by Des Hunt
On that day, Milt’s caretaker drove the tractor—the rest of us were already on the boat. We got underway just after eleven o’clock. Apart from a moderate southerly swell, the weather was perfect. Dad said that the swell was probably a good thing, as it would keep the smaller boats ashore. This meant that only boats from Castlepoint or as far away as Wellington would be able to get out to where Pimi was reported to be. More than likely, we would be the first on the scene. A check on the radar showed a couple of boats to the south of us.
As soon as the course was set, Milt turned on the computer system which was one of several screens surrounding the wheel in the steering house.
‘Let’s see if the satellite’s working,’ he said, entering a lengthy username and password. A while later he was logged onto the Internet and accessing the tracking site. Pimi’s path showed as a series of dots heading north along the Hikurangi Trench.
‘She’s feeding,’ said Colin. ‘Run the mouse up the dots, Milt, so we can see the times.’
As the mouse moved from one dot to the next, the time and location popped up on the screen.
‘About forty minutes apart,’ reported Colin. ‘She’s definitely feeding.’
‘Can she hold her breath for forty minutes?’ asked Steph.
‘No,’ replied Colin. ‘She can’t hold air in her lungs or she wouldn’t sink.’
‘Then how does she breathe?’ I asked.
‘She doesn’t need to under the water. She does it all before she dives. Have a look at the figures again.’ He moved the cursor over the last dot. ‘See, she was on the surface for eighteen minutes before diving. During that time she would be breathing almost continuously. She has to get the carbon dioxide out of her muscles, and fill up with oxygen. Then she’s ready to go again.’
‘What about her baby?’ Steph asked, ‘Does the baby go with her?’
‘No, she hasn’t had the calf yet,’ replied Colin. ‘She wouldn’t go down for forty minutes if she had. For the first couple of months the calf has to stay on the surface. She wouldn’t leave it for long at all.’
‘We’ve got company,’ interrupted Milt, pointing to the radar where two more blips had appeared to the south. There were now five boats zeroing in on Pimi.
‘What’s our ETA?’ asked Dad.
‘Depends where she surfaces,’ replied Milt.
Colin put his finger on the screen. ‘She’ll come up there.’
Milt nodded. ‘Then it’s about twenty minutes.’ He studied the radar for a while. ‘The others will be about twenty-five minutes.’
‘When will she surface?’ asked Vicky.
Again Colin adjusted the cursor on the screen. ‘She dived ten minutes ago.’ He thought for a moment, before adding grimly, ‘Which means she’ll come up in the middle of us.’
‘Surely she’ll see the boats and move away?’ said Dad.
‘Yeah, she’ll sense the boats, using her sonar. She’ll even hear the motors. But after forty minutes below, she won’t have the energy to move far away. If she doesn’t get to the surface quickly and rest, then she could pass out. They’re very weak and vulnerable when they surface from a dive.’
From then on we were silent, with each of us staring out at the sea. I don’t know about the others, but I wasn’t really seeing much. I was thinking about the other people converging on Pimi. I felt sure that some of them would be journalists, and if they were anything like Scatworm they’d go to any lengths to get the photos they wanted. More than likely Scatworm was one of them. Then I thought of Vermin. Maybe he was there, too. I shuddered. That man was a nut case—anything could go wrong with him around.
As predicted, we were the first on the scene. Colin had fiddled with the computer and now had our position showing as a green dot. It was sitting in exactly the position where Pimi should appear.
Milt climbed onto the upper deck to control the boat from up there, where the view was better. Some of the others joined him, but not me. Now that we had stopped moving, the rolling swell was beginning to make me feel sick. I moved into the driver’s seat and made out I was the captain. Every now and again the controls in front of me would shift as Milt adjusted for the southerly current.
Three minutes passed before the first of the other boats arrived. The captain looked like a wealthy businessman; no doubt trying to impress some of his mates by bringing them out to see Milton Summer’s whale. It was plain they were surprised to find the superstar himself out there, and soon the cameras were out and aimed at us.
