Eye of the Whale Read online

  Every minute that Elizabeth waited for Echo felt like an hour, but she did not dare get into the water too early and risk losing track of him. Handing the binoculars to Milton, Elizabeth pulled on her yellow fins. Her weight belt pressed down against her hips. She spat into her mask and positioned it on her forehead, ready to slip silently into the sea at any moment. Her long black hair was already braided, but she swept a few untamable strands out of her face and behind her ears.

  With her mask and snorkel, she was limited to the border world of the surface, but scuba diving, with its clouds of bubbles, would disturb the whales and interfere with her recording. She had become quite expert at free diving and could hold her breath longer each year. Every movement was done precisely and quietly. Sound travels great distances in the water, as light cannot, making hearing as important to whales as sight is to humans. She didn’t want to scare Echo away. Not all were benevolent in these waters.

  As on many other small and remote Caribbean islands, almost everyone on Bequia depended on the sea for their livelihood. While some were master boat builders whose craftsmanship was prized far and wide, most were simple fishermen. Yet a handful of men continued the hundred-year-old tradition that their ancestors had learned aboard the Yankee whalers. They hunted in small sailboats, using old-fashioned harpoons, and they were allowed to take four whales a year by the International Whaling Commission. This was a small number in comparison to that of the Japanese and Norwegians, who each killed hundreds of whales annually.

  In the distance Elizabeth saw the Japanese factory fishing boat that had been trawling these waters all season. Her jaw tightened. She knew they were offering development money on the island to gain access to the fisheries and who knew what else. They had even paid for the whaling station.

  When she first came to the tight-knit community on Bequia eight years ago, she quickly discovered that if she was going to have any hope of doing her research, she would have to make friends with the whalers—the local heroes who fought the giants.

  As she got to know the whalermen, a mutual respect had developed between them. Milton had warned her against getting too friendly with his half brother, Teo, who was the whaleboat captain and a heartbreaker. Elizabeth knew she could handle herself, and to her surprise, Captain Teo had a great deal of knowledge about the whales. It was the Bequia whalers, after all, who had correctly guessed that the males were whistling—the word they used for singing—down in the depths.

  Elizabeth continued to scan the horizon through her binoculars. She had given Captain Teo an identical pair when it looked like he might give up the hunt and start a whale-watching business. Elizabeth had explained that individual whales could be identified by the pattern on their flukes, like a fingerprint, and he had told her how devoted whale mothers were to their young. As they shared their knowledge, they became friends and eventually lovers. It was still hard for her to believe that she could have fallen for a whaler. She could have escaped his handsome face and bewitching eyes—one green, one blue. She could have resisted the warmth and confidence of his island smile, but ultimately, she was caught by his love for the sea and his eagerness to share it with her.

  For two months her desire and her doubt had wrestled like predator and prey. Elizabeth had ended their relationship over the phone the day after she met Frank for the first time, back in Boston. She knew that in the shelter of Frank’s embrace, she could create a life and have a family. Despite what Frank said, she did want a family. Six years was not that long to be married, and Elizabeth argued that there was still plenty of time to have children after she finished her dissertation.

  The blow finally came, and it was only fifteen meters away. Elizabeth threw down her waterproof notepad. She hoisted herself overboard and, biceps straining, lowered herself slowly into the water.

  “Mind the sharks,” Milton said softly as he handed her the video recorder. “Is plenty in these waters.”

  “Don’t remind me.” Elizabeth took the bulky gray waterproof housing that protected her video camera. She wished Milton wouldn’t mention the sharks every time she got in the water. Many of the fishermen could not even swim, and Milton was even more afraid of sharks than she was.

  Elizabeth pulled her mask down with one hand and then placed the snorkel in her mouth. She could hear her anxious breath rattling through the blue plastic tube and tried to slow it down. Ever since she had seen the movie Jaws as a girl, she had been afraid of sharks, which was very inconvenient for a marine biologist. She controlled her fear by never looking behind her in the water. If she was going to be eaten, she did not want to know in advance.

  Elizabeth reminded herself of the facts that helped to keep her fears at bay. Unprovoked attacks by sharks were extremely rare. In these parts there were mostly reef sharks, which were rarely aggressive. Even tiger sharks—while second only to white sharks in reported attacks on humans—were generally safe if one understood their behavior.

  She knew that those who thought the wild was ferocious and endlessly dangerous were wrong. There was a homeostasis in nature where predator and prey existed in close proximity. Only occasionally at feeding time was the calm disrupted in a convulsion of violence as one animal died and another was able to continue living. Survival was unkind, but it was not cruel.

  Elizabeth kicked her fins slowly and smoothly, trying to make as little disturbance as possible. Only forty or fifty feet below her, she could see the marbled light dancing on the gray-brown coral and a blue parrotfish darting around. The crackling of the reef’s snapping shrimp filled her ears, although most of the coral looked bleached and dead. She felt a wave of sadness as she recalled how colorful the reefs had looked when she first came to the island. She thought of her colleagues who were trying to understand why the reefs here and around the world were dying faster than anyone had predicted. Was it warmer waters? Pollution? Disease? No one knew for sure.

