Eye of the Whale (4 page)

Then she heard the jarring blast of the air horn, only slightly muffled through the water. She scanned around her and saw what was no doubt adding to Sliver’s agitation—a Caribbean reef shark was biting into the placenta, its white mouth shaking back and forth as it tore off a piece. Its gullet convulsed and gills pulsated as it swallowed the sizable prize.

Another gray reef shark appeared, swimming around the placenta. Fear flooded Elizabeth’s veins, paralyzing her limbs, even though she knew that reef sharks were relatively harmless to humans. Fighting to retain control, she took a deep breath. Finally, her muscles responded to her command, and she turned to face Sliver, who was watching her closely. The mother was still supporting her baby on her back, helping the calf to breathe.

Elizabeth kicked her fins slowly, approaching. Sliver’s body was still, unthreatening. Her eye, although stressed, seemed to communicate something—
was it understanding?
Elizabeth had no time to waste, so she continued forward, realizing the danger she was in if she had misread Sliver.

A moment later, she reached out and touched the soft skin of the baby whale. She placed her finger in one of the smooth nostrils of the blowhole, but it did not close reflexively. She could hear the strained rumbling of its breath—the calf was trying to live.
Could Sliver hear her baby’s weak heart beating against her back?

Elizabeth moved down the body of the young whale toward the tail that was draped over its mother. The calf’s smooth skin felt like a shelled hard-boiled egg. Elizabeth noticed several lesions, which surprised her—how could the calf have gotten lesions in its mother’s womb?

There was no way to get to the underside of the tail, where the veins were visible.
This is not like working with dolphins at the aquarium, Elizabeth thought. How the hell am I going to do this on a humpback out here in the open sea?
She felt for the large veins of the tail fluke, which trainers and veterinarians used to administer injections in captive cetaceans.

She had never heard of anyone giving an injection to a humpback whale, but the physiology would no doubt be similar. She felt the little indentation where one of the veins curved along the shape of the tail. As she pushed on the black skin, she could feel the spongy
wall of the vein, softer than the rubbery connective tissue on either side. The vein might be too deep for the short needle, but there was no time for an alternative. The baby’s life was draining away.

The air horn sounded again.

She looked over and saw quite a few dorsal fins and tails slapping on the surface. A pack of sharks was fighting over the coveted spoils, but she could see from the delicately curving shape of their dorsals that they were all reef sharks. She sighed with relief.

Elizabeth quickly removed the plastic cap of one Twinject and wrapped her fist around the pen, jabbing it into the vein all the way up to the hub. The spring-loaded needle shot into the whale’s body.

No response.

She clutched another pen and punched it into the vein.

Still no response.

Elizabeth’s limp snorkel hung next to her face as she kicked with her feet to stay next to the whale’s drifting body. Despite its size, the calf seemed so fragile.

Sliver began to sink so that only a small part of the calf’s back floated above the surface. Elizabeth would need to make the next injection underwater. She bit down on the hard plastic mouthpiece of her snorkel and felt for the veins as she ducked her head beneath the surface.

She injected a third pen. Still nothing.

The calf’s circulatory system was large, but she had expected to see some reaction by now. As she waited, she saw the frenzy of sharks still feasting on the delicacy of the placenta. They lashed at the red-brown mass and at one another.

Then she saw what she had feared most—a tiger shark moved in, scattering the reef sharks. The vertical bars along its twelve-foot length were unmistakable, and its dorsal was sturdier and more menacing than those of the reef sharks. She stared at its wide
mouth of scalpel-sharp teeth and then saw it look at her through its large black eye.

It’s just swimming,
she told herself as she scanned its body for possible threat displays: pectoral fins pointing down, mouth gaping open, stiff movements. It was displaying none of these. Perhaps it was the whales that kept the tiger shark at a distance, or the placental feast. She kept telling herself that she was not in immediate danger, but she could not stop her heart from racing or the dizzy sensation caused by the cascade of fight-or-flight hormones in her body.

