Whale Pot Bay

by Des Hunt

  ‘What about the calf?’ asked Milton.

  Steph stopped talking to Pimi and lifted her head. ‘It’s alive,’ she said. ‘Pimi told me.’

  Colin looked at her strangely, before saying, ‘Well, let’s see if it’s OK then.’

  Again I took the end of the stethoscope. This time I had to place it on various parts of her lower body.

  ‘It’s alive and kicking,’ he declared. ‘Or should I say flipping. In fact it’s in better health than she is.’

  ‘You don’t have to call the baby “it”,’ said Steph with a smile. ‘He’s a boy.’

  Again she got a strange look from Colin, but he said nothing.

  ‘All right,’ said Milt, taking charge. ‘Now we have to make sure they both stay alive. Whatever is needed, we’ll do it, no matter what the cost. So, Colin, what do we have to do?’

  Colin thought for a while. ‘An antibiotic. That’s the most important thing, and the sooner the better. We’ve got plenty back in Palmerston North, but it’ll take most of the day to get it.’

  ‘We’ll take my plane,’ said Milt, matter-of-factly. ‘What else do you need?’

  ‘I’ll pick up a vitamin mix at the same time,’ replied Colin. ‘But the next most important thing is to get her to eat. I doubt that she’s eaten since the accident.’

  ‘She eats squid, doesn’t she?’ asked Dad.

  ‘That would be the best thing, if we can get some.’

  ‘Would fishing bait be OK?’

  ‘Yes, if you can get enough of it. She’ll need about ten kilos a day.’

  ‘That’s all right. I’ll make sure she gets it,’ said Dad.

  ‘I’ll look after Pimi,’ said Steph.

  ‘And I’ll look after Steph,’ I said.

  Milt laughed. ‘Good, then everyone’s got a job to do. Let’s get on and do it.’ He turned to Steph and me. ‘You two just make sure she’s still here when we get back.’

  ‘She will be,’ said Steph, giving Pimi’s head a rub. ‘She says she’s not planning on going anywhere.’

  Dad was the first to return. He’d made a rush trip to Eketahuna and cleaned the shop out of squid bait, although that was still only enough for a couple of days. He and Vicky brought out several kilos in the inflatable.

  ‘I thawed it out in the microwave,’ said Vicky. ‘I’m sure she wouldn’t want it frozen.’

  She held one up by a tentacle. It was not a pretty sight with its black eyes surrounded by drooping tentacles and slimy pink flesh.

  ‘Yuk!’ complained Steph. ‘Am I expected to hold that?’

  ‘Yes,’ answered Dad. ‘Lots of them. There were twenty-eight in the kilo pack I opened. So if Pimi’s got a normal appetite, she’s going to need about three hundred a day.’

  ‘I’ll feed her,’ I said. ‘I don’t mind the slime.’

  ‘You do the first few,’ said Steph, ‘and then I might have a try.’

  The squishy squid was difficult to hold and it took some time to work out how to stop it squeezing out of my hands. Then I had to get it into her mouth. I stretched my arm down feeling around her head for an opening. I found something and felt around for a while before realizing it was her upper jaw. I’d been expecting teeth, yet there weren’t any. But stretching down further, I touched the lower jaw which did contain teeth—long, sharp ones. I dropped the squid and quickly pulled my hand out. I felt a rush of water past my hand which must have been her sucking in the squid. Then she lifted her head and nudged my body, which I figured was her way of saying thank-you.

  I fed her four more before I worked out the best way to do it. I just had to lay the squid between her teeth, and she would do the rest. I didn’t even need to pull my hand out quickly. She seemed to be able to sense when my hand had been removed.

  She gobbled through the first pack of twenty-eight without a break. Then I showed Steph how to do it. The second packet went down more slowly, and halfway through the third she balked—she’d either had enough or was too tired to take any more. We decided to try again later.

  Milt and Colin returned after midday.

