The Hall Chimp

by Robbie Arnott

  In the next year they caught four fish, and the season after they brought in six. This proved to be their average number over the next decade: six fat, fierce, fighting Oneblood tuna, sometimes as few as three, occasionally as many as ten. The seal stopped growing at one hundred and sixty kilograms, but he didn’t lose any of his zip, and at his full weight and strength he could herd up the largest Onebloods going around, giving Karl—whose spear arm had become reliably accurate—the unenviable task of holding on to the violent death throes of a furious six-hundred-kilo fish.

  Their victories in the water were matched by Louise’s success on land. The tourism industry around the north coast thrived, and after a couple of years she was able to rent an office in town, allowing them to turn her home office into a nursery, which was soon occupied by their first daughter. Eighteen months later another daughter appeared, and amid all this swimming and spearing, earning and child-rearing, Karl noticed that they were getting older, all of them, and he didn’t mind anywhere near as much as he thought he would have.

  Eventually he retired—much sooner than he had planned to. But he retired, nonetheless; why else would he now be trudging along a windy beach, carrying tiny, line-caught fish that a Oneblood wouldn’t even bother to nibble? It wasn’t his choice; it wasn’t his idea; but the salt and waves held other plans for him.

  It came about on a clear day, with a hard blue smear of sky shining above his boat, a perfect day for being in the water. A normal start: half an hour of floating until the tuna began to bullet upwards after the pilchard swarms, then a few false chases before his seal ran a ring around a big male. The corral was seamless, and Karl’s spear had shot true. The shake and bite and blood cloud had all been uncomplicated, and the kill was completed in a routine manner. It was only as they were hauling the fish towards the moored dinghy that Karl felt something go wrong. It was not a mental feeling, no gut twinge or rumbly sense of fear—it was physical, a feeling of something huge and powerful bumping into his hip as it slid past him through the water.

  His first thought: shark. But he knew, even before he turned around, that this wasn’t a shark; the bumping weight had been wrapped in smooth, rubbery skin, not the rasping cartilage of shark hide. Swivelling in the water, still not seeing the creature, his ears were filled with a rapid rhythm of clicks and high-pitched squeaks. And finally, after a full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn, he saw it, in all its fins and flukes and black-and-white immensity: an orca.

  The seal had swum to his side and was watching the whale double back. Karl wasn’t worried, not initially. Orcas don’t attack humans, and a single one won’t go after a full-grown fur seal—twisting agility and sharp teeth make it too risky a meal. It probably just wanted their tuna. Karl pushed the dead fish towards it and started back-paddling towards the boat. But the orca ignored the carcass, pushing it aside with a nudge of its tail—and then a second clicking song thrummed through the water. The seal flipped around faster than Karl could move, as a second orca wafted past them on the left. A

  dive beneath the surface, ready his aim, wait for the flash of the fish’s white underbelly and, most importantly, the purple seam of life that threads through its body. When the artery is visible he must strike. He cannot miss, not even by an inch, because a spear plunged into scales and muscle will no more annoy the tuna than the nips of the seal, and it will escape. The point and barb of the spear must cannon into the glowing artery, where the scales are thin and the life is beating. Blood will cloud the sea, and the eyes and mouth of the Oneblood will yank wide.

  Now arrives the hardest part of the hunter’s job: holding on. As its life-juice leaks away the tuna begins to thrash with all the strength and panic stored up in its mighty body, and the hunter must not let go of his spear; he must remain connected to his prey, even as he is torqued and whipped through the water like a kite in a storm, even as the air is shaken out of his lungs in big rush-rising bubbles. It is only when this wild thrashing slows down—which could take two, three, five minutes—that the watching seal flies in to clamp a hard mouth onto the spine at the back of the Oneblood’s head, crunching down on the brain stem; and finally, out of blood, out of mind, the great fish dies, and the exhausted seal and drowning hunter must drag it to the boat, where it is gaffed and winched aboard before sharks sniff the blood and bring more, unwanted death.

