Now, getting up stiffly, he mentally amended his departure date to Labor Day. That should give them all plenty of time. In the meantime, he’d get in touch with a few of the young keepers he’d trained and see who might be interested in a position.
SAM ARRIVED AT the holding pool at 6:00 A.M., carrying a Dunkin’ Donuts box.
“Oh, yum,” Neva said. “You’re the best.”
Sam held up a thermos. “Brought coffee, too,” he said.
“Great minds think alike,” Neva said. “Me, too.”
Sam laid a custard-filled donut—her favorite—on the rim of the pool. The calf was awake and moving, so she took a bite whenever they came around to that spot in the pool.
“You think you’ll have to keep him in this little pool much longer?” Sam asked her.
“Gabriel’s hoping we can move him into the med pool tomorrow. Isn’t he the most beautiful thing? I’m totally in love.”
“Yes, ma’am, he is. Hard to see him as a baby, though. He’s awful big.”
“It’s all relative. He’s less than half Friday’s size.”
With surprising speed, Neva discovered the tedium and discomfort of walking the calf. Half an hour after she’d gotten in, he stopped moving and hung quietly in the water, pecs and flukes drooping, eyes closed, dozing. Neva scratched slow, light circles around his head and blowhole to get him used to being touched and petted. She shifted from foot to foot; she windmilled her arms, trying to stay warm. Her numb hands ached, she had started shivering, and her muscles had begun to burn.
“Sam,” she said over her shoulder. “Talk to me. Distract me. I’m dying here. It’s been, what, two hours since Gabriel left?”
Sam consulted his watch. “One hour, three minutes.”
“Dear god.”
“Time flies, huh?”
“I wish,” Neva said, and then, to distract herself, she said, “You know, I’ve been wanting to ask how Reginald’s doing.”
“He’s good. Boy’s got a lot to learn, though.”
“Such as?”
“How not to talk back, for one thing. He sasses his teachers sometimes, tells them when they’re wrong about things. Boy’s smart as a whip, so it turns out he’s usually right and they’re usually wrong, but that don’t make it good manners. Plus he does love a good argument. You could say the sky is blue and he’d argue it’s green, just for something to do. Must have driven his aunt crazy. He and Corinna, though, they’re thick as thieves. Plus she hugs on him. He pretends it embarrasses him, but he loves it. Don’t think he got too many hugs in his life. Or love, for that matter.”
“Well, he’s got plenty now. That’s the important thing.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Sam. “It is.”
AT TRUMAN’S INVITATION Martin Choi arrived at the pool at seven fifteen. Truman met him in the killer whale office, as they’d agreed. As they walked from there across the back area to the holding pool, Truman said portentously, “Martin, the zoo and Friday need your help.”
“Yeah?”
“We need you to tell the world this little whale’s story.” Truman stopped walking to turn and face Martin—who ran right into him, clanking with gear and robbing the moment of some of its intended theatricality. “Because here’s the thing,” Truman said, “We think chances are excellent that we’re going to be accused of kidnapping this little whale so Friday can have a companion.”
“Yeah? So that would be good. I mean, who wants to be alone, huh?”
“Yes, but we didn’t do that.” Truman felt the beginnings of a headache coming on. “This animal—this baby—was abandoned by his pod off San Juan Island because he had such severe injuries he couldn’t keep up. He’d never be able to survive on his own.”
“Bummer.”
“Yes, it is. The point I’m trying to make is, we rescued him. That’s key.”
“Yeah, sure, I get that.”
“Of course you do,” said Truman. “That’s why he needs you to be his voice, Martin. His voice. He’s counting on you to tell his real story, because he can’t.”
“Well, yeah,” said Martin. “So what do you think the big guy’s going to think, having a little buddy?”
“We won’t know until we’ve introduced them to each other.”
“Yeah? Well, I think he’s going to go out of his mind. The first whale he’s seen in, what did you say?”
“Nineteen years.”
“Nineteen years. How cool is that?”
