by Jeff Gulvin
‘Powerful, isn’t it?’
‘Incredible.’
‘The Derry Castle was wrecked on the northern reef in 1887. There were twenty-two crew members and one passenger and they all went into the sea.’ His voice was deep but soft in her ear. ‘Fifteen of them drowned.’
Libby shivered and closed the door again. ‘I tell you what,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you just get us into Port Ross?’
He did, steering the Korimako east and south of the currents that plagued Pebble Point, and in darkness they entered the natural harbour between Enderby and Ewing Islands. In the lee of Enderby the sea grew calmer; the wind still howled but they were moving into sheltered waters and Libby felt the Southern Ocean roll fading under her feet.
They anchored in Sandy Bay, lying short of the swathes of bladder kelp that grew a metre a day, and Jonah fired up the gas stove. ‘Who’s for mutton stew?’ He placed a pot he had cooked ashore on the work surface and prised off the lid. Libby sniffed and smiled.
‘It smells good even when it’s cold.’
‘That’s because it is good, Libby, especially when it’s cooked the way I do it’ — he winked at her, a glint in the black of his eye — ‘with roasted kumara on the side.’
‘Sounds even better.’ Both Libby and Bree had acquired a real taste for the Maori sweet potato since they had been in New Zealand.
She opened a bottle of chilled Montana Chardonnay and poured four large glasses, then put another bottle in the cooler. She called John-Cody and Tom up from where they were checking the engine and they drank a toast to the safe passage south. The main engine was off, only the auxiliary running. Libby swallowed wine. Then she heard a rumbling noise, long and drawn out, burred at the edges, a sound that was almost vibration. ‘That’s a southern right whale,’ she said.
They went on deck wrapped up against the winter night; rain clouds hid the stars and the water was coal black. The mountains lifted in grey shadows above Sandy Bay and Libby heard the bark of Hooker sea lions on the beach.
Water shifted behind them and they crossed to the other quarter where a great dark shape lifted like a bank of oiled mud from the sea. Black and shiny with running water, the great whale rolled on its side and slapped the surface with a shovel-like flipper ten feet long. They were soaked. Libby stepped back, caught her breath then looked down again as the whale lifted its head and she could see the paler colour of the callosities that covered its jaw like barnacles. They heard the weighted rubber-like explosion of sound as another whale blew some distance from the boat. ‘It seems they’re already here in numbers,’ John-Cody said.
The whales were early; it was only May and the majority would linger till almost November, mating in groups, the males fighting for the continued path of their genes, coupling with a female en masse, one set of sperm displacing that of her previous lover. The pregnant cows would give birth throughout the period, and as spring shook off the ghosts of winter they would leave the harbour on their migratory path north.
Libby lay in her bunk that night and listened to the whales in the water, roars and grunts and vibrating sounds so deep they rattled the hull. It was nothing like the song of the humpback; these whales communicated at a much lower frequency and could send sound many miles through the ocean. They did not echolocate like dolphins, but it was generally accepted they used their low-frequency pulses to navigate great distances.
The southern rights were a gentle race, inquisitive and slow-moving, preferring shallow water, which had almost been their downfall. The Basques hunted the northern breed to virtual extinction during the Middle Ages. The same had occurred with the whales here in the Southern Ocean. Libby knew from previous research that many New Zealand scientists believed these whales were the descendants of those driven to the very brink back in the nineteenth century. Their colouring was different: they had a greater area of white or grey skin, and were more mottled on the underside of their bellies. That would be a sign of inbreeding, which was bound to occur if their numbers had been vastly reduced. There were only a couple of thousand of them left in the entire ocean. Tomorrow, if it was possible, she planned to dive with some of them.
John-Cody woke in the night. The wind had dropped to a whisper and perhaps it was the sudden stillness that disturbed him. He got out of bed and pulled on his clothes, then made his way up the steps in darkness. The clouds had rolled back and moonlight illuminated the wheelhouse on all sides. As soon as they dropped anchor he and Tom had unfastened the aluminium shutters to relieve the feeling of claustrophobia that developed on any voyage south. He stood a moment to gather his thoughts, listening to the huge variety of sounds the whales were making outside.