  This process is easy to describe, much harder to carry out. During that third year Karl and his seal attempted it dozens of times, never getting close to making a kill, usually coming much closer to being killed themselves by their harried, huge prey. More happened in this year—Karl’s parents gave up on coastal life and moved to a unit down south in the capital, leaving the family cottage to Karl with the proviso that he occasionally visited them; his seal swelled to one hundred kilos and began to grow a thick mane around his scruff; a storm smashed up the fishing boat Karl worked on, robbing him of three months’ wages; and when it was repaired, on their first charter with a group of tourism-industry bigwigs, he met Louise.

  Early on there was talk that he’d move across to Devonport, where she ran her holiday-booking business, but this idea never caught on. (Karl only went along with it out of courtesy; he knew that Hawley had hooked her.) When Louise realised there was no uprooting Karl she moved herself into the cottage, bringing her business with her and turning the spare room into an office. Karl, by now in his late twenties, felt an itch beneath the salt on his skin when he started seeing her on his shabby deck every evening as he trudged home, and knew, even though he had never spoken to anyone about women or courting or even the reddening notion of love, that he needed to do something permanent about her. He knew it as surely as he knew the Hawley tides—but it wasn’t all up to him.

  For the final approval he goaded Louise into his dinghy, muttering not much at all in response to her questions, and chugged out to the spires beyond the heads. Here he raised his spear, as he always did, and within a minute his seal joined them. He splashed Karl with both fore-flippers, eager to hunt, but stopped when he saw Louise. A heavy stare. A long blink. A slow, submerged circumnavigation of the boat. A reemergence and a querulous bark. Louise baulked. Reach for him, Karl asked. Please. After a few moments of hesitation she did, looking back and forth between Karl and the seal, not panicked, but certainly not comfortable. The seal splashed, barked louder, and moved in. The heat of its breath stank across her knuckles. The seal’s mouth opened, revealing small, bright-white daggers. Its head dipped, rolled, twisted…and then it was butting her hand, turning it over, revealing the thin, vulnerable skin of her wrist and the blue veins shining through it. Her eyes shot circular and she nearly yanked back her arm, but Karl said: Wait, wait. Let him come. Against all her instincts she did, with her eyes closed, so she didn’t see the seal swim an inch closer and lean his face against her palm; she only felt it. At his touch her eyes opened, and she looked down to see the resting watery face throwing a heavy stare up at her. Now your other hand, said Karl. Use both. And just as he had done years earlier, she moved in and cupped the seal’s head, now far larger than when Karl had first held it. The moment lingered. A contented bark leapt from his hot mouth and then, with a diving flip, he was gone, leaving Louise to shriek with relief and wonder, and turn to Karl and see two trails of hot water running down his cheeks, mixing salt with salt.

  Three months later a sharp-cut diamond was bouncing light off her finger, paid for by the first Oneblood that Karl and his seal caught.

  After the kill Karl had lain prone in the boat, sucking in gulps of air, rubbing the ruff of his seal as it dozed against his leg. The hunt had gone more or less the way it was meant to: a smooth shepherd, a tight breath, a true strike. Steel met blood in a jagged rupture, and Karl had just held on to the shaft as his bones were jiggled by their writhing, dying prey. When the seal had crunched into the spine and the fish went limp Karl was so surprised he almost forgot what they were meant to do next. Pushing, heaving and winching the Oneblood into the bo
at had drained all the strength they had left.

  Now he floated under a pale sun. The sky was half wiped with the fluff and cream of clouds, but enough yolky heat was leaking down onto his tired limbs to keep him from shivering. His other half lay sleeping beside him. Their victim lay glassy-eyed and still-gilled. Thoughts were flicking through Karl’s mind, not holding, running away from him before coherence caught up. He dropped one hand into his partner’s ruff and lifted the other upwards. A warm breeze brushed against this risen hand, a breeze carrying tang and salt and the clearing scent of eucalyptus as he clenched his fingers around wet, warm fur.