“Very,” said Truman. “Very cool.” They were passing through several empty holding bays; Truman could see the small rehab pool ahead. “I should also tell you that there are some people out there”—and here Truman lowered his voice and shifted his eyes back and forth several times, as though someone might at this very moment be lurking nearby—“who may even accuse us of maiming the animal on purpose, to justify keeping him.”
Martin squinted. “Yeah? So, I mean, that would be bad.”
“Very bad. And very not-true.”
“Sure, yeah, I get that.”
They had arrived at the pool. Libertine was in the water, Ivy was perched on a wooden stool she’d scared up, and Julio Iglesias sat reluctantly in her lap. She kissed the top of his head, and his ears went flat with annoyance.
“Okay, let’s introduce you two,” Truman said to Martin after greeting them. “Juan, this is Martin Choi. Martin, meet Juan.”
Libertine continued walking the calf around the perimeter of the tank. When they came to Martin again, Truman handed him a dive mask to hold up to his face. “If you put the mask just under the surface, you’ll see the injury clearly,” said Truman, as they’d rehearsed.
“Youch,” said Martin when he saw the calf’s flukes. “I bet when he swims he just goes in a circle.” Truman’s headache bloomed into full flower.
For the next forty-five minutes Martin Choi snapped photo after photo, including some through the mask, which graphically showed the full extent of the calf’s injuries. Then Gabriel arrived and fed Juan his first dead fish—or so they told Martin, though they’d actually primed the calf half an hour earlier with a handful—and then a second and third and so on, until he’d gone through a quarter of a bucket. “He was hungry,” Truman said, because with Martin Choi you could never overstate the obvious.
“So that’s good, right?” said the reporter.
“Very good,” said Truman, and they all nodded as one.
Next, as they’d rehearsed, Libertine told Martin how much calmer the calf was now that he was in their care, and how frightened he’d been when he was drifting into the little bay by Ivy’s house, forsaken and alone. “Here, he’s safe,” she concluded. “He knows that. And he has the entire zoo pulling for him. He knows that, too.”
Then she lobbed the interview back to Truman for a final summation. “What you have to remember,” he said, “is, this is a baby. Would you leave a badly injured human baby floating out there all alone?”
“Well, of course not,” Martin said indignantly.
“And that’s exactly what he needs you to tell the world. Be his hero, Martin,” Truman intoned, channeling Matthew. “Be his hero.”
IN THE PAPER’S Wednesday edition two days later, the News-Tribune led with a story about the killer whale calf. Headlined OH, BABY, BABY!, it detailed the calf’s rescue, with emphasis on his otherwise hopeless plight. Incredibly, Truman found that Martin Choi had gotten most of the information right. The accompanying photos were graphic enough to make it clear that this maimed orphan wouldn’t stand even a slim chance in the wild. The story was picked by the regional, national, and international wire services by noon.
Predictably, the Friends of Animals of the Sea responded that afternoon with an e-mail blast to its membership and the same media outlets that had picked up the story, titled (somewhat inscrutably, Truman thought) TWO WRONGS. The e-mail made the case that the zoo had cold-bloodedly captured a hapless calf for the sole purpose of exploitation as a companion animal for the imprisoned Fr
iday and that the calf should have been left alone to perish naturally. The fact that that death would almost certainly have been a lonely, slow, and painful one brought on by sepsis, starvation, or both was not mentioned. Apparently such a death would be mitigated by the fact of its accomplishment in the beneficent bosom of Nature.
TWO DAYS LATER once Gabriel was sure the antibiotics they were giving Juan had taken hold, they moved the calf into Friday’s medical pool. Although a watertight gate separated the two whales, Friday hovered there all day, spy-hopping again and again to see over the top. His visitors complained that they couldn’t see him, and neither Neva nor Gabriel could engage Friday in a work session, not even an innovative one. He wouldn’t even eat until they resorted to feeding him beside the med pool. He sang, whistled, clicked, and trilled at the calf in a long and constant song. And the calf sang back.
“Can they understand each other?” Neva asked Gabriel, who was tossing in fish every time Friday opened his mouth. “I mean, they speak different languages, don’t they?”