Feeling in his pocket for tobacco, he made himself a cigarette then stepped on deck to smoke it. There was a chill in the air, but nothing compared to the ice when the wind was blowing, which it usually did: in fact he could not recall such a calm night in the Sub-Antarctic. He moved to the bows and leaned on the rail and made out the dulled shapes of sea lions on the beach beyond the kelp. Another whale called from behind him and the sound was eerie, ringing out in heavy discordant chimes against the night. He thought then of the shipwrecked sailors, ancient colleagues who had been lucky enough to make it ashore when their vessels foundered. He thought of those who had not been so lucky and were taken by the sea or dashed against rocks till the life was beaten out of them. He thought of the Moriori Maori who had survived on these islands for almost fourteen years, the longest anyone had lived down here. But even they left in the end and it was a fact that nobody had ever tamed the islands; perhaps that was why he and Mahina had loved them so much.
The whalers didn’t last, neither did the sealers, but they left only when they had savaged the respective populations almost to nothing. Charles Enderby’s town of Hardwicke lasted only three bitter years and was abandoned in 1852. Now the islands were abandoned to the giant megaherbs, the tangled forests of rata and the wildlife, which thrived in abundance unhindered by man.
John-Cody paced his boat, moving quietly in his soft-soled shoes so as not to disturb the three sleepers beneath him. From bow to stern along both quarters he checked the ropes, the sail sheets, the lifebelts and the dive locker. He stood resting against the glasshouse and smoked his cigarette, then cupped his hand to the fresh-water barrel and drank. Again a bull called from the depths and the sound reverberated in his soul. He looked up into the night where the blackened firmament rang with a million stars. He got his bearings and located the ones he knew: Lyra and Vega, Aquila; the constellation of Hercules almost due north, Corona Borealis to the west and Serpens Caput west again. Silently he trusted that Tom knew them as well as he did, then he went below deck.
Libby lay awake in her bunk. She had heard John-Cody moving about earlier as if he was troubled by dreams, tossing and turning in the bunk next door. When he got up she could see him through her open door, silhouetted by the moon at the top of the steps. She had wanted to get up too, but didn’t. Quite why, she was not sure: she heard him go on deck and she lay there deliberating. He was gone only ten minutes then he was back in his bunk with his reading light still switched on.
Libby rolled on her side and tried to sleep. But sleep wouldn’t come. Her head was crammed with emotions, disparate thoughts that cluttered her mind till it hurt. She thought about Bree and the two of them being in New Zealand, she thought about Nehemiah Pole and Dusky Sound and the difference in John-Cody since that day he had gone to meet him. There was a terrible distance in his eyes, as if he was there on the boat with them and at the same time somewhere else. The fun had gone out of him, as if he was right back where he had been when she and Bree first arrived. Why was she so bothered about it? Her concern was Dusky Sound and the reality that a resident pod dwelt there and what might happen to them.
But John-Cody crowded her thoughts: he had done for a while, at home, when she was alone in Dusky and here and now on this boat. She sat up and watched the light from his cabin still creeping across t
he chart-room floor. Slipping out of bed she went to the toilet and when she came out she saw him lying on his back, his face still and closed, sleeping the sleep of the dead.
NINETEEN
THAT FIRST MORNING LIBBY was on deck as soon as it got light. The cloud drifted low and purple with thunderheads, the wind skating the surface of Port Ross. It lifted in foaming caps of white and whipped the tangled mass of rata where the tree trunks grew only so high and then bent at right angles. The branches massed together, forming a web of foliage that scarred the flanks of Enderby Island. She could hear a thousand birds, the combined weight of their song piercing the wind with a strangely mournful timbre. John-Cody moved next to her.
‘What birds live down here apart from albatross and mollymawk?’ she asked him.
‘There’s flightless teal on Adams Island. That’s found nowhere else.’ He smiled. ‘It’s a duck though. Those you can hear over the wind are bellbirds, and at night you’ll hear white-headed petrel. The New Zealand falcon preys on them both. They’re pretty tough little guys. They’ve been known to have a go at people if their nests are disturbed.’