The next two boats were similar, although not up to the same standard of luxury. It was the last one that carried the media contingent. There were five or six reporters and an equal number of photographers, including Scatworm. Surprisingly there were no TV cameras, although there was somebody with a small video camera. At first I couldn’t see clearly, but when he moved out of the shadows I saw the shaven head. It was Vermin. He’d swapped the camouflage kit and rifle for respectable clothes and a camera. Yet he seemed no calmer than before—he looked just as wild as when he was killing magpies.
My observation of the man was broken by a voice from a speaker above my head. ‘Jake, can you turn on the fish-finder?’ asked Milt. ‘We want to try and see Pimi. It’s the box to the left of the computer screen.’
I found it and switched it on.
‘Thank you,’ said Milt, ‘I can adjust it from here, now.’
I watched as the image slowly formed on the screen. There was little to see except a few red dots on a blue-black background.
‘Not much there,’ came Dad’s voice.
‘Probably too deep for most fish,’ added Milt.
‘Scan wider,’ Dad suggested.
The image blanked for a moment, before returning much the same as before. Then right at the edge a red shape appeared.
‘That’s her,’ said Colin.
The other captains must also have been watching their fish-finders, for we heard motors revving up all around us.
‘She’s about four hundred metres to the north,’ said Milt as the throttles in front of me were rammed forward. The boat reared up and sprang into life like a frightened horse. Already three of the other boats were ahead of us.
‘This is madness!’ shouted Colin. ‘They’ll kill her if she rises in front of them.’
I saw the throttle levers ease back, and a moment later the engines calmed and we were slowly cruising through the wake of the other boats.
‘He’s given up,’ said a voice beside me. It was Vicky. ‘There’s nothing he can do to stop them.’
My heart sank. This was not the way I wanted it to be. As long as we were close to the other boats, I felt we had a chance of stopping them doing anything crazy. Now it was out of our control. They could do what they wanted to her and there was nothing we could do except watch the fish-finder and hope.
By then Pimi was closer to the surface, although it was impossible to tell where she was in relation to the boats. Then, suddenly, she changed direction and began to move back towards us.
‘She’s seen them,’ said Vicky, excitedly grabbing hold of my shoulder.
But the other boats must have also seen her, for all of them began to turn around.
We watched anxiously as Pimi’s image got closer to the centre of the screen. Surely she would break the surface at any time.
‘There she is!’ shouted Steph from the deck above.
‘Yes!’ said Vicky, pointing a little to port of where we were heading.
Pimi surfaced with hardly a ripple. Almost immediately a thin wisp of spray issued from the left side of her head. She was breathing again.
The other boats were now heading back towards her. ‘Go around and head them off,’ suggested Dad.
Milt must have agreed: the pitch of the engines increased and the bow lifted as we took off again. However, this time we had the advantage, as we were closer to Pimi. Within seconds we were on the other side, between her and the racing boats.
She was only a few metres
from the hull, floating almost lifelessly in the water. There was a steady stream of mist from her breathing hole. While she couldn’t know that we were the people who’d saved her when she’d stranded, I got the feeling that she knew that we meant her no harm.
The same could not be said of the other boats, which were approaching at high speed. Milt throttled back so that we were stopped in the water. Now they would either have to crash into us, or slow down and pull over to one side.
Colin dropped down onto the deck in front of me, holding the remote control. He pointed it towards Pimi and started pressing buttons. ‘Hold it steady, Milt!’ he yelled. ‘It’ll only take a moment.’
‘Those other boats are not slowing,’ Dad warned.
‘And I’m not moving,’ replied Milt, grimly.
I turned and saw that the lead boat was the one carrying Scatworm and Vermin. It was coming straight towards us at full throttle. I was already bracing myself for the impact when, at the last minute, it throttled back and swerved to one side. After rushing past our bow, it turned in towards Pimi. Fortunately, it was going too fast to turn sharply, and the boat shot past, just a few metres clear of the startled whale.
