“No, I don’t think they understand rentals here, they seem to think they’ll be able to rent it out over the winter; he even mentioned you staying there. But I told him about how you were planning on buying the title for our house from us so you can just pay the taxes.”
That wasn’t actually part of any of my plans. My mother’s new insistence on this enduring topic suggested she might have gleaned from Ill John that I had a bundle of cash on me. Part of her plan to weave me further into society with every phone call involved hinting that the world disapproved of my avoidance of crippling responsibility and debt. My mom would talk about food and taxes with anyone, though. Not enough and probably prepared wrong; and too much and definitely prepared wrong.
“But, Orange, this is what I didn’t tell Hezzie: they were asking about seagum. Whether your father taught you to go seagumming; if you would take them to your patch.”
And this is how even the most morally pristine of island mothers resembles a successful drug dealer: they are excellent enforcers of discretion. The wrong tone from a stranger and it’s all over. Seagum patches are passed from father to son and are defended by threats of feud and sabotage that can only make sense to natives. “They probably don’t know. I’ll talk to him about it.”
Our conversation ended like they usually do. Mom passed on instructions and warnings from Dad. Then she said she still loved me. If Snorri hadn’t been standing there, I might have said the same back to her. I held the phone up to him and gave him a smug look to say, ‘Hey, lookit, I just I just aced a phone call—with my mother, even.’
“You’ve got a problem,” he said.
“What’s wrong?”
“You have a message from Waldena.”
I looked at the Brady Bunch-style grid of faces; Waldena’s was scowling but not bobbing like Moira’s. “Why’s she making a face?”
Snorri smirked. “Your countrymen call it an ‘app.’ You should see what she does on mine.”
I gave her image a little bip between the eyes and got her text message: “Come find me.” Snorri saw it. “She sounds lonely.”
“I think she threatened to kill me last time I saw her. Or maybe it was the time before that. Maybe she just wants to re-up the threat.” I wondered. . . I wondered if there were a word in Finlindian for the perfect marriage of dread and desire.
Snorri gave me a look that suggested we’d all be better off married to good Finlindian bears. I couldn’t decide what to type back, even after Snorri showed me how to invoke the English keyboard, so I waved the phone around, hoping to shake off Waldena’s summoning.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The Wrong Whale
“We’re not towing anything, are we?”
Snorri said no.
“Well, Skipper, I believe it is my genetic destiny to inform you, thar she blows.”
“It just breached?”
“Yeah, but it’s been with us a while.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I thought I was probably hallucinating.”
“You should have told me anyway.”
“Yesterday a seagull said, ‘Fish in limber clouds.’”
“You should know the difference from bird blather and a real whale.”
“I should be home sleeping off a big lunch.” We watched a while. “It’s spending too long on the surface,” Snorri said.
“Is it OK? Wait, I think it’s waving at us. Fuck, it’s huge!” The whale had rolled onto its side and raised a fluke that seemed as large as the Honeypaws. It hit the water’s surface with a tremendous beaver slap and then descended, leaving the water to our aft a rolling boil.
A minute later the boat bulged up under us, making us both nearly squat in compensation. Just below us, its image barely distorted by the water, was the biggest eye that had ever looked at me. I was transfixed as my measure was taken by the vastness. Then, staccato pops like a machine-gun cannonade that rose in pitch and frequency until it was the scream of a banking fighter jet. I fell back onto the deck and got tangled up in Snor-ri. My heart, and his too—I could feel it—were fluttering like the last brown leaves on a winter oak. I couldn’t tell whether I was hearing a strangely-dopplered police siren or whether my ears were ringing. Snorri and I noticed we were holding each other and ungrappled ourselves. When I got to my knees and looked over the side, I could see that the boat was yawing in the vortex the whale had left as it dived again.
“I’ll take the harpoon gun!” I yelled, unnecessarily, to Snorri, “You get the wheel!”