  Δ

  He sold the Oneblood meat to a Japanese wholesaler named Oshikawa for an amount of money that made his head swim in ways that no fish or seal ever could. Oshikawa had wanted the whole animal, guts and head and all, but Karl had laughed—those parts belonged to the seal, and everyone in the fish industry knew it (including the seal, who wolfed down his share on the dock in front of a troop of delighted schoolchildren). With the money he had bought Louise’s ring; and a month later they caught another Oneblood, selling it to the same wholesaler for an even higher price. After their third catch he quit his job on the charter boat and dedicated every working day of the season to the tuna grounds.

  In the next year they caught four fish, and the season after they brought in six. This proved to be their average number over the next decade: six fat, fierce, fighting Oneblood tuna, sometimes as few as three, occasionally as many as ten. The seal stopped growing at one hundred and sixty kilograms, but he didn’t lose any of his zip, and at his full weight and strength he could herd up the largest Onebloods going around, giving Karl—whose spear arm had become reliably accurate—the unenviable task of holding on to the violent death throes of a furious six-hundred-kilo fish.

  Their victories in the water were matched by Louise’s success on land. The tourism industry around the north coast thrived, and after a couple of years she was able to rent an office in town, allowing them to turn her home office into a nursery, which was soon occupied by their first daughter. Eighteen months later another daughter appeared, and amid all this swimming and spearing, earning and child-rearing, Karl noticed that they were getting older, all of them, and he didn’t mind anywhere near as much as he thought he would have.

  Eventually he retired—much sooner than he had planned to. But he retired, nonetheless; why else would he now be trudging along a windy beach, carrying tiny, line-caught fish that a Oneblood wouldn’t even bother to nibble? It wasn’t his choice; it wasn’t his idea; but the salt and waves held other plans for him.

  It came about on a clear day, with a hard blue smear of sky shining above his boat, a perfect day for being in the water. A normal start: half an hour of floating until the tuna began to bullet upwards after the pilchard swarms, then a few false chases before his seal ran a ring around a big male. The corral was seamless, and Karl’s spear had shot true. The shake and bite and blood cloud had all been uncomplicated, and the kill was completed in a routine manner. It was only as they were hauling the fish towards the moored dinghy that Karl felt something go wrong. It was not a mental feeling, no gut twinge or rumbly sense of fear—it was physical, a feeling of something huge and powerful bumping into his hip as it slid past him through the water.

  His first thought: shark. But he knew, even before he turned around, that this wasn’t a shark; the bumping weight had been wrapped in smooth, rubbery skin, not the rasping cartilage of shark hide. Swivelling in the water, still not seeing the creature, his ears were filled with a rapid rhythm of clicks and high-pitched squeaks. And finally, after a full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn, he saw it, in all its fins and flukes and black-and-white immensity: an orca.

  The seal had swum to his side and was watching the whale double back. Karl wasn’t worried, not initially. Orcas don’t attack humans, and a single one won’t go after a full-grown fur seal—twisting agility and sharp teeth make it too risky a meal. It probably just wanted their tuna. Karl pushed the dead fish towards it and started back-paddling towards the boat. But the orca ignored the carcass, pushing it aside with a nudge of its tail—and then a second clicking song thrummed through the water. The seal flipped around faster than Karl could move, as a second orca wafted past them on the left. A third approached them from the right and a fourth—dark, fast, its click song a jittering swarm of sound—swam directly beneath them. They peeled off to join the circling movements of their pod mates. Now the orcas were whirlpooling around them, and the seal was spinning around Karl even faster, trying to keep eyes on them all. Karl clutched his spear. His pulse tripped staccato.

  And then: relentless and inevitable, it began. Each orca took turns barrelling towards the seal from a different direction, breaking off its charge at the last minute as the seal turned and showed its teeth. Karl followed the orcas with the point of his spear, keeping it outstretched towards them, but they started charging in weaves; he couldn’t keep up. The seal couldn’t run—they would catch it over a straight line—but it wasn’t trying to escape. With each aborted charge it moved closer to Karl, spinning around him, and Karl realised he was being protected, even though the orcas were not hunting him.