‘Done it!’ shouted Colin. ‘I just hope she’s got enough energy to dive and get out of here.’
We all stared at the whale, willing her to dive. But she just lay in the water as if frozen with fear. Then a red stain started spreading from her tail end.
Above us, Steph screamed.
‘Oh my God!’ cried Vicky beside me. ‘She’s bleeding. ’
‘Is that blood?’ asked Milt.
‘Yes,’ I said more to myself than anyone. The water surrounding Pimi was quickly turning red-brown.
‘She can’t have been hit,’ said Dad, puzzled. ‘They weren’t close enough.’
‘It was certainly not us,’ said Milton, forcefully. ‘Maybe she was attacked while she was feeding.’
By then the journalists on the other boat had seen the blood and the photographers were shooting rapidly. Vermin was almost falling over the back as he leaned out to video the scene. Scatworm was gesturing to the captain to move the boat in closer. There was a great churning from the stern as the boat went into reverse. Slowly it crept back towards Pimi. The photographers all jostled to get to the side nearest her, tilting the boat perilously.
Then two more boats arrived alongside. As they came to a stop, their wake welled up and hit the journalists’ boat side-on, thrusting the still-churning propeller towards Pimi. There was a thud of contact. Then the boat swayed dangerously, causing the photographers to scramble to stay on board. I could see the captain struggling with the wheel as he tried to keep an even keel. Finally he managed to change gear and the boat eased slowly forward.
But it was too late. As the boat moved away and the water calmed, we saw Pimi rise to the surface, in the middle of the pool of red. Then her injuries became visible, bringing gasps and screams of shock. Across her back, where the tracking pad had once been, was a deep gouge cut by the spinning propeller.
While most people were trying to cope with the horror of the scene, the photographers were clicking away furiously. Some were taking shots of Pimi, while others concentrated on the reaction of the onlookers. Vermin’s camera was aimed at Pimi. Then, as I watched, he tilted the camera so that he included Milt’s boat in the shot. Slowly he panned the length of the boat until the camera was pointed directly at me, and there it stayed. I turned away, not wanting to be part of his horrible home video.
When I looked back, the camera was on Pimi again. She was now lying head-down in the water, with only the arch of her back and the deep wound visible. A strange silence settled over the scene as we watched her slip slowly away beneath the surface. Soon she was gone.
The silence seemed to last for ages, before being broken by a loud voice. It was Vermin. ‘Well,’ he shouted, ‘that’ll keep the sharks fed for a while, won’t it?’ Then he laughed wildly at his own joke. But nobody joined him in the laughter: none of the business people; or the journalists; not even his mate, Scatworm.
Chapter 17
The trip back to Whale Pot Bay was mostly a silent affair, broken only by Steph’s quiet sobbing. We’d spent several hours at the location where Pimi had disappeared, cruising back and forth, without success. She never resurfaced within the several square kilometres we patrolled. I think Milt would’ve searched all night, if we hadn’t been there—he was deep into blaming himself for everything. Finally, even he had to accept that she was gone, and we headed for home.
It was early evening by the time we came ashore. Milt invited us up to Tarquins for a meal, which we accepted although nobody seemed particularly hungry. Steph was given some paracetamol and put in a bed with the hope that sleep might lessen some of the grief. The rest of us sat in the lounge, moping as if we were at a funeral. Actually, it was worse than a funeral. The only funeral I’ve been to was Grandma’s, and that was almost a fun thing with people telling stories about her life and what a character she’d been.
We had no such stories about Pimi. Every time we’d had contact with her, things had gone wrong: the death of her first baby, followed by her own stranding, and now this…I think we all needed to talk about it, but no one was prepared to start the conversation. In the end, Milt turned on the television so we could watch the news. That provided more than enough for us to discuss.
The event was the second item. Before it began, the announcer warned that some scenes might be disturbing for some viewers.
