Authors: Douglas Carlton Abrams
With his eyes closed and his head tilted to the side in concentration, Maddings effortlessly played along with this year’s song. He had begun to accompany whale song out of musical curiosity, but it had proved a powerful research method that let him enter and understand the structure in a way that his most technologically advanced spectrographic software could not. Now, six weeks into the breeding season, he knew this year’s slowly evolving song practically by heart.
Although he had studied many kinds of whales, there was nothing quite like the song of the humpback. Its rhythm was scored to the rolling ocean; its haunting sounds gave voice to the abyss.
Maddings suddenly stopped playing. Quickly he put the cello in its case and jumped to the computer console. His trembling fingers flicked on a desk lamp. Its bulb cast a spotlight revealing the computer, a black synthesizer, and a photograph of a gray-haired woman in her fifties whose radiant smile made her beautiful.
Anxiously, Maddings adjusted the black knobs of the recording
equipment, unable to believe the sounds coming from the directional hydrophone. Built in to the hull of the boat, this underwater microphone picked up the sounds echoing through the sea. Maddings made sure he was recording and then grasped the black joystick. He rotated the hydrophone 360 degrees. In every direction the song was the same—in every direction the song was new.
“Switch to the sonobuoys, old man. Switch to the sonobuoys.” Maddings barked directions to himself in what was left of his British accent after years of living abroad. The other members of the crew were all asleep or up on deck.
Maddings squeezed his eyes closed to focus his mind completely on the sounds coming in from the sonobuoys. Used by the U.S. Navy to listen for enemy submarines, declassified sonobuoys now allowed marine biologists to listen for whales in vast expanses of the ocean. There was no doubt—the song was definitely diverging, shifting dramatically.
A wave of excitement flooded Maddings’s body as his hands grew hot and his breath short. A voice in his head warned,
You’re too old to get excited about what might just be your imagination or faulty equipment or both.
But he didn’t believe this lying voice of caution.
Maddings wiped a trickle of sweat from his forehead. He hadn’t felt like this in forty years, not since the day he and a colleague had discovered that the sounds made by the humpback whale were actually songs with recognizable structures. Four decades of study had documented repeatedly that the songs, sung exclusively by the males, evolved gradually over a season, even over years. New musical phrases were introduced by individual singers and gradually adopted by all males, but whole songs were not completely replaced in a night. What Maddings was hearing over the speakers was contradicting forty years of careful research.
He checked the recording levels again. The sound was getting louder as he picked up more singers. He turned the volume down to
avoid distortion; the lights flickered green and stopped erupting red. Maddings needed confirmation. He grabbed the watertight case and pulled out the sat phone. From memory he dialed the number of his closest collaborator at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
“Mike, Maddings here. Sorry to wake you. Something…something unprecedented is happening.”
“Maddings, good to hear from you. For you to use the word ‘unprecedented’ must mean you’re talking about a goddamn miracle.”
Maddings knew that neither of them believed in miracles, but he had woken Mike in the middle of the night only once before, and that call had made both of their careers. Perhaps that was why Mike was so uncharacteristically courteous even at this hour. “What is it?”
“I’m still in Socorro, recording song. There’s rapid transformation. Mike, the song sung yesterday is gone. Overnight the humpback population is singing a completely new song.”
“That’s impossible.”
“I know it is. I’m calling to find out whether you’ve heard about anything like this happening. I want to know if anyone else is observing it.”
“Actually, there was some controversy about this a few days ago on WhaleNet. I invoked your research to dismiss her.”
“Dismiss who?”
“That old graduate student of yours down in Bequia.”
“Elizabeth…”
Maddings said under his breath. A smile warmed his face as he began to shake his head in amazement and satisfaction.
Of course it would be Elizabeth,
he thought.
Brilliant Elizabeth.
Elizabeth’s face leaped to mind. Her unusual genetic heritage—half Jewish, half Native American—made her beautiful face look almost Asiatic. How she ever got a good Irish name like McKay, he never knew, but the Irish did seem to get around. Elizabeth was not only arguably the most gifted graduate student he’d ever taught, she was also a marvelous violin player and had been a vital member of
his research quartet. That was until she had to follow her doctor husband across the country for his residency. It had been a great loss to the department and to him. He did become very fond of his students, which was a real liability, since they invariably left him to pursue their careers.
“Professor Maddings! Come quick!” The voice echoed down through the metal corridor from up on deck.
“I’ll call you back, Mike.”