Across the bay a whale breached. They both watched as it came high out of the water then landed on its side, smashing into the surface with a sound like glass shattering. Libby narrowed her eyes: the whale was much lighter in colour than most southern rights she had seen. Its back was a powder blue/grey with ivory patches in places. It rolled, flippers out of the water, and showed them the mottled cream of its belly.
‘Moby Dick,’ John-Cody said.
Libby stared. ‘You’ve seen him before?’
‘Oh yes, every time I’ve been down here. He’s always one of the first to arrive.’
Libby looked again at the huge pale creature breaking the waves by the boat. ‘The white whale,’ she murmured.
He smiled, leaning on the rail with his hands clasped together. ‘Not white, but as close as I’ve seen in a southern right.’
They watched as another whale joined Moby Dick, slightly smaller and much darker in colour. The pair swam slowly towards the boat, keen to investigate this new arrival in the harbour. Libby felt her excitement building. She had been in the company of whales many times before, but the feeling was always the same: an almost childlike sense of expectancy. She and John-Cody stood side by side at the rail as the pair came closer, massive, rolling together so the water sloshed against their hides, sending out a wake big enough to rock the Korimako. Moby Dick lifted a great flipper and slapped the water again, then he eased himself closer and caressed the back of the other whale, which Libby assumed was female. Gently Moby stroked her and they heard the low grunting and a higher-pitched calling, catlike almost in quality.
The two vast mammals moved with incredible grace till they were right up to the boat. Libby could make out the callosities, white and fibrous like drying battery acid, tattoos almost, round the huge shovel-shaped lower jaw. The female lifted her head, a quarter the length of her body, spy-hopping beside the boat. Her jaw was very black and she had four round callosities running back along her skull. With a low guttural moan she sank beneath the surface and turned her flukes to brush the hull so the boat bobbed like a top. Moby Dick followed her and they swam together before she dived deep. He lob-tailed for a moment, just his great grey flukes visible against the backdrop of Sandy Bay, then they too disappeared beneath the surface: and Libby watched, the image of his caress, so vast and yet so gentle, imprinted on her mind.
After breakfast they went back on deck and saw Moby Dick breach close to them once again. He was alone this time and playing, slapping the water with his flippers, then whacking his flukes with such force the deck was showered with spray. The wind had died a little but the cloud was still low and grey, curling like wisps of smoke against the hills.
Moby Dick approached the boat and Libby lifted the lid on the dive locker where she had stowed her drysuit. John-Cody watched through the galley window for a moment then he went on deck.
‘You can’t dive alone, Lib.’
‘Then come with me.’ She already had her jacket off and was laying out her under-suit. He hesitated. He had intended to dive, but not quite yet and not with Libby.
‘You’ve dived here before, haven’t you?’ she said.
He nodded. ‘In a seven-mil wetsuit: it was bloody freezing.’
She laughed. ‘You’re a tough guy and we won’t be in for long. I’ve got underwater video gear, John-Cody. This is a great opportunity.’
‘DoC doesn’t allow you to swim with the whales.’
She wagged her head at him. ‘DoC isn’t here. Besides, I work for DoC, remember?’
She pulled down her jeans, revealing white knickers and brown legs, sitting back on the top of the locker to ease the jeans over her ankles. He gazed at the smoothness of her thighs and she felt that gaze and goose pimples that were nothing to do with the cold lifted on her skin. It was as if his eyes physically stroked her, caressed her as Moby Dick had caressed the female he courted. She folded the jeans and stood up and John-Cody found himself staring at the apple cheeks of her bottom. The muscles stood out against the skin of her legs and she worked her fleece over her head and stood there in T-shirt and knickers, her nipples suddenly hard against the flimsy material.
‘Are you going to get changed or just stand there gawping?’
John-Cody flushed red. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean…’
‘It’s OK.’ She laughed. ‘Let’s get in the water.’
