His voice cracked, and so did her hope.
Now, on the wall, she wept for the shark that just swam past and all the other sharks out there in these waters. For all future sharks, those unborn and those young and growing. With everything there was a tipping point, and she could feel that doing this thing, this hunt, would do so much more harm than good. And its echoes would be heard for years to come.
Tears wet her temples, and she drifted off for a time, then jolted awake to pink streaks in the sky. Only a few stars remained. Still fresh in her mind was a dream, though it didn’t dissolve the way dreams normally did.
She is on Catalina in the cove where her father died. Morning light breaks through the fog here and there on the water. She is busy looking for shells in the shallows when the tide begins to come up, washing her farther and farther up the beach. It doesn’t bother her at all. In fact, she loves going limp and letting the shore break roll her across the grainy sand. The water is frigid, but the cold never bothers her much.
Her mother has gone out for a walk and her father is sleeping in, and the morning feels like hers alone. The yellow kayak sits high on the sand, and she eyes it with longing. Maybe just a quick spin around the bay? No one would have to know. But her mother’s insistent words are stamped in her mind. “You are never to take the kayak out alone, do you hear me? Between the fog and currents and sharks, you could easily just disappear.”
A loud, crashing explosion brought her back to the seawall. Falling coconuts. Desperate to climb back into her memory, she curled into a fetal position and covered her ears. But the door had been shut.
What had happened in between this memory and the one from the hospital? She knew it would be the hardest thing ever to relive, her father dying right there in front of her, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that things had happened differently than her mom had believed. Only by stepping back into her childhood mind would she ever know the truth.
Just now, she had been so close she could smell the blood in the air.
They sped over metallic-blue water, heading out to sea. Woody had suggested they check out the offshore buoys because large sharks often gravitated to them. Weather and wave FAD buoys—fish aggregation devices—were known to house entire ecosystems of saltwater critters.Microbial reefwas the scientific term for them. Microbes collected on the buoy, fish ate the microbes, larger fish ate the smaller fish and apex pelagic predators often swam through for lunch.
Minnow watched the high bank of clouds stacking up in the south with some interest.
“Is that coming our way?” she asked Nalu.
“This island has its own weather patterns, but my guess would be yes. See those puffy clouds overhead?” He craned his neck up. “Usually that means a storm is coming. But it could stay to the south of us.”
A storm was the last thing they needed right now, and she prayed for the calm seas to remain. With Nalu driving, Minnow had the binoculars around her neck, ready to scope out other boats and any marine life or debris they came across. It was six miles out to the buoy, and already the sun burned hot on her shoulders. She was leisurely making sweeps of the horizon when suddenly a whale breached just ahead, its entire body launched clear of the water. So close you could see the barnacles on its fins. A thunderous slap when it landed.
“Whale!” they both yelled in unison.
Nalu let off the throttle and they floated, waiting for more. A moment later, a much smaller whale managed to get halfway out of the water, its splash a small fluff compared to the last.
“Baby,” Minnow said, fullness welling up in her chest.
A pungent and fishy smell lifted off the water around them as a third whale—another adult—flung itself skyward. Eighty thousand pounds of grace and ancient intelligence. Minnow was no stranger to whales, and yet every time she came close to one, she had to gulp back sobs. Those eyes of theirs, they saw into her soul.
“Cut the motor,” she said.
He did as instructed. Behind them, another slap. This time a tail twice as wide as the boat was long.
“Holy shit, we’re surrounded,” Nalu said.
If there were any large sharks around, none of them were gettingclose to this baby. Besides the mama, there were at least two other adults in the area.
“Escorts, right?”
“Gotta be.”
Spreading out in the water below and reverberating through the hull of the boat was an eerie, high-pitched keening.
“Whale song, can you hear it?” she said, her whole being humming from the vibrations.
Nalu cocked his head. “Nope. Wanna jump in?”
She gave him a look. “That would be illegal, wouldn’t it? Let’s just let them pass and we’ll be on our way.”
A hundred yards. That was the law.
“You see anyone from DLWA around?” he said.
“No, but the laws are there for a reason. You know that.”