  She turned her gaze to the gray housing of the video recorder she held in front of her, putting her finger on the trigger, preparing to record Echo’s every sound and movement. Elizabeth was one of the few researchers who had started to record vocalizations while simultaneously observing and recording whale behavior. Whales spent the vast majority of their lives in an alien and distant world, so the work of studying them was long and difficult. Nonetheless, at moments like this, it was thrilling.

  Elizabeth kicked more quickly. Her hands floated ghostly white in front of her. She stared at her naked ring finger. Tomorrow she would be going home to California. While she hated to leave the whales, she needed to return to Frank. Elizabeth remembered the fight they’d had the day she left for the island, and her stomach tightened as she thought about Frank’s ultimatum.

  Echo appeared out of the shadows, interrupting any other thought, leaving only this moment of awe. She saw his huge head, from the rostrum on top down to the jaw, ending just before his enormous flippers. It was truly impossible to comprehend the vastness of his body. Behind the jawline, a third of the way along his length, she saw his eye looking at her serenely. With increasing size came ever greater calm in the order of nature. What had amazed Elizabeth most about these titans of the deep was not their power but their gentleness. In her imagination, whales were the very eye of the storm around which the whole world hurried and worried. She knew that Echo’s massive heart was beating only once every three seconds as hers continued to flutter like that of a hummingbird. Humans were small and nervous creatures.

  Echo’s tail floated up until his body was pointing down at a forty-five-degree angle in the singing posture. As he sang, Elizabeth’s rib cage began to vibrate. She recorded every discrete sound, every phrase, and tried to remember each of the recurring themes from her earlier recordings of this year’s song. She drifted closer, the song growing louder.

  High-pitched whistles and ethereal, ghostly moans surrounded her, vibrating through her. The deeper grunts and groans felt like a pressure wave, similar to the bass of a giant speaker pinning her to a
wall. Her whole body shook, and her teeth started to rattle. The song began to overwhelm her senses as it spilled into her middle ear, disorienting her balance, invading her. She had never been this close before. She tried to steady herself but didn’t know if she could withstand the intensity of the vibrations.

  She was panting through her snorkel and starting to sweat under her mask. She needed to back up, but she did not want to leave, to miss anything. It was her last day of the season with the whales, and she would have to wait a whole year for another opportunity like this. She focused her mind on the sound, closing her eyes, becoming a part of the song.

  When Elizabeth opened her eyes, she saw another whale swimming toward Echo. Her heart beat even more wildly. Interaction between whales was always the most dramatic and potentially important part of her work. It was where her research on communication came alive, and she said a scientist’s prayer to the whales to give her something good, something she could write up and use to convince her department to give her another extension on her dissertation.

  As she watched the languid aquatic dance of the two gentle giants, Elizabeth forgot about her deadlines. She knew that the function of the songs was one of the great mysteries of the ocean, with courtship and competition as the two predominant theories. What she was about to witness might reveal a piece of the puzzle.

  Elizabeth released some of the air in her lungs and sank below the surface. If she was to understand the interaction, she had to know the sex of the new whale. Almost immediately, she could see the hemispherical lobe on its belly, revealing that this was a female. Elizabeth let out more air and sank down farther, holding the video camera out in front of her with rigid arms and pointing it where she was looking. The whale swam right next to her. Although four thousand times more powerful than Elizabeth, the female did not knock her out of the way. Instead, she gracefully raised her fourteen-foot flipper up over Elizabeth’s head. And that was when Elizabeth saw it.

  “Oh my God,” she sputtered into her snorkel. She looked closer to see if she was imagining it. No researcher had ever seen what she was about to record on film.

  TWO

  THE FEMALE was in the process of giving birth. A tail, its tips curled over, was beginning to emerge from the whale’s genital slit.

  Elizabeth could not believe that she would be fortunate enough to witness a birth, let alone film it. In her shock, she had forgotten about breathing until her deflated chest began to ache. At times like this, she wished she could use scuba tanks.

  Kicking gently to the surface, she blew water out of her snorkel and gasped for air. The whole time she continued looking down and pointing the camera at the female—she was not going to miss this for the world. Elizabeth double-checked the red indicator on the screen to make sure the camera was recording, and stayed as close as she could without scaring the mother. From what she could tell, the female did not seem agitated by her presence. Emboldened, Elizabeth let out more air from her lungs and silently descended again.

  Another gasp of bubbles escaped as she recognized the notch missing from the female’s tail. It was Sliver. She had seen Sliver several times over the course of her research, and now she felt like a midwife invited into the intimacy of the whale’s birth.