Still he stood there, unsure what to do, unsure of so much all at once. Jonah tapped the window and John-Cody looked round to see him grinning widely. He coloured still further and bent for his own suit in the dive locker.
Libby pulled the under-suit on and zipped it up. Now she looked like an overgrown child in a Babygro. John-Cody helped her into the cumbersome rubber drysuit and zipped it across the shoulders. He wished he had one: he knew these waters and just how chill they were at this or any other time of year. He would last twenty minutes at most before the blood froze in his veins. But he couldn’t let her dive alone: he had dived alone once, but only for a short while. The sea lion colony sometimes brought in the odd mako shark or white pointer, and black-suited divers had the unfortunate habit of looking a lot like sea lions. A few years ago a scientist had lost an arm to a white pointer off Campbell Island. Only the bravery of a twenty-one-year-old girl had saved his life.
He changed quickly, peeling on the rubber suit, then lifted his harness out of the locker and watched Libby checking hers. His wrist-mounted dive computer was in the cupboard under the wheel and he went in to get it, asking Tom and Jonah to let the dinghy down from the transom. On deck Libby was checking compressed air bottles with the attention of an expert. She hoisted two out and John-Cody rechecked them, then he picked up his mask and fins and they made their way to the back of the boat.
The Korimako was the only vessel in Port Ross but habit made him run up the dive flag anyway. He fastened his air tank then wriggled into the straps, the sudden weight bending his back. Libby was already set and she was checking her air supply through the demand valve. The dinghy was in the water and Tom was making a few circuits to empty the bottom through the plughole. Plug back in place, he came up to the dive platform where Libby and John-Cody clambered aboard.
They moved very carefully through the water. There were a lot of whales and they were slow-moving and kept close to the surface. Both Libby and John-Cody had their masks dangling at their necks, fixing them only when John-Cody spotted Moby Dick spy-hopping once again.
Tom cut the revs and Libby slipped over the side and surfaced again, then Tom passed her camera down. The water was blue green and clear as crystal. John-Cody took a breath and fell backwards, feeling the sudden rush in his lungs as the cold hit him. For a moment he could do nothing but concentrate on his breathing, harsh and ragged in his chest till he surfaced and cleared his mask, then trod water until he could slow his breathing again. The water was freezing, colder than he
remembered, and he thought of the chill and darkened places where only whales were prepared to dive. Libby gave him the OK signal then they sank below the surface and worked their way down to ten metres.
Libby kicked round in a slow circle, fully three hundred and sixty degrees. John-Cody tapped her on the shoulder. She faced him, eyes bright through her mask, and he pointed over her shoulder. She looked round as an enormous black shadow drifted out of the hazed light which penetrated from the surface. Again John-Cody touched Libby’s shoulder then pointed down and they descended till they were underneath the whale as it swam. Libby was filming. John-Cody watched her and also kept watch on the apparent emptiness of their surroundings.
They were still close to Sandy Bay and a couple of big bull sea lions flew by with a wing-beat of flippers. One of them spun round, sallied in close and barked in his face. John-Cody looked in its eye and blew bubbles. The sea lion barked again, then ducked away and was gone. Above him the passing of the whale, as big as a locomotive, blocked all light and the sea went from green to grey in a moment. The familiar thrill brought on by proximity to such size, power and intelligence washed through him. He felt a calm descending and he worked the water with gentle fins as the whale disappeared into the new green of the sea.
Libby had lowered her camera and was signalling to him. He swam over and saw her eyes were shining with excitement. For a long moment they looked at each other and then she reached out with fingers encased in rubber and gently squeezed his arm.
A whale had turned and was moving round them in an arc: not Moby Dick but another smaller one. John-Cody could make out her genital slit and the swollen lactation grooves on either side. He frowned and looked at Libby, who had seen what he did. The cow was heavily pregnant. She must have conceived last July; there would be a ten-month gestation period with twelve months more before the infant was weaned. Southern rights gave birth once every three years and the pregnant cows would seek shelter in the shallow bays, often alone but sometimes with another whale in attendance, like a midwife.