Sliver buoyed the calf back up, and Elizabeth took another giant breath once she reached the surface with them. It was as if Sliver were asking her to try again, although she knew the whale could not possibly have understood what she was doing. But somehow she must have known that Elizabeth was trying to help, or she surely would have protected her calf.

Elizabeth looked at the final pen in her fist and then felt for the vein with the fingertips of her other hand. She pounded against the whale’s sloughing skin. The pen fired, and the epinephrine shot into the vein.
Breathe, dammit. Breathe.

The calf’s desperate gasp was fast and sharp as the blowhole opened wide. The baby’s entire body seemed to convulse with the desire to live as it arched its back, lifted its flukes, and started throwing its head and tail to the side spasmodically. Elizabeth kicked backward quickly to avoid being hit by fifteen hundred pounds of newborn awkwardness. She heard a sputtering sound and then saw a tiny blow. The baby, still stimulated from the injection, rolled off its mother and started to beat its tail up and down eagerly. Elizabeth laughed with relief, and her chest swelled with joy as she saw the two fifteen-foot blows followed by the six-foot blow from the calf. Its burst of vapor was an explosion of hope and survival.

The three whales dove, the baby following the lead of its mother and escort. Elizabeth scanned the pattern on its tail, trying to memo
rize it. She noticed four very faint parallel lines on the left side and remembered the four injections. She’d call him Fourth Chance.

Elizabeth was alone on the surface. She looked around and realized that she had drifted twenty meters farther away from the boat, out into the open ocean. Milton knew not to approach too close while she was working with the whales, but now she heard the groan of the motor as it sped toward her. She was eager to climb in, knowing what was still lurking near the placenta. Some shark species preferred live prey, and she did not want to find out if tigers were one of them.

The bump came like a shoulder in her side. It was no doubt the infamous bump-and-bite behavior, and the shark was circling back for the second half of the equation. Elizabeth began to swim frantically, arm over arm, to the boat that was speeding toward her. In her panic, she literally tried to run from the shark, her legs kicking, her muscles steeled by the adrenaline, her chest jutting halfway out of the water.

“Shark! Liza! Shark!” Milton shouted from the boat—he must have seen the dorsal fin approaching her. Despite the frenzy and flurry of water, she felt as if time were slowing down, every second distended and terrifyingly long. A video she had seen flashed to mind. It was of a shark slowly biting off a woman’s leg; it had been shockingly gradual and deliberate.

She could not help looking back at the dorsal that was only a dozen feet away. Though there was no way she would reach the boat in time, her body continued kicking desperately.

Suddenly, an enormous pressure wave of water rushed against her skin. She closed her eyes, anticipating the bite. The foaming water erupted like an underwater volcano.

Elizabeth was thrown forward.

A stream of moist air exploded above her as Echo surfaced. His exhalation was like a gunshot fired in her defense.

Elizabeth looked around her for the dorsal fin but saw nothing above the surface. She ducked her mask underwater, still searching for the shark. She was no longer breathing through her snorkel, and the salt water tasted like metallic blood. Stuffing the bite-piece into her mouth, she looked in every direction, trying to see beyond the dissipating bubbles.

In front of her, not more than a few feet away, was Echo’s eye. The gaze was unnerving. She felt an intense familiarity, after all these years, and some sense of recognition beyond actual knowing.

She heard the scream of the motor and Milton’s voice shouting her name, but it sounded far away. There was just this moment of presence.

Then Milton grabbed her wetsuit as Echo effortlessly sank away. Elizabeth looked up at Milton, still unable to speak. His strong fisherman’s arms hauled her into the boat, and she fell against the wooden seat like deadweight, water pouring off her arms and legs.

“You all right?”

Elizabeth pulled off her mask as the adrenaline drained from her limbs. She looked up at Milton blankly, still in another world.

“That whale done save you, Liza.”

Milton’s words registered in her mind, along with the impossibility of their meaning. “Whales breach, Milton, that’s what they do,” Elizabeth said, trying to convince him—and herself—that her “rescue” was just ordinary whale behavior.

“This one done breach for save you, Liza.”