“That’s a little simplistic, but yes, something like that.”
“What do you mean?” asked Ivy, who was watching Libertine feed Juan on the other side of the watertight partition. The calf was a voracious eater, opening his mouth wide anytime someone appeared, with or without a bucket. Gabriel suspected that the calf had been weak even before it was injured.
“Friday is an Atlantic whale, and Juan is from the Pacific,” Gabriel said. “We know there’s such a thing as killer whale dialects because even within the Pacific population, transient whales have different calls than resident ones. We don’t know exactly how much they overlap, or even if there is any overlap between Atlantic and Pacific animals. But Friday will teach the kid what he needs to know so they can communicate. Right now, he’s so excited he may not be communicating anything besides a ton of variations of ‘Ooh!’ ”
“Can you imagine?” said Truman. “For Friday, it must feel just like Christmas.”
They had decided to document the entire introduction process with a video camera. Libertine, their self-appointed videographer, popped out from behind a camera on a tripod and said, “He’s like a little kid. He keeps asking, When? When? When? over and over.”
“Tell him it’ll be soon,” said Gabriel. “As soon as it’s safe.”
That afternoon, at least one day ahead of plan, Gabriel decided to lower a metal grid between the pools in place of the solid, watertight gate. That way, Friday and Juan would have visual as well as auditory contact. With the video camera rolling, they watched Friday lay his entire body along the grid separating the two pools, his eye staring through to the calf. At first the calf was hesitant, but after a few minutes he approached Friday, laying his side against Friday’s.
And then, abruptly, Friday turned around and left.
“What’s he doing? Hey! Don’t leave,” Neva called, dismayed.
Both Gabriel and Libertine were smiling. “Just wait,” said Gabriel. “Watch him.”
Friday swam all the way across the pool, where he rounded up his blue ball. Then he pushed it back until it bumped up against the gate.
“Is he bringing it to Juan?” Neva asked Gabriel.
“Can’t we let the little one into the main pool?” Libertine asked.
“Not yet,” said Gabriel. “We have all the time in the world. I don’t want to go too fast and have to net the calf to get him back into the med pool.”
“Why would you have to do that?” Neva asked.
“Look, he’s not a puppy. You’re assuming these two will get along, but it’s also plausible that Friday will look at him as a competitor for the pool’s resources—for food, attention, toys, or anything else Friday values.”
“But he brought him his blue ball, for god’s sake!” said Ivy. “His most coveted possession!”
“You’re seeing it as a generous gesture. It’s equally possible that he’s showing it to the calf to make sure he knows he’s got dibs on it.”
“So you think Friday might actually be aggressive toward him? There’s no reason to think he’d hurt him, is there?” Neva asked.
“No—if there were, we wouldn’t have brought him down here,” said Gabriel, “but it’s within the realm of possibility. Anytime you get two animals together, there’s some risk, especially when it’s two males. All I’m saying is, let’s not hurry. Let’s give them a chance to get used to each other gradually. You don’t want Friday to be alone anymore, and I get that, but he’s already not. They can see each other. They can hear each other.”
Ivy huffed impatiently, but she didn’t challenge him.
FOR TWO DAYS and nights Friday rarely left the gate that separated him from the calf. He vocalized continuously through all his waking hours. Even a screening of The Day After Tomorrow, a movie he loved, failed to tear him away. A hydrophone in the pool recorded not only Friday’s vocalizations, but also the calf’s. By the morning of the third day, some of the vocalizations synched up. The calf was learning Friday’s calls.
It was time to remove the gate.
As Gabriel choreographed it, they would let the two whales meet right after the gallery closed for the day, so they’d have as much time as possible to interact without visitors looking on. No one expected it to go badly, but YouTube was full of animal encounters gone wrong, and Truman had expressed a certain amount of concern that the two killer whales might join their ranks. So at seven fifteen that evening, Ivy, Gabriel, Libertine, Neva, Truman, Sam, Winslow, and Reginald all gathered on the pool top. There was an air of barely controlled expectation. Gabriel brought up two full buckets of fish, sent Neva to the opposite side of the pool with one bucket, and kept the other at the gate between the two pools.