He caught my arm as I scrambled to the forward deck, “No!”
“It’s going to kill us!”
Snorri was a very pale man at the moment—me too, probably, but Snorri appeared disturbed on an epic scale, whereas I was merely scared silly. “It already did not kill us.”
“What?!” I wanted action. I had already not shit my breeches, nor barfed breakfast, and the cartilage in my knees was already firming back up. I knew I was nearly OD’ing on adrenaline and stupidity, but I wondered if I weren’t actually bred for this moment—stabbing the whale—and if Snorri were thwarting my birthright. And besides, the nasty harpoon gun on the deck— what the hell else was it for?
Before I could mutiny, another spout erupted several boat lengths away and drenched us. It smelled foul. This time, when the whale breached, I got a better look at it, having been unable to look away from its eye when it was under the boat. It was smiling at me. And groaning. Its chinless face was a little like the bow of a ship and its recursive lips gave its grin the rueful droop of a seagum addict. I took this expression to mean, ‘I’m going to enjoy mulching your little boat, even though I may bruise my forehead.’ “It’s gonna ram us!”
Snorri held me by my shoulder, much too hard. “I think I recognize that whale. Or rather I think maybe he recognizes me.”
“So, it’s back for revenge?”
“I think, I hope, it’s just curious. Look at him. That’s a big blackie. What do you islanders call these, right whales?”
“Right.” Or wrong, really. If I had lived hundreds of years ago, this big black whale would have been swimming right off coast. My ancestors, and Snorri’s too, used to hunt these guys in little boats launched from the shore. Properly stabbed to death, their corpses would float and could be towed in to get flensed right on the beach. Thus they were considered the “right” whale to hunt and thus they had been nearly exterminated. It wasn’t until most of them had been boiled down into oil that North Atlantic whalers ventured to the South Pacific. It was the wrong whale for another reason too; this wasn’t the species carrying Snorri’s antennae. We hadn’t been looking for this kind of whale.
So this whale shouldn’t have been there. Or it should have had enough sense to stay away from human beings. Therefore it was here to kill us.
Snorri exclaimed in Finlindian. In English, he said, “I think the Whale Council’s sonar is working too well!”
The Honeypaws came with the usual assortment of fishing and navigational tools, but his sonar was something special, as he had told me during the ceaseless orientation seminar our week-long whale-watching trip had become. Just because North Americans had quit whaling didn’t mean we were done harassing them. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, we’d been doing our best to drive them insane by transforming the ocean into a clanging discordia of grinding propellors, sonic booms, cable buzz and every other sound we buried, unheard by human ears, in the ocean depths. In a mere generation or two for some of their species, we surface-dwelling hominids had filled the ocean with enough sonic pollution to effectively blind, deafen, starve, and madden all the remaining echolocutionists.
Snorri had explained that the Northern Indian whaling councils had developed a type of sonar that was supposed to be more euphonious, more cetacean, and that Honeypaws was among the first generation of whalers to use the system. He had told me the real tragedy was the callous destruction of the whales’ oral culture, but by then I had tired of his own ora
l culture, and had stopped listening to his conjectures about the molecular transference of vibrational resonance of the one-stringed harp his ancestors played and its influence on cetacean telecommunication. He had a story about a thousand Finlindian greybeards yoiking and strumming their harps on the beach, summoning whales to deliver them from starvation and darkness.
Snorri didn’t have a harp, but I knew it was only a matter of time before he began yoiking. “Listen to this,” he said and went in the cabin, where he adjusted his council’s special sonar song so that we could hear it onboard. It made me think of melancholic satellites whistling as their orbits decayed. While I and the gulls listened to that, Snorri hooked his phone up to Honeypaws’ dashboard. “Now listen to this. . . no, wait. Wait a minute.” Snorri advanced and reversed a recording of someone, possibly a human being, gargling and whooping. “Here, this is a recording of the summoning song I was telling you about.”