  Colin was pleased that Pimi had eaten so much. ‘You’ve got to remember that she normally feeds for most of the day and even during the night. She won’t take the full ten kilos all at once. You’ll have to feed her three or four times a day.’

  ‘I can do that,’ said Steph with determination.

  ‘Good. Now we’ve got to get some antibiotics and vitamins into her.’ He took out a syringe with a needle that was longer than any I’d ever seen.

  ‘Hey!’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t want that pushed into me.’

  ‘It’s got to be extra long to get through the blubber and into the muscle, otherwise the drug won’t get into her bloodstream.’ Then, without further warning, he darted her and pushed home the plunger.

  ‘Ouch!’ squealed Steph. However, Pimi gave no reaction. If she’d felt it, then it obviously didn’t bother her.

  Three more injections followed, with no more reaction than the first. It was then decided that we should go to the shore and leave her alone for a while. Colin thought that too many humans around for too long might distress her.

  We went to Tarquins for lunch and to discuss what to do from now on, which was mostly about security.

  ‘This has got to be different than before,’ said Milt, sternly. ‘I don’t know how the press got hold of the tracking details, but it’s going to have to be different this time.’

  Colin took over. ‘The thing I’m most worried about is someone coming in by boat. They wouldn’t have to come far into the bay before they see her.’

  ‘That’s unlikely,’ said Dad. ‘We rarely have boats coming in here. It’s too difficult, unless you’ve got the right boat.’

  ‘But they do cruise past taking photos of Tarquins,’ said Milt. ‘Some go near the mouth of the bay. We need to make sure that they don’t see anything that will make them suspicious.’

  ‘No more than two people out in the water at a time,’ suggested Colin.

  ‘And only on surfboards,’ added Milt, ‘as that would seem quite normal.’

  After a bit more discussion, it was decided that Steph and I would have the job of feeding her, with Colin coming out once a day to administer medicines and check her progress.

  ‘OK,’ said Milt, winding up the discussion, ‘that’s it. I think we’ve covered everything. The important thing is that we must continue to behave as normal. If we do, no one will suspect that she’s here.’ Then he gave a little smile. ‘The rest of the world doesn’t need to know that she’s risen from the dead.’

  There was one job that we hadn’t discussed at our meeting, and that was looking out for Scatworm and Vermin. I considered that one of my duties. I maintained my watch on Scatworm’s hideout, visiting it every so often in the early morning when we first went to the bay.

  Fortunately, my visits were a waste of time: there were no new signs of him, his vehicle, or his stinky smoking habit. It gave me hope that he and Vermin had given up. If they didn’t hear about Pimi, we probably wouldn’t see them again.

  Pimi made great progress. Within two days the swelling was down, although not entirely back to normal. Every day she was eating more. So much so that feeding her became a chore. We would load the squid into a white plastic container which would float alongside our surfboards. Then we’d take turns, feeding her a kilogram at a time. We got into the habit of giving her three squid per mouthful to speed things up. However, it still took a fair part of each day.

  One day, when we’d finished, Steph passed her ankle rope over to me and said, ‘Hold on to this. I’m going to swim with her for a while.’ She then slipped off her board and took a few tentative strokes away from me. I’d seen her swimming a couple of times when she’d come off the board in the surf, but this was the first time I’d seen her do it willingly.

  She was quickly about fifty metres away from me. While she had a powerful arm action, her legs trailed behind her with hardly any moveme
nt. I had a glimpse of how fast she must have been before the accident.

  Soon she was back with me, treading water beside Pimi. ‘Come on, Pimi,’ she said, stroking the whale’s head. ‘Come and have a swim with me.’

  Steph moved off again, followed a moment later by Pimi. It was amazing: you would have sworn that the whale had understood what Steph had said. If Steph was all upper body with her swimming, Pimi was all lower: she swam with seemingly effortless movements of her tail.

  That first time, they went only a hundred metres or so. However, from then on they would swim together after every feed. Both of them got stronger with each swim. Sometimes Pimi would give a little spurt as if challenging the girl to go faster. To do so, Steph had to use her legs, and soon she was kicking almost like a normal swimmer.