Maddings felt the sharp pain in his not-so-young knees as he bounded up the stairs and practically stumbled to the gunnels, looking beyond. If it had not been for the ache in his joints, he would have sworn that he was dreaming. To see one whale breaching was always extraordinary, but to see so many was unfathomable.
A
S THE SONG ENDED
Apollo thrashed his massive tail back and forth—propelling his forty-ton body straight out of the water—
His black shimmering skin glittered in the moonlight as white foam spilled off like a waterfall—
His winglike fins rose slowly away from his body as he began to twist—
Pivoting on his fifteen-foot fluke—his back arching—the spray bristling from his body—
A moment of suspended time—weightless in the moonlight—
His earthbound bulk—refusing to linger in the sky any longer—fell back into the sea—
The resounding crack—the white lava waves—his flipper reached toward the sky as the dark waters enveloped his body at last—
All around him the others began following his lead—countless whales launching themselves skyward under the full moon—
They tore their bodies from the water in an endless cycle of flight and fall—erupting out of the molten water
—
At last the moon reached its zenith—
Apollo and two other males began to swim quickly away from the rest of the group
—
The others would follow north in the days and weeks ahead
—
Yet Apollo’s destination would be different from that of all the others
—
ONE
12:00
P.M.
Five days earlier
Saturday, February 10
Shark Bay, Bequia, Caribbean Sea
13°01’N, 61°12’W
“T
HERE,
L
IZA!”
Milton pointed toward the bay.
Elizabeth McKay saw the blow before it vanished in the wind. The aching tiredness in her legs from five hours of standing and scanning the horizon disappeared as the excitement of the chase began.
She looked through her large waterproof binoculars. The afternoon light reflected off the water like shards of glass, making her blue eyes burn, but she forced her eyelids open wider to take in more information. She squeezed the hard rubber eagerly when she saw the back of the whale floating in the water where it had surfaced.
“Head into the wind,” she said as she braced her leg against the bench.
Milton had already anticipated her command and was steering upwind of the whale. It was hard to believe that eight years had passed since they started working together, when she first came to study North Atlantic humpback whales in their most southerly breeding grounds. Finding Milton had been like discovering a treasure of devotion: He had tirelessly helped her to navigate the dangers that she and her research subjects faced in these waters.
The old Evinrude 35 whined quietly as Milton drove his beloved lime-green boat into the trade winds that endlessly lashed these eastern Caribbean waters.
Elizabeth looked back at the viridescent mountains that thrust sharply from the water to a ridge stretching the length of the island like the spine of an emaciated animal. Bequia—or “bekway,” as the natives called it—meant “Island of the Clouds” in Carib, but today there was not a cloud in the sky. The land was densely forested, mostly with the knotted and wind-curved trunks of white cedar, which the boatmen handpicked to fashion the ribs of their double-ender sailboats. From where she stood, Elizabeth could also see towering palms and prickly cactus, along with brightly colored houses that hugged the steep slopes and flat harbors. Their roofs were topped with corrugated metal, which the islanders used to capture rainwater.
Milton cut the engine, and they silently drifted back toward where they had seen the blow. “The whale he not far now,” Milton said in the warm accent of the islander—a cross between a Scottish brogue and a Jamaican drawl. When Elizabeth heard Bequians speaking to one another, she sometimes had trouble understanding them, but when they spoke to outsiders, they often tried to speak “proper,” as they called it. “There the whale!” Milton shouted.
Elizabeth looked where he was pointing and saw the glistening black back and dorsal fin just as the whale began to dive. Grabbing the camera from her yellow Pelican case, she anxiously pulled off the lens cap.
Will I get the image? Will I recognize it?
She pressed the shutter-release button halfway. As the image focused, the whale fluked up, and she saw the pattern on the tail. She stopped breathing as she shot several photos, but she could hardly restrain her enthusiasm. The tail sliced through the surface, and she shouted back, “It’s Echo, Milton! It’s Echo!”
She magnified the digital image on the camera’s small screen to
prove it to herself, but the three lines on his left fluke were unmistakable. With a little imagination, they looked like the ever widening circles of a radar display. These distinctive markings had inspired Elizabeth to name him Echo during her first season of fieldwork with Professor Maddings. Entering his unique tailprint into the fluke catalog had sealed her fate as a scientist intoxicated by the thrill of discovery and the patterns of nature.
Elizabeth scanned the water through her black binoculars with the precision of a radar-tracking device, searching for the wispy white plumes that would hang in the air for only a moment. Echo could stay down for as much as twenty minutes and surface anywhere within a radius of miles. Her stomach dropped at the thought of losing a chance to swim with Echo on her last day on the island.
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.