A Song for Your Supper
Amy picked the whale. It had been a stressful morning for her, and Quinn wanted to convey his complete confidence in her, so he handed over the headphones and took directions as they narrowed down which of their whales was actually the singer.
"Wait a second," Amy said. "Shut down the engine."
And then she did something that Quinn had seen no one do for twenty-five years, and then it had been his mentor, Gerard Ryder, who most people agreed had been eccentric to the point of being full-blown bat shit. Amy hung over the side by her knees and put her head in the water. After about thirty seconds she swung up, spraying a great crest of seawater all over the boat, then pointed north.
"He's over there."
"That doesn't work, you know," said Quinn. It was pretty much accepted that humans didn't have directional hearing underwater. He was just gently trying to remind her.
"Go that way. That's where our whale is."
"Okay, there may indeed be a singer over there, but you didn't locate him by hearing him."
She just stood there next to him — dripping on his feet, the console, the field notes — looking at him.
"Okay, I'm going." He started the engine and pushed the throttle over. "Tell me when I get there."
A couple of minutes later Amy signaled for him to cut the engine, and she was hanging over the side with her head in the water while the boat was still coasting.
"Well, this is just stupid," Nate said while Amy was submerged.
Amy dedunked long enough to say, "I heard that."
"Looks like you're bobbing for whales, is what it looks like."
"Shut up," said Amy, up for a breath. "I'm trying to listen."
"You look like that cartoon character in 'B.C. that used to watch fish all day."
"That way," said Amy, up again, pointing and dog-shaking the water out of her hair onto the Ph.D. "About six hundred yards."
"Six hundred yards? You're sure?"
"Give or take fifty."
"If we're within a half mile of a singer, I'll buy you dinner."
" 'Kay. What do you suppose the freight is to fly a lobster from Maine to my plate in Lahaina?"
"I'm not going to need to know that."
"Drive the boat, please. Over there." And she pointed again, not unlike Babe Ruth indicating the Wrigley Field fence over which he would hit the famous promised home run (except Amy was thin, a girl, and alive).
Quinn heard the singer even before they put the hydrophone in the water. The whole boat started resonating to the song as they coasted into a drift.
Amy hopped up on the bow and pointed to some white spots dancing below the surface — pectoral fins and a tail. "There he is!"
If there had been a crowd, they would have gone wild.
Quinn smiled. Amy looked back at him and grinned. "Steak and lobster," she said. "Something red and French and expensive for the wine, something on fire for dessert — don't care what it is, long as there's flames coming off it — then a backrub before I send you back to your cabin alone, disappointed and confused. Ha!"
"It's a date," said Quinn.
"No, it's not a date. It's a bet, which you have lost miserably because you had the audacity to doubt me, and for which you shall remain ever sorry. Ha!"
"Shall we work now? Or would you like to gloat a bit longer?"
"Hmmm, let me think about it…"
She's so small, yet she contains so much evil, Quinn thought. He threw the field journal at her and read her the longitude and latitude off the GPS. "Film's in the camera. New roll. I loaded it this morning."
"I was thinking I'd gloat some more." Amy picked up the notebook, then paused as she opened it to begin writing. "Singing stopped."
"Sometimes I think they just stop singing to freak me out."
"He's moving," Amy said, pointing.
"Moving," Quinn repeated. He looked over the side and saw the white pec fins and flukes flash out of sight. "Hold on." He started the engine.
"They can hunt these kind, as far as I'm concerned," Quinn said after they'd been on the whale for two hours.
They'd recorded three full cycles of the song and gotten a crossbow biopsy, but the whale simply would not fluke, so they hadn't been able to get an ID photo. A lot of good it did to have a DNA sample when you couldn't identify the animal.
"Hunt them and make them into pet food," Nate continued. "Get their tainted, nonfluking genes out of the gene pool."
"Maybe you should have a doughnut or something, get your blood sugar up," Amy said.
"Use their pathetic, nonfluking baleen for corsets and umbrella stays. Use their vertebrae for footstools. Use their intestines to make giant, nonfluking whale sausages to serve at state fairs. Remove their putrid unfluking gonads and —»
"I thought you liked these animals."
"Yeah, but not when they won't cooperate."
The whale had led them five miles out toward Molokai and very close to the wind line, where the waves were too big and the current too fast to stay on a singer. If the whale continued in this direction, they would lose him within the next two dive cycles and the day would be wasted. What was even more frustrating was that this animal was hanging in the water and singing with his tail only a few feet below the surface. Typically, a singer in the channel would be thirty to fifty feet down — this guy was at about seven. Nate kept having to pull up the hydrophone to keep it from bopping the whale in the noggin as they drifted over it.
"He's coming up," Amy said. She grabbed the camera off the seat and aimed it at a spot twenty yards or so in front of the boat so the auto-focus and exposure would already be set.
Nate pulled up the hydrophone with two yanks and started the engine. The whale was moving faster this time. Nate adjusted the throttle to put Amy at the right distance for a full-frame tail shot.
One breath and he was down for ten seconds, another breath twelve seconds, another breath and the great tail peduncle arched high into the air.
"Looks like he's going to do it," Nate said.
"Ready," Amy said.
The tail cleared the water by just a foot, presenting an edge view instead of a flat horizontal view that would give them all the markings, but Nate thought he saw something. Something that looked like black letters on the underside of the tail.
"You get that? You get that?"
"I got what there was. He didn't present very well." Amy had run the motor drive for the whole cycle of the dive, maybe eight frames.
"Did you see those markings? On the underside? The black… uh, stripes?" Quinn whipped off his sunglasses and wiped them with his T-shirt.
"Stripes? Nate, I didn't see anything but edge through the camera."
"Damn it!"
"Look, he fluked. Maybe he will again."
"That's not the point."
"It's not?"
"Get up on the bow, see if you can find him."
Amy stood on the bow and directed Quinn. When she dropped her arm, he killed the engine. And there was the whale, hanging there, singing, his tail not ten feet under the water. They weren't a hundred yards off the wind line, and the boat was drifting away from the whale faster than it had before. They'd be over it for only a minute or so. This close to the wind line, they'd probably lose him the next time he came up. Nate was not going to finish this day wondering if he was having hallucinations again. "Amy, hand me my mask and flippers from the bow cabinet, would you?"
"You're going in the water?"
"Yes."
"But you never go in the water."
"I'm going in the water." Nate opened a plastic Pelican case and pulled out his Nikonos IV underwater camera, checked to make sure it was loaded.