  And then, in his right periphery, he saw the rushing gape of a glossy pink maw. He lurched in the cold wet and aimed his spear forward, as his seal bobbed in front of him, lips bared, muscles coiled. He thrust the spear and missed by metres, miles, oceans, as the orca baulked, and the tiny bounce of relief that hung in his stomach was overtaken by a vast swell that rushed him backwards, followed by an even bigger thwack of rubber and muscle. He was tossing now, overturning and disoriented, only just seeing the fluke of a different orca that had risen beneath him and sent him somersaulting through the water.

  After two full revolutions his body stopped flipping. He regained his bearing and cracked his head through the surface, sucking in air before diving back below. He couldn’t see his seal. He couldn’t see the orcas either, but he could still hear their clicking songs. He swivelled and spun and swam in every direction, left right up down north south, but there was nothing but bubbles and navy and clicks.

  But then another noise intruded—a harsh slap that sounded like it had come from above the water, not through it. Karl surfaced. First he saw nothing; but from behind his head he heard the slap again, so he turned, and there he saw it. He saw it happening through his waterlogged, salt-reddened eyes. He saw it sped up and slowed down. He saw his seal’s body being slammed against the water by the orcas. They took turns gripping its tail in their teeth and flinging their heads left to right, over and over again, using the hard lid of the ocean to break Karl’s seal into ragged chunks of brown-red meat.

  Δ

  In the months between the orca attack and his walk down the beach, clenching his teeth against the grit blowing into his shins, Karl tried to forget that clicking sound. But it was lodged in a hole between his ears, a backdrop to his days that he feared and hated but could not escape. He was reminded of it constantly: when a light switch was flicked, when Louise clicked her fingers, when his leaping daughters clicked their heels, when Sharon at the fish-and-chip shop clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth as she waited for the oil in the deep fryer to heat up. All these humdrum sounds and more stirred up the bouncing echolocation of the orcas, and with them came the images, and the memory of the warm salt breeze, and the slapping crack of his seal as its body was broken against the ocean’s face.

  He didn’t find another seal; he didn’t even try. He knew of other hunters who had successfully re-partnered, but he didn’t have the energy or appetite to start the training process all over again. And the idea of seeking out a fresh pup raised bile in his throat—it made his own seal swim up through his memories, resting its young face against his palm. And then the clicks would return, haunting snaps that floated through the water endlessly towards him, and Karl would mash thumbs into his ears or take a chainsaw to a bluegum or gargle rum u
ntil one of his daughters found him hacking dry sobs at the bay.

  Perhaps this abandonment of the hunt was a good thing. He started hearing rumours that the Oneblood stocks were declining. At first he thought the other fishermen were lying, trying to drag his spirits up from the seabed, but then a story appeared in the paper that was headlined ‘Worst Tuna Season in Decade’.

  He spoke to his old wholesaler, the fastidious Oshikawa, who confirmed the report. Bad year, he told Karl over a pint of stout. Not many fish, and the fish I have seen are small. Karl lapped at the creamy tide of his dinner and Oshikawa, fingering a coaster, said: Maybe a disease we haven’t picked up. Maybe a monsoon somewhere messed up the food chain. Maybe the water is getting warmer. He tore the coaster into white flecks. Maybe just a bad season. Karl sipped, fiddled with his own coaster and was about to ask a question, but as he opened his mouth someone closed the pub door, and the latch shouted out a loud, clear click that forced Karl to change the subject.

  Money was no problem. Years of catching and killing Onebloods had left him with what many people would call a small fortune, certainly enough to pay for the groceries, insurance, even to send his daughters to a private boarding school in Launceston. Louise was still pulling in a decent income, so there was no need for him to go back to work on the charter boats. He knew he needed to do something to keep himself occupied, but all he knew was swell and spear and seal.