The Whiteness of the Whale: A Novel

by David Poyer

  Dorée put three fingers on Sara’s wrist. Those lips parted, ready to speak, as Sara stopped breathing, unable even to think, much less guess or anticipate what she’d say next.

  “Whale ho!” Perrault called from aloft.

  She turned as the others scrambled to their feet, staring out to where the captain’s outstretched arm pointed. Quill and Madsen stood on the coachroof, shading their eyes. Dorée pushed past to clamber up with them. Auer stared, frozen; then scrambled toward where she’d wedged the camera. Sara started to climb atop a fuel barrel, then remembered what had happened to Georgita. She searched the locker and found the binocular case. Unsnapped it and hastily wiped the lenses clear of crystallized salt.

  “There she blows,” Dorée called gaily.

  Sara shuddered. Surely Tehiyah couldn’t mean what she’d inferred. Or could she? But why was she so surprised? Was it that she didn’t believe Tehiyah Dorée could go both ways? Or that she could be interested in her?

  To hell with that. Whales! She jammed the glasses to her face and focused on distant white feathers amid slaty blue, blossoming across many degrees of horizon. Quill went back to the helm. Anemone came around and he trimmed the sails on a course to intercept.

  The expanse of slowly heaving sea between them and the pod gradually narrowed. Everyone was topside now except for Bodine and Georgita. Madsen hung from a shroud, rather unnecessarily daringly, Sara thought, watching through a small pair of binoculars and carrying on a running commentary. “Five … six … eight. See the tail? There’s a flipper. Pretty sure they’re humpbacks. They spend summers here and head north for the winter. Two more! Mick’ll be picking up their songs, down below. Wait a minute … another group behind the first. To the left. Maybe a dozen more. Smaller.”

  “Minkes?” Quill said.

  “‘Piked whales,’ Jamie. We don’t call whales after their killers. They’re both baleen feeders, the pikes and the humpbacks.”

  She clung to the shroud, unable to look away. The giant flippers of the humpbacks wheeled and crashed with flat smacks and splashes that rolled across the sea like the clash of a distant battle. The pikes were smaller, more streamlined. Their rostrums—the points of their upper jaws—were sharper, their dorsals hooked and set farther back. The second pod stayed clear of the first, the groups not quite intermingling. She started for the companionway, to go down to Bodine and listen, but couldn’t leave the spectacle. Anemone was sailing nearly parallel to the pod now. They were clearly on the move, although the whales gave the impression of ambling, rather than hurrying.

  “Another,” Eddi yelled. “One whale. Off to starboard.”

  Sara snapped round, searching where the videographer pointed. She expected more humpbacks, or more pikes. They were the most common species, since the great whales had been winnowed from the oceans. But this spout was lower and bent to one side. She put a hand on Madsen’s shoulder. “What’s that?”

  He shaded his eyes. “Sperm whale.”

  “Physeter macrocephalus.”

  “I can’t believe it! All this time at sea and not a single sighting. Now we’ve got three different species in view at once.”

  “How it goes,” Quill rumbled. “Either too much, or not enough. Like wind.”

  Remarkable. But then, if they were in an area of rich food resources, not all that strange. The question was, where were the whalers? She studied the distant splashes. Madsen was telling her the pods were mainly females and young. “The males only join them for about three months, to mate. Otherwise they’re loners.”

  “Interesting.” The males of many species spent most of their time alone, meeting others only to breed or to defend territory. “You’ve spent a lot of time whale watching?”

  “We all did, whenever we could. It was inspiring. To see the animals we were there to protect.”

  “I can imagine. All you whale-huggers.” She smiled to show she was joking. “Were there scientists on your cruises?”

  He hesitated. “Not really. The Japanese claim they’re conducting ‘research.’ Which was why I thought it was strange you were coming. It’s a loaded word, in our community.” He smiled too. “Us whale-huggers. A good one, Sara. I’ll remember that.”