  Elizabeth was running out of air, but she refused to risk missing the birth.

  Sliver was contracting her abdomen, trying to squeeze out the baby, just like any other mammalian mother. At last the rest of the ten-foot black body was born in a cloud of tissue and pink-tinged fluid. The calf had large fetal folds—creases caused by the cramped confines of the womb—which made the newborn look like it was made out of origami paper.

  A six-foot placenta followed soon after. Reddish brown from blood and pink from exposed tissue, it drifted in the bright blue water like a giant jellyfish. Elizabeth shivered as she remembered the man-of-war she had accidentally brushed up against the year before. She recalled the sharp pain of its stinging cells, the flush of the hives that had covered her body like a burn, and the difficulty she’d had breathing as her tongue and throat swelled. Frank, a physician, now insisted that she carry epinephrine with her at all times just in case she got stung again.

  Elizabeth was getting dizzy from lack of oxygen. She surfaced, blowing out the water in her snorkel and gasping, both for air and from the excitement of what she had just witnessed. Her hands were numb from the adrenaline pumping through her system, but she kept the camera pointed down.

  As she descended slowly once again, she saw that Echo was supporting the calf. This surprised her. Most helper whales were females, “aunties,” and there was no evidence of pair bonding in humpbacks. The male that impregnated Sliver eleven and a half months ago could be anywhere. Elizabeth could not understand why Echo, who most likely had no genetic relationship to the calf, was helping it to the surface.

  Then she realized—something was wrong. She had not noticed it until now. She looked closely at the calf’s body, her eyes straining to see through the streaks of sunlight spilling into the water. The baby rolled off Echo’s rostrum and began to sink, listing to the side, not moving its flippers or tail flukes. Elizabeth knew from her time working with dolphins and belugas at the aquarium that cetacean babies usually swim at once. But this whale’s body was limp and looked like a corpse slowly sinking in the water.

  Elizabeth heard the mother’s contact call: w-OP. And again a few moments later: w-OP. But there was no answer from the calf. She heard the sound again. Still no answer.

  Sliver swam to the baby and nudged it with her head. The baby responded to its mother with a weak nod. It was not dead. But without the movement of its fins to keep it buoyant, the baby continued to descend. Sliver responded more urgently. She swam under her sinking baby, supported it across her head, and carried it to the surface forcefully. Her massive body created a current of water that pushed Elizabeth away.

  Elizabeth’s eyes were wide as she held her head above the water, waiting. She saw the two adult blows, but no breath from the baby draped across its mother’s back. What’s wrong? she wondered. Why is this baby in distress? Had it been born prematurely? Had it been a prolonged labor? She swam toward the calf, wanting to help it live. But how?

  As they all bobbed above the surface, the calf’s small blowhole caught her eye. It was slack. Elizabeth had an idea. It was crazy, but if it worked, it could save the calf’s life.

  Elizabeth flipped onto her back and began to propel herself with her fins back to Milton’s wooden boat. She held the video camera against her chest and rocked back and forth, trying to make her body as streamlined as possible.

  “Open the first aid kit!” she shouted as she reached the boat and hoisted her video camera onto the bench.

  “You hurt?”

  “No, just give me the case!” There was no time to explain.

  “Blood in the water,” Milton said as he handed her the first aid kit. Elizabeth pried open the hard plastic tabs and grabbed the pack of prefilled hypodermic needles. There were four Twinject pens, each calibrated for two doses—not enough for the calf’s body weight. But dosing of epinephrine was not an exact science, and she had no alternative. The calf’s muscles, including its heart, were not responding to life. The baby’s whole body was shutting down. The cardiac stimulant in her hand was the only hope.

  “Listen for the horn,” Milton said, holding the air horn in his hand. It was their signal to alert her if he saw sharks.

  Elizabeth’s flippers propelled her forward quickly, and she twisted her body rhythmically to increase her speed. As she approached the whales, she tried to stay focused, but her eyes were drawn to the edges of her mask, scanning for sharks. Maybe she did want to know if she was going to be eaten.

  “Bruuuuuuuuuffff!”

  Elizabeth froze. Sliver’s protective underwater blow was unmistakable, as was the screen of bubbles. Elizabeth knew not to challenge a thirty-five-ton female driven by the strongest of instincts: protection of her young.

  Elizabet
h looked into Sliver’s eye. The sclera was bulging, and it showed an anxious ring of white. Of course she’s stressed, Elizabeth thought, and tried to calm her breath as she swam forward slowly. The baby could die at any moment from lack of oxygen. Elizabeth approached cautiously, looking for any further sign of agitation or aggression. One swipe of Sliver’s tail or flipper could kill her instantly.

  Instinctively, Elizabeth held up her hands, although she had no hope that this universal human gesture of peace would mean anything to a whale. Was it possible for a whale to read emotion or intent? Elizabeth gently moved her flippers back and forth as she held herself upright in the water.

  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.