“Song” was a poor descriptor for what I was hearing. There was a sort of rhythmic thwonging—the one-stringed harp—and the sound of a man who had smoked far too much opium being startled to death slowly, while he occasionally hit himself in the windpipe. Then he played the “song,” which he said was a recording of one of Finlindia’s living yoiking legends at the peak of his improvisational form, along with the special sonar. “You hear it? The concordances? Not harmonies, but …” and then he started warbling along, making a rumble in his throat and a whistle in his nose.
I looked out at the dark leviathan. He was staring at us with the other eye now. I looked back at Snorri. His eyes were closed, and his Adam’s apple was bobbing. Suddenly, I knew just what to do. I cupped my hand over my ear back-up singer-style and went at it like a sled dog staked out for the night in polar bear country. Somehow, it felt right to utter/sing a series of “wuh wuh wuh woos,” in different speeds and tones. Snorri opened up his chant/wail to leave room for mine and we found ourselves in a sort of concordance and not harmony, just as Snorri had said. He moved close in to me and I began to lose sense of the cabin. While I worked the chant, stretching and goosing the syllables, Snorri whispered in my ear: “Think of distance, of time, how your voice can transcend them or make them unbearable.” Then he stood right up against me and joined back in. We were sharing the same breath. I’d do the “wuh woos,” which were coming to me in wave-like sounds, and he’d swallow them, replying with something like a squadron of distant geese. Snorri moved in even closer. Back-and-forth, nose-to-nose, we yoiked until I got fizzy, saw the stars we were singing about, and blacked out.
I was only down for a moment; Snorri and I had filled the cabin up with a weirdness and level of carbon dioxide that was beyond my tolerance. Snorri turned off the yoik and the sonar and I peeked back at the whale. Did whales blink? This one didn’t seem to.
“What was. . . . ”
“Anybody can yoik. You just did. You intuited whale speech. And the big blackie heard us. He’s responding.”
We listened to something like a giant copper cauldron being rolled across a rocky valley. “What’s it saying?”
“I really do not know, though I wish I did. There are legends that Northern Indian ancients could sing with them, but they never wrote the language down, and it’s long lost. Some of our scholars think that certain scrimshawed designs are actually a sort of sonic map to Northern waters, transliterated from whale speech, but other people think they’re just scribbles. I don’t know. I could understand my bearbride well enough, but we lived together for years. When I used to feed the little pink melonheads in my council’s fjord, they’d be right there at the water’s edge, chattering away to me. I don’t know what they were saying, but I could tell it was mostly just trivial gossip about the pod—and begging for more kribble, of course. More, more, more, now, now, now. That’s what all animals say when you’re holding food.”
We listened for a little while. The whale shifted from its epic rumbles to a goofier, though still stentorian series of meeps and fwoos. I told Snorri it sounded a little like Rover yowling at spiders in the cellar.
“Did you know most whales have millions of lice on them? The lice can be used to date the origin of a whale’s species, since the insects reproduce so quickly. Many generations of lice live on a long-lived whale like this, and they form their own divisions of lice-species as they adapt to the particular whale’s biological ecology.”
“That’s like what that Bags guy in the sub was saying about the whalefalls and his arcology fantasy.”
“The lice might even have more of a story to tell us than the whales.”
“You’re not going to do a lice yoik, are you? I don’t want to talk to them.”
“Me neither. I only like to sing with heavy animals.”
I scratched my head hard; it had been a long time since I’d showered.
“Brace yourself!” Snorri yelled. The whale had crossed the distance between us in a moment, and then Honeypaws was being butted along the water, her bow almost shipping from the speed. Snorri and I staggered into the wheelhouse, and he took the wheel to keep us pointing forward.
“Now?” I asked, pointing to the harpoon gun.
“No! If this were a serious attack, he would have used his tail. This is, I don’t know, affectionate?”
“We’re fucked!”