  The humpback pod was closing in on them now. Lifting the glasses, she watched the great heads shoving the water to either side. A blow jetted up every few minutes. Beside some of the larger whales swam smaller copies. Cries rose from the other side of the boat. She turned; one of the humpbacks had come in close and was twisting beneath the water, the white patches of its undersides and flippers a lighter blue in the deep topaz jade. Gulls dipped low, screaming as they plummeted into the froth churned up by great tails. A humpback rolled onto its side, curious eye upturned. Such a small orb to supply view to such an enormous creature. But then, the percentage of brain volume devoted to sight, the visual cortex, was much smaller than in a human being.

  She turned back to see the lone sperm had altered its course, maintaining its distance. She raised the glasses. The huge creature looked like a reef in a storm. As it plowed into each wave it shattered it, tossing up violent bursts of spray the wind trailed off in twisting veils.

  Then, for just a moment, she saw it clearly. Glimpsed a massive lump of head in the trough between two seas, filling it with heaving green water and foam like beaten eggwhites. She squinted into the eyepieces. Not black, like the others. She couldn’t really label its color. Quartz veined with iron, perhaps. Or perhaps that was just the sheen of water on its skin reflecting sky and spume. Its blow jetted sideways in a sudden burst of mist like steam from an old-fashioned factory whistle. It rolled and heaved, far apart from the others. Then the tail levered up slowly, and the sea surged empty once again.

  She should get to work. She stowed the glasses carefully, as Quill had taught them, and went below. Her fatigue had backed off. She slid down the companionway and lurch-walked forward as the boat rolled around her like the rotating tunnel in a fun fair. Only now her hands went out of their own accord to grasp and steady, and her boots knew exactly where to step to anticipate the next lean of the deck.

  * * *

  Bodine was in his chair, seatbelt swinging loose, bulky earphones clamped to his big head. His detached legs swung weirdly from a makeshift hook in the overhead. He glanced at her with unfocused eyes. The screen traced colored lines that vibrated. When he actually noticed her he flinched, as if recalled from a dream.

  When he turned a knob a long, hissing note, flutelike, yet far more complexly modulated, filled the swaying forepeak. It went up and down the scale in chirps and grunts and fartlike repetitive clicks, going on and on but sounding anything but random.

  “The humpbacks?”

  “Right. A typical song. This unit downshifts the sound; what they’re actually putting out can go way above the highest freq we can hear.” He cranked a dial and aligned a needle with a shimmering spoke. “This one’s broad on the port beam. From the intensity, four, five hundred yards away.”

  “About where the pod is.” And lifting her head, she could hear them through the hull even without the earphones. Though no doubt she wasn’t getting the full range, the way he was.

  “It’s mainly the males who sing, and they don’t usually stick with the pod. But it’s not unheard-of.” He rooted in a plastic milk crate and came up with a file folder. He flipped to a printout and flicked it over to her.

  It was a monograph on the acoustic analysis of humpback songs. She nodded. “You’re recording these?”

  “Well, I was planning to. Then we got knocked down, and all my zip ties broke and the workstation took a dive out of the rack.” He jerked a thumb at a disassembled computer. “Until I get that working again, and our satcom comes back up, I’m not digitizing squat.”

  That explained the crashes and curses during the storm. She found a perch on a crate of batteries. “Mick … what exactly did you do in Afghanistan?”

  He showed teeth. “What they told me to.”

 
“Electronics?”

  “Sort of a mix of that, and intelligence.”

  It didn’t sound like a way to lose your legs, but he didn’t meet her gaze or seem eager to add any specifics. She tried again. “How’d you get hooked up with Sea Shepherd? That’s where you met Lars, right?”

  He rolled his head as if his neck ached, and she half reached out. Her hand paused, then returned to her lap. For a moment she’d wanted to rub his nape … but fortunately he hadn’t seen it. “I had my military disability,” he said. “Didn’t have to work. But after a while I started to feel, like, shit. Sitting at home posting crap on my blog … going to grad school … I was drinking. Giving my wife a hard time. Ex-wife, now. Classes bored me. Going head-to-head with whalers sounded like it might get the old burn going again.”

  “Did it?”

  “Up to a point. But the Shepherds have these very strict rules of engagement. What they can’t or won’t do. So it was easy for the whalers to escalate. Then the insurance people and the lawyers got involved and the ship was impounded. Lars and I stayed in touch, though.”

  He tensed, fixing like a spaniel as a new spoke glimmered into a coruscating fan. Frequency waves raced up and down. “Sperm. Big one.”

  “There’s one up there. Magnificent creature.”

  “Uh-huh.” He flipped switches and keyboarded, then stared at a screen filled with what looked like fuzz. “I was checking for radars. But I suspect they’ve turned them off.”

  She was lost for a moment, then realized he’d shifted topic from whales to whalers. “Can they hunt without radar?”

  “Not for long, not in ice. But the open sea extends farther south this year. Which may not be good news for the whales. At least, the baleen feeders.”

  “Why not?”

  “The krill eat sea growth on the bottoms of the ice. Less ice, less krill; less krill, fewer whales.” He grimaced. “So there’s both the Japanese killing them, and less food to go round. I’m not a fanatic, like Lars. But we don’t need to wipe out species with brains bigger than ours, that sing songs so complex that even after decades of study, we have no idea what they’re communicating.”

  He rubbed the back of his neck. Again she started to lift a hand; again, dropped it. You can’t do that, Sara, she told herself. Can’t rub your assistant’s neck. No matter how harmless it might seem. She stood abruptly, hitting her head on a dangling plastic-and-metal foot. “Oh—sorry. I’m going back topside. Shall I ask Dru to stay with one of the pods?”

  “He wants to keep pushing east. But if we could run with the humpies for a few more hours, I might be able to get something recorded. If the hard drive hasn’t totally crashed.”

  * * *

  Topside everyone was still hanging over the lines, passing binoculars back and forth. Eddi had lashed herself to the mast to free both hands for the camera. The captain listened to Sara’s request without expression. Before he could say anything Madsen put in, “We’re not out here to watch whales. We’re here to stop the slaughter. Right, Dru?”

  “The owner’s orders are to locate and pursue the fleet,” the captain said, gaze fixed above them both.

  She said, persuasively as she could without sounding coy, “I understand that, Lars. Dru. But I am here to observe. So if we could get just a bit closer?”

  Perrault pursed his lips in a fine Gallic expression that held absolutely no possibility of English translation. “I’ll stay with them for a couple of hours. But if Mick picks up emissions, I’m heading after the fleet.” He took a breath, released it; then put the wheel over. Hauled the mainsheet in hand over hand so quickly the line blurred, and jerked it up into the stainless jaws of the block. Anemone heeled as she came around, sails luffing, then snapping back into full draw as she steadied on the new course.

  The humpbacks did not seem to mind their company. They continued to spout. The younger ones ventured closer, then were sheepdogged away by vigilant … parents? Aunts? She hung over the side, wishing there was some way to make out the sex of these giants.

  “Bubble herding,” Madsen called down. “See those four off the bow, swimming in a circle? They surround a school, leaving trails of bubbles. The prey moves away from the bubbles, and from the white patches on the whales’ fins.”

  Sara gasped as the sea bulged from beneath. One after the other, the whales came up within the boiling mass of encircled prey, gaping mouths the size of hotel swimming pools, the grooved skin of their lower jaws expanding to take in many tons of seawater and food. Tiny silverine fish leaped within those rapidly shrinking ponds, frantically trying to escape what was already certain destruction. She clung to a shroud, entranced. The whales were cooperating. Using tools to hunt. As clearly as a chimp using a stalk of grass to raid a termite nest.

  Another calf ventured their way, but this time its larger guardian hung back. Sara shaded her eyes as it wallowed closer. Hard to call something that huge cute, but …

  Auer called from her perch, “Bend down a little, Sara. As if you’re talking to it. That’s right.” She looked up to see the lens pointed at her.

  Dorée came around the coach house and stood watching as Eddi kept asking Sara to turn this way and that. Sara grew annoyed. Had she asked to be filmed? Finally she straightened. “Eddi, I don’t really—”

  “Oh, a mother and calf,” the actress said brightly, with a lilting, ardent inflection that turned every head on deck.

  Sara blinked. A heavy sweater was unzipped to showcase cleavage. Tehiyah’s shaken-out hair streamed in the wind like a dark banner. Her eyes, no longer narrowed at Sara, sparkled. Somehow she’d seized center stage, as if the open deck of the slowly slipping sailboat were the boards of a theater. Those eyes! Sara couldn’t pull her gaze from them. Those great tawny pools welcomed the universe, beaming love. Dorée circled the coach house to emerge on the foredeck, where the lines of the swelling sail intersected. As if magnetized, Auer’s lens followed. “Can you hear?” Dorée called. “A mother, singing a lullaby to her child.”

  Sara didn’t hear anything but the wind. But every face on deck followed the actress, drawn like sunflowers to the rays of morning. She stopped at the bow and bent; thoughtful; attentive. Beneath the water a cerulean blue flickered, slowly faded, then rose again.

  The whales surfaced without haste, the smaller first, closest to the dipping and rising prow. Snapping her attention back from the actress, Sara noted the protuberances of modified hair follicles, the limpish sag of a black dorsal.

  She leaned forward, concentrating on the massive beasts that arched and flexed a few arm’s lengths away, bathed and cradled by the sea. The massive backs were crosshatched with circular marks, like the scars of many whippings.

  “Oh, gosh,” Eddi whispered.

  White spray burst up, then rained down, the mist drifting for many yards until it swept over them, wild with a dank rankness of fish paste and animal breath. A slitted double nostril gaped, inhaling, one aperture much wider than the other; then snapped closed as a wave washed over it.

  The young whale rolled onto its back, flinging out its fins to expose the white underside, long grooves running along it as precisely as if machined. A tight slit perhaps two feet long came into view, surrounded by puckered flesh. “Female,” Madsen noted. “Two, three years old.”

  Dorée pulled her hair back with a graceful motion to reveal a grave, transfigured expression. She spoke to the lens. “These wonderful creatures are being slaughtered by the hundreds each Antarctic summer. A new Holocaust, perpetuated through the ignorance and greed of a few, and the apathy of the rest of us. Only the Cetacean Protectors are here to intervene, at the very bottom of the world.—Pan down to them, Eddi, then close-up on me.—But we will protect these gentle giants. Find their murderers, and the killing will stop.”

  Auer cleared her throat. “Tehiyah? I didn’t come up here to—”

  “Back to the whales, Eddi. Then … cut. Let’s do another take. I love the baby.”

  Sara remembered her ow
n Canon, and pulled it from her pocket. There had to be millions of pictures of humpbacks online. These same whales wintered in the Hawaiian Islands. Maybe an opening slide for a presentation. If she ever got invited to another academic conference, which was an open question.

  The massive mother blew, an explosive pffoootsch that rained down over the sea. She arched her back, an expanse of wet black rubber large enough to play tennis on. Sara snapped off shots as the flukes lifted in a black rainbow, executed a complex flourish, showing the maculated cream-white underside for several seconds. Then the female slipped slowly under.

  “Fantastic,” Eddi said. “They do put on a terrific show.”

  “They’re not circus animals,” Madsen snapped. When Sara looked his jaw was set. “They are not here for our entertainment.”

  “Looking doesn’t hurt them, Lars,” Eddi said mildly.

  “That’s what the tour operators say. Then they chase and harass them for hours. We don’t just destroy their habitat, slaughter them, make them into meat. We have to make them exhibits, too.”

  “Look, they’re coming back.”

  They turned to the gigantic animals now rising again, blowing, on the other side. Dorée trotted across the foredeck, calling, “Okay, let’s do it again.”

  “Sorry, Tehiyah. You have your assistant for that.”

  “And she’s fucking useless, so you’re my cinematographer now. Get down here. Shoot upward, into my face.”

  Instead Auer’s lip came out. She stuffed the camera back into its case. “Fuck you. I’m not taking orders from you.”

  “Eddi,” Perrault said from the helm. “Control yourself. Your job—”

  She whirled, and Sara recoiled from the sudden passion in her voice. “My job? Nobody here’s paying me! I paid my own airfare down. Anything I film is mine!”

  “Anything you film is ours,” Dorée said.

  “That’s not the agreement I made.”

  “Why else would you be along? I assure you, if you don’t do your job, you won’t work in film again. Or anywhere else in entertainment—aquatic or otherwise.”