said Chase, and he
thought:
 
being a father is too.

The whales passed a few hundred yards to
the east of the boat and continued on their way.
 
Gradually their sounds faded until, at last,
even with the glass, Max could hear only faint echoes.
 
He and Chase went topside and opened the
cooler Mrs. Bixler had packed for them.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

The first of the sea lions returned after
half an hour.

They were sitting in the stern, eating,
when they heard a bark and looked over the stern and saw the animal ride a
little swell onto the swimstep.

"Hello, Groucho," Amanda said.

Chase shook his head.
 
"I don't know how you can tell."

"Live with them night and day for
three years, you'd be able to tell, too."

The sea lion raised itself up onto its
long rear flipper and heaved itself through the door in the transom.

As Amanda removed the camera and harness,
the sea lion barked excitedly and swung its head from side to side.

"What's she saying?" asked Max.

"She's telling me what she saw,"
Amanda said.
 
"You know, like, ‘Hey,
Mom, get a load of this!’"

Chase said, "And what do you think
she saw?"

Amanda held up the camera.
 
"We'll look at the tapes on the way
in," she said.
 
"As soon as the
others come back, we can try to catch up with the whales again."
 
Then she said to Max, "Why don't you
give Groucho some fish while I dry this off and reload it?"

Max lifted a hatch in the afterdeck,
brought out a bucket of mullet and dangled a fish before the sea lion.
 
It didn't snap at the fish, didn't lunge for
it, just extended its neck, accepted the fish and seemed to inhale it.

The second sea lion, Chico, returned ten
minutes later, the third, Harpo, a few minutes after that.
 
Max fed them both, and when they had eaten,
they waddled across the deck and lay down in a heap with Groucho, and the three
of them slept in the sun.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

Amanda checked her watch; Chase knew this
was the tenth time in the past five minutes.
 
Then she shaded her eyes and looked out over the flat water, straining
to see any movement on the surface.

"You said they can keep diving all
day," he said.

"They can, but they don't, especially
after a workout like they had with the sharks."
 
She looked at her watch again.
 
"None of them has ever stayed out for
two hours.
 
Besides, they
want
to:
 
they get tired, hungry."
 
She
frowned.
 
"Particularly
Zeppo.
 
She's the lazy one.
 
She's late.
 
Very late."

"Maybe she just decided to take
off."

"Not a chance," Amanda said
flatly.

"I don't know how you can be so
certain.
 
She's a—"

"They're
my
animals," she snapped.

Chase raised his hands in a gesture of
surrender, and said, "Sorry."

"Where are the binoculars?"

"There's a set up top and a set down
below."

Amanda started to climb the ladder to the
flying bridge.

"We can go look for her," Chase
said.

"No, she knows where we are.
 
We're staying here till she comes back."

If
, Chase
found himself thinking.
 
If
.

25

As it moved into deeper water, scouring
the sloping sands in search of things to kill, the membranes in its head had
sensed new sounds — unfamiliar, high-pitched, far away.
 
It had tracked the sounds, feeling them grow
ever louder and more pronounced.

Finally, in water that had lost its
gray-green gloom and become clear blue, it had come upon the sources of the
sounds:
 
animals larger than it had ever
seen, certainly too large to attack, dim shadows that rose and fell with ease,
showing no vulnerability, no fear.

It had been about to turn away, to resume
its hunt elsewhere, when it had noticed other things among the large
animals:
 
smaller, quicker things, things
that might be prey.
 
It had waited in the
distance, moving just enough to keep pace.

Once, one of the new things had wandered
close, and it had tried to catch it from behind — lunging forward with swift
kicks and sweeping strokes — but the thing had sensed its approach and had
fled, too fast to pursue.

Eventually, it had fallen behind, and soon
the living things were out of sight, leaving only a tantalizing trail of
sounds.

Now it hovered in midwater, its eyes
glowing like white-hot coals as they probed the fathomless blue.

A sudden pressure wave startled it; it
looked up, and it saw a black blur receding upward toward the light:
 
one of the smaller living things had
returned, swooping by and continuing on its way.