  One afternoon when we came ashore, Dad and Vicky were on the beach. After talking for a while about Pimi, Steph went off to the tent to get changed. Vicky turned to watch her daughter walk away.

  ‘Look at her,’ she said. ‘That’s what I was telling you about, Alan.’

  We looked, and soon Dad was nodding. For a moment I couldn’t see what they were talking about. Then I realized that Steph was walking differently: her legs were no longer kicking out to the side. It wasn’t exactly normal walking, but it was a lot better than before.

  Vicky turned to me and said quietly, ‘Thank you, Jake.’

  I was taken by surprise. ‘What for?’ I spluttered. ‘I haven’t done anything.’

  ‘For the swimming.’

  ‘That’s Pimi,’ I said.

  ‘Not entirely. Steph wouldn’t be able to do it unless you were out there.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘You know, she thinks a lot of you.’ I remained silent, not sure where this was going. ‘She called you her big brother the other day.’

  That was a shock to me. But when I thought about it later, I began to understand what she was suggesting. At first Steph and I had worked together to help Pimi. Now it had reached a stage where we got on reasonably well around the home. Not that it was all happy families or anything near that: there were still moments of conflict, but nothing like there’d been before.

  Chapter 20

  The dig was making good progress. The remains of the whaleboat were now fully uncovered. It was surprising that there was anything left, considering it was almost two hundred years old. We knew the age because we found a brass plaque near where the bow would have been, stating:

  Whaleboat Cachamor

  Sydney, 1820

  Melanie said that the name was a play on ‘cachalot’ which was a common name the whalers gave to sperm whales.

  While the brass plaque had survived OK, the many iron fittings were mostly layers of rust. There was little doubt that if we tried to move the boat, it would fall apart. However, moving it was important if we were to complete the dig, because the metal-detector was saying there were large bits of metal inside, and we needed to see what they were.

  We decided to dig below the boat so that it could be lowered into the sand and buried. It would then stay there until experts came and found a way of shifting it.

  The excavating took two days. Only then did we find that the metal bits inside were a harpoon and a lance. These were the weapons used to get the whales: the harpoon to catch and maim, followed by the lance to finish the whales off. At first I found them fascinating in a macabre sort of way. That changed when Colin showed us a video of modern-day whalers using very similar weapons to kill whales in the seas around Antarctica. It sickened me that after everything we now knew about whales, we were still as barbaric towards them as we had been two hundred years before.

  I suppose we were stupid to think that the news about Pimi wouldn’t leak out somehow. It was the squid that gave it away. Pimi was soon eating so much that we had to order it in at a hundred kilos at a time. That created storage problems: where do you store such a huge amount of fish bait? The answer was to use a refrigeration container that Wally had out the back of the pub. Unfortunately, on the day that the delivery was made the pub had customers, and one of them became very interested. Wally told us about it one night when we went to the pub for dinner.

  ‘This guy came in by himself and ordered a beer. He couldn’t stay still. He marched around the place, staring out of windows, thumping tables, kicking chairs, and generally making a nuisance of himself. At one stage he stood for a long time, staring at the photo of the whales. Then he raised his hand and made a shooting motion at them. Poof poof he went with his finger. Then walked away with an evil smile on his face.’

  ‘What did he look like?’ I asked.

  ‘Young. Not all that big. Bit weedy, actually. Cleanshaven.’

  ‘What about his head?’

  ‘Can’t say. He was wearing a beanie. I can tell you about his eyes, though. They were crazy. Do you want to know what I think?’ he asked, leaning forward as if about to reveal a secret. ‘I think he was on drugs.’

  Dad and I looked at each other and tried not to smile. Wally always thought people were on drugs. If somebody didn’t conform to Wally’s idea of sensible behaviour, they had to be taking drugs. It was a bit of a joke around Hauruanui.