On his signal, Libertine started the hydraulics that lifted the gate.
No one spoke as the gate started to move. The only sounds were the creaking equipment and the whales’ breathing. Even Julio Iglesias stayed stock still in Ivy’s arms.
Friday took a deep breath and sank below the waterline.
Sam, positioned in the gallery, transmitted, “Friday’s going into the med pool. I can only see half his body.”
“He’s just rubbed his head along the calf’s side,” Neva announced from her radio beside the med pool. “He’s moving really slowly, like he doesn’t want to hurt him or scare him or anything.”
Then they all heard it, even in the gallery: a high, thin, sustained duet. Ivy, standing beside Gabriel at the near end of the pool, grasped his arm tightly and whispered, “Oh my god.”
With infinite gentleness, Friday backed out of the med pool, drawing the calf out with him until they were through. Once they were in the deep water, Juan slipped below and just off of Friday’s right side—what would normally be his swimming position beside an adult female. Friday swam very slowly, very deliberately, barely moving his flukes. Despite his injuries, the calf was able to keep up.
“What are they doing?” Ivy asked Gabriel.
“Watch,” Gabriel said. “Friday is showing him the pool.”
Once the big whale had taken the calf around the pool’s perimeter, he brought him to the bottom, where they swam around the rock work and along the gallery windows. “You got to see this,” Sam transmitted. “It’s like they’re attached. Friday’s going real slow, too, so the little one can look around.”
Together, the whales continued their explorations until the calf began to flag and a thin trail of blood seeped into the water from his damaged flukes. Friday brought him to his favorite corner of the pool, leaving him there while he swam to his blue ball, which had fetched up onto the broad slide-out area of the wet walk. By creating turbulence with his pectoral flipper, he coaxed the ball closer and closer until it was near enough for him to move it with his nose. As the entire staff watched, Friday swam the ball across the pool to the calf, placing it by his cheek. Then he began to sing, the notes rising into the air, sweet, joyful, and pure. “Ladies and gentlemen,” said Truman over the securit
y radio, after having to clear his throat twice, “I believe it’s time to alert the media.”
Epilogue
IT WOULD BE early the next fall before the zoo was clear of film crews, reporters, VIPs, and journalists. Juan became an overnight golden child, faithfully attended by Friday, his constant companion, protector, and teacher, and thrilling visitors and media around the world. Within the calf’s first two months at the zoo, photographs of him and Friday were on the front page of magazines and newspapers around the world, and went viral on the Internet. Visitors came back time after time, many from considerable distances. In elaborate games of Simon Says, Friday taught Juan not only his repertoire of behaviors, but how to play and pose in front of the gallery windows, to the mutual delight of whales and visitors.
Gabriel backed off Friday’s training schedule; each whale had the other for companionship, and Gabriel told Truman he didn’t see the need for training anymore, beyond keeping basic medical and husbandry behaviors sharp so the keepers could draw blood and weigh and examine them as needed. The staff continued to conduct innovative sessions—you can do anything you want, but you can’t do the same behavior twice—because the whales seemed to enjoy them so much. Friday and Juan often played the game as a team, each riffing on what the other dreamed up, sillier and sillier and sillier.
Truman often visited the pool. One day, Gabriel called him on the radio and asked him to come over, meeting him with a pair of XtraTufs, a dog whistle, and a bucket of fish.
“Go ahead,” he told Truman, clanking the handle on the bucket of fish to summon the whales.
“What?”
“Go ahead—take the session,” Gabriel said. “Ask them to do something.” When Truman hesitated, he said, “Come on, you’ve watched, what, about a thousand of these sessions by now. Ask him something—you know all the signals.”
And so Truman drew his guns, feeling ridiculous until the whales responded to the command for innovative behavior, Friday with a tongue loll, the calf with a vertical spin. They came up with new behaviors for ten minutes straight.
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