“You better hope not. These guys have the biggest testicles of any animal on the planet.”
I had a headful of nearly insuppressible sarcasm, and a bolus of panic bobbled around my stomach and intestines. A thought of good old Rover came to me as unbidden as the whale was butting our stern. She did this too. In fact, most every domesticated creature I could think of had done this to me. Animals headbutt you when they want food.
“The kribble!” I said to Snorri.
He thought about it a moment and told me to fetch it from the forward hold. I dashed down the steps. We only had a few sacks of the dried krill and krill by-products, but they were fifty pounders. I humped them up to the stern deck and Snorri handed me his long knife. I slit the bags and heaved them over the stern, where they hit the whale on the back. It stopped shoving us and veered away. We coasted on another fifty yards or so; as we slowed, our bow rose to a safer level. Snorri started the engine he’d cut when we first saw the whale and took us out in a short arc. The whale was doing something similar; he circled back to the spreading cloud of kribble and came to a relative stop as he hoovered in the dried bugs, straining them through his long thin louvres of baleen.
“That’s learned behavior,” said Snorri. “The important question is; did he learn it from fellow whales or people?” With the boat under power and the whale occupied, it was safe for Snorri to leave the wheel for a moment. He twisted his phone a couple of times and then folded it back onto itself, sort of like cutting a deck of cards with one hand. Then he held it up at eye level as if he were saluting with it.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m photographing it. See? This configuration acts as a lens. A microphone, too; I’ve been recording it. Your phone does this too, but it doesn’t have the same quality lens.”
Snorri told me to pilot us around the whale slowly, now that it was relatively still. He wanted to see as much of it as possible. It was still watching me; I could tell.
“Set the wheel straight and let us drift a minute, I want you to see something.” I made it so and joined him on the rear deck to watch the whale have his snack.
“You see that brindling?” he asked, pointing along the whale’s length.
“Is it from lice?”
“No! That’s a really desirable pattern, almost impossible to breed for. See, under the black there’s a coruscating wavy pattern like ripples reflecting the night sky.”
“Nobody breeds this species.”
“Right, they’re much too big and range too far, even if they weren’t nearly extinct.”
“And now it’s following us. And we’re out of kribble.”
“This, I think, is a legendary whale. Th
at brindle is a pattern from our distant history—it resembles a sequence of powerful runes. In some illuminated sagas, these whales swim on the margins with names and messages coded into their skin. My people have always known whales are the masters of long-distance travel and communications on this planet; we have folk tales about wizards who passed messages across the oceans with these whales.”
“What, they wrote on them?”
“No they sang to them. Like our sonar does.”
“What, exactly, is our sonar singing?”
“I had thought it was just a nice historic allusion, like that car with the flag on your TV show that plays ‘Yankee Doodle’ on its horn.”
“That’s not. . . never mind.” There are nuances of North American popular culture that are not worth explaining in the presence of a whale.
“But now I think the whale councils might have a broader and deeper agenda. Maybe they are trying to summon these old boys back. If our ancestors really did know how to sing to whales, they never wrote the language down, and it’s long lost to our culture. Maybe the councils want the whales to come back and teach us.”
“Teach them what?”
“I don’t know. I spent years learning more than I want to know about whale husbandry, but really, at heart, I’m a bear man. The whale councils are the oldest and most secretive institutions in our society. They have agendas that span history and nations. The European nonsense about the councils as smuggling syndicates is just the most recent attempt to smear them. Without the councils we wouldn’t have crossed the Atlantic in prehistory.”
Ignoring the fact that I knew with moral certainty that Snorri was a smuggler and that nothing much we’d done together recently would have been considered legal in North America, I asked about the writing on the whale instead.
“It’s not necessarily runes,” he said. “It might just be a fortuitous coincidence. Maybe they’re code. It’s organic though, nobody tattooed or branded them. Actually, I’ve never even seen one before. I doubt many people have.”
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