It started with an aerial view of the boats clustered around something in the water. With all the noise of the boat engines, I hadn’t noticed that there’d been a plane out there as well. The overhead scene cut to a closer view that must have been taken from one of the boats. I figured it was from Vermin’s camera, as that was the only video I’d seen. The film clearly showed Pimi lying in the red-stained water. It looked like a shot taken just after the journalists’ boat had zoomed past us.
A voice-over was saying, ‘This is the scene that we found when we first saw her.’ It was Vermin’s hissy voice. ‘You can see that the whale is already injured, and the only boat there at the time was Milton Summer’s. They must have gone over the top of the whale and cut it with the propeller.’ There was a pause in the voice as the view cut to a later scene where Pimi’s injury was in full view. ‘In this shot,’ continued Vermin, ‘you can see the injury made by the propeller.’ The camera zoomed in and we had our first close look at the cut. It looked worse than what I’d seen at the time. Any hope I’d had that she might have survived disappeared as I watched her head sink into the water and her body slowly slide away. The final shot in the film was of our boat with Milt staring down at the empty water from the upper deck. He looked extremely upset by what he’d just witnessed.
As the film finished, the presenter’s image returned. ‘Unfortunately, Milton Summer has been unavailable for comment,’ she said.
This was followed by the co-presenter adding, ‘You can see more of this remarkable footage in our programme after seven.’ They then moved on to the next item.
Immediately, Milt was on his feet and pacing angrily around the room. ‘That is so wrong!’ he shouted. ‘It’s all wrong.’ More pacing. ‘All my phone calls were patched through to the boat and nothing came through. They haven’t tried to contact me at all.’ He clenched his fists and beat them against the air. ‘It’s all bullshit. My boat doesn’t even have a propeller. Anyway, we were well clear of Pimi when she surfaced.’
‘We all saw her when she came up,’ said Dad, ‘and she wasn’t injured at that time. The blood came later.’
Suddenly Colin sat up straight. ‘It wasn’t blood,’ he said, quietly.
‘What!’ exclaimed several of us together.
‘It wasn’t blood. It was ink.’ The room went still as we waited for him to explain. ‘Pimi inked. It’s what pygmy sperm whales do when they’re frightened. They squirt a red-brown dye out of their anus. It’s meant to put off
the attacker. They might also use it to confuse prey so that they can catch them more easily.’
Dad nodded. ‘So she got frightened by the journalists’ boat screaming in the way it did?’
‘Yes,’ replied Colin. ‘Normally she would have dived after inking, but I suspect she was still too exhausted.’
Vicky pointed at the television. ‘How do we get those people to tell the truth?’ she asked.
Milt was beginning to calm down. ‘Let’s wait and see what they show after seven.’
So we did, and the first thing we saw was Vermin sitting next to the presenter. Milt rushed to the screen and stabbed a finger at him. ‘That’s that weird shop assistant.’ He turned to us. ‘Scott Grey. He’s the one who leaked the information about me surfing. He’s the one who started all of this mess.’ Then he nodded slowly. ‘Now it’s all beginning to make sense—he’s trying to get back at me for losing his job.’
Vermin was describing what had happened out on the water, or at least his version of it. His video footage had been carefully edited to suit his argument. For example, the shot of Pimi after she’d inked showed only the front half of her body. The place where the tracking pad was attached was invisible. Hence he could claim that the injury had already happened, but we just couldn’t see it. Without doubt he must’ve known it was a lie.
The story was the same as given earlier, except more of the video was shown. Only at the end did it add anything new. They showed the segment where Scott Grey had panned the camera along the boat before zooming in on me sitting in the captain’s chair. I was surprised to see that I had hold of the wheel.
They froze this image on the screen behind the two men in the studio. ‘This is why it happened,’ Vermin said. ‘A boy was driving the boat at the time. Milton Summer let a boy take charge. No wonder they ran over the whale.’
‘Are you saying,’ put in the presenter, ‘that the boy was at the helm?’
‘Yes,’ replied Scott Grey, looking straight into the camera. ‘He had to be. As you saw in the other shot, Milton was on the upper deck. You can’t drive the boat from up there.’