  ‘What about the squid?’ asked Dad.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, be patient. I was getting there. Don’t rush me.’ He looked offended for a while, before continuing, ‘Well, this guy was just about to leave when the fisheries truck pulls in and starts unloading. I go out to give a hand and find him staring at the boxes as if we’re unloading gold. His mind’s ticking over about something. He stayed there all the time while we unloaded the truck. It was annoying, but I couldn’t ask him to go away, could I? That would only alert him that it was something hush-hush.’

  ‘Did he say anything?’ I asked.

  ‘Not a word. At the end I went around the back to lock the freezer, and when I came back he was gone. I haven’t seen him since.’

  Molly brought the food out then, and that was the end of the conversation, but not of my thoughts. I knew who the man was—the eyes were the giveaway. It was Vermin. He was still around Hauruanui, and, unfortunately, he now knew that Pimi was alive.

  From then on, I started out slightly earlier each day so I could inspect Scatworm’s hideout at a time when he was unlikely to be there. If either he or Vermin were planning to take photographs, I figured they would go there: it gave a perfect view of anything happening down in the bay.

  I was right. It was the third morning after the pub dinner that it happened. I had just begun my inspection of the hideout when I heard voices coming from above me. I looked up and saw Scatworm and Vermin picking their way through the scrub on the opposite side of the gulley. Within seconds, I was lying flat on the ground under a thick bush, hoping they hadn’t seen me.

  Soon the voices were close enough for me to make out what they were saying.

  ‘—the same whale?’ That was Scatworm.

  ‘For certain. It’s got this great gash across its back,’ replied Vermin, almost with pride. ‘You wait ’til you see it.’

  By then the voices were almost beside me.

  ‘And they’re feeding it with squid?’

  ‘Yeah! Tonnes and tonnes of the stuff.’

  They came into view, less than five metres away from me. Vermin was dressed in his camouflage kit, but without the rifle. That didn’t make him any less scary. He walked in a way as if he was ready to attack anything that moved.

  They approached the edge until they were looking into the bay.

  ‘There she is,’ said Vermin. ‘Just like I told you.’

  Together they looked at her for a while. I knew what they were seeing, for I’d taken a look before they’d arrived. Pimi was almost outside the bay. It was a place where I often found her in the morning. I had the feeling that she went fishing at night to supplement the food we were giving her.

  Scatworm lifted his camera to study her. ‘I can see what you said about the wound. It’s definitely the same whale.’ He l
owered the camera. ‘This is going to make a great story. But I need her closer in than that. Plus I need to get the kids in the same shot.’

  ‘Or Summer,’ added Vermin.

  Scatworm nodded. ‘Yeah! Milton would be even better.’

  After a time, Vermin turned away from the sea to stare at his partner, as if trying to make up his mind about something. For the first time I had a good look at his eyes—they were even crazier than I’d seen at any time before. If this was how he’d been at the pub, then I could understand Wally saying he was on drugs.

  ‘You know,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a sure way of getting all of them in the same photo.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Shoot the whale.’

  That was too much for me. ‘No!’ I cried, before clamping my hand over my mouth

  Scatworm spun around. ‘What was that?’ He seemed to be staring straight at me.

  ‘Rabbits!’ declared Vermin. ‘There’s vermin everywhere around here.’

  Scatworm clearly didn’t agree. ‘I don’t think so. It sounded very human to me.’

  ‘Rabbits do that sometimes. Forget about it. What do you think of my idea?’

  Scatworm thought for a while. ‘OK, explain how shooting the whale will help.’

  ‘It’s simple,’ replied Vermin. ‘If the whale is dead, it’s sure to float up onto the beach. Then they’ll all gather around to mourn its passing.’ He grunted, as if the thought of mourning any animal was ridiculous. ‘That’s when you get your photos. We share the money fifty-fifty.’

  ‘And what happens when they discover it’s been shot?’

  ‘So what? How will they know who did it? I bet most of the people around here own rifles. It’s not like they’re going to launch a criminal investigation over a dead whale.’

  Scatworm stared at him for a while, shaking his head slowly. ‘I’m not too sure about using guns. Things could go wrong.’