The caresses tightened.
Wrapped me.
I was no longer moving forward.
I kicked furiously.
Not a fish.
Don’t belong.
Breathing hard, bubbles volcanic.
If I had become entangled in brush on a hiking trail on a mountain path the way an air-breather should be hiking I could have calmly worked my way out of trouble and yelled to my hiking companions up ahead to wait.
I couldn’t yell down here or I would drown.
All I could do was hum.
Theme from Jaws.
Bubbles slowed, just at the edge of perception.
Okay lady, you’re caught in the kelp. You got your fins entangled. Stop kicking. Reach down to your leg and draw the dive knife from the sheath. That’s why dive knives were invented.
I bent and twisted and tried to reach my knife but the entanglement went all the way up my calves.
And then my worst nightmare bloomed and I suddenly did not want to look behind me to see what had hold of my legs, because what if it wasn't kelp? It was not out of the question that my legs were entangled in the tentacles of a jumbo Humboldt squid or a purple-stripe jellyfish or some sort of encasing toothy eel.
I froze.
Don’t rile it.
Like starting a bar-room brawl, I recalled Tolliver saying about chumming for Humboldt squid.
I waited for it to bite me, sting me, or release me.
It did nothing.
I came to my senses. First, get that breathing under control. Think of a mountain meadow in the sunshine.
Breathing slowed. Bubbles slowed.
Next, I reached into the mental file drawer where Tolliver’s kelp-diving lessons were stored. Searched for the heading if you’re stupid enough to get entangled. Found it. Draw your knife, cut yourself free. Couldn’t reach the knife. Next? Very steadily, without twisting your torso, pull your knee — or knees, plural, should you be stupid enough to get both legs caught — up toward your chest.
Very steadily, without twisting my torso, I pulled my knees toward my chest. Astonishingly, they came. Along with their wrapping.
Next? Unwrap the kelp from your limbs.
I reached down and grasped the tangle of kelp — snapping stalks and pulling the mess free of my limbs — and when I had finished self-rescuing I streamlined myself into one hell of an agile fish and in short time I caught up with Walter and Tolliver.
It appeared they hadn’t missed me.
Lessons learned.
The kelp trail branched and branched again but Doug Tolliver, along with his wrist compass, led us to the pinnacle.
We had sampled its spreading fingers, outside the forest. Inside the forest, the pinnacle was a thick-bodied pillar of rock, wider at the base and thinning as it rose.
It looked like a Christmas tree.
It was hung with all manner of gaudy decorations. There were anemones the color of strawberries and apricots and limes, some of them large as dinner plates. There were volcano-shaped sponges and spreading