“I wouldn’t go that far, Milton.” For a scientist, the idea that whales would care about humans was difficult to accept, not to mention impossible to prove.

“Dolphin save people—dog, too. Why shouldn’t a whale save you so?” Milton was smiling, confident in his interpretation.

Elizabeth did not answer. Human-animal encounters like the one she had just experienced were always anecdotal and impossible to
study. Her father’s superstitious beliefs aside, animal intent was not provable. Elizabeth unclipped her weight belt and slowly peeled off her fins, feeling increasingly human.

Milton stopped smiling as the boat began to vibrate again with the sound of the whale song.

“Cut the engine,” Elizabeth said. The boat went silent with a sputter. Elizabeth grabbed the waterproof case, the clear cover revealing the digital audio recorder inside. She dropped the hydrophone overboard and put on her headset.

“What’s wrong?” Milton asked, perhaps noticing the expression on her face.

She pushed one earpiece closer to her ear, not believing what she was hearing. In her spiral flip pad, she quickly recorded the time and started making notes.

“What’s wrong?” Milton asked again.

“The song is different—completely different.”

“Maybe he just done tired of the old song.”

“They don’t just start singing new songs.” She knew that the change in the song was as extraordinary as what she had witnessed in the water, perhaps more so.

With both hands, Elizabeth pressed the earphones against her ears, trying to hear the higher frequencies better. Her eyes grew wide and her mouth opened in mute recognition. The rapid transformation was unprecedented enough, but the sounds were totally impossible in a song.

“Are we recording?” Elizabeth asked anxiously, pointing to the pelican case on the bench next to him.

Milton looked down. “Yes, Liza, we getting every last word.”

THREE

Moments later
Aboard the
Masuyo Maru
1 mile off the coast of Bequia

T
OKUJIRO
K
AZUMI
peered through the enormous deck-mounted military binoculars from aboard the factory fishing ship. Through the eyepieces he saw the American researcher in her tiny hired boat. While he could see her long black braided hair, he could not see her beautiful face. He had been following her work since long before the recent
National Geographic
article. What he could not see in the sixty times magnification, he remembered from the full-page photograph in the magazine. Her face was wide, her high cheekbones like cliffs, her eyebrows arching over eyes that were so blue and so deep he could stare at them in the photo for hours. Her mixed race made the eyes linger, as the mind tried to understand what ancestry could have caused such a fusion of features and such consummate beauty. The magazine journalist must have wondered enough to ask and revealed the answer: a Jewish mother and a Native American father. The crossbreeds, like Elizabeth McKay and like him, were the hardiest and most vigorous, always taking the best qualities from each genetic strain. It was as true for humans as it was for dogs. He thought of his pet, Kioko, a mix breed, who had lived for eighteen years. It was not long enough. Kazumi still could not bring himself to imagine getting another.

The boat bobbed on the surface like a floating green buoy.
Sweet Madonna
was painted casually in red along the sideboard. He could barely make out the headphones pressed against her ears.
Listening to the whales,
Kazumi thought. He groaned, remembering her papers, which he had read online. Even the Scientific Committee of the International Whaling Commission had decided to discuss whale communication at the next meeting, largely because of her work. The day that humans could understand whale communication would spell the end of whaling forever. People did not want to eat food that was intelligent enough to talk.

Oil from whale blubber had become obsolete as a result of the discovery of petroleum. The only remaining market was for whale meat, and even there, demand had fallen over the past decade. Still, the whaling industry was actively working to expand the market by opening whale meat restaurants and getting whale meat into schools. As the executive director of the Japanese Department of Fisheries Development, Kazumi had been instrumental in getting thirty-five hundred schools to start serving fish sticks and burgers made out of whale meat. And, of course, there was China, an enormous untapped market for whale meat.

Kazumi looked up from the binoculars and saw the steep slopes of the island near the small boat. The lack of rainfall and arable land had made it one of the last islands to be colonized, and the fierceness of the Carib Indians had helped ensure their independence and that of the runaway slaves who came to join them. But eventually, all people could be bowed by force, as the British had proved so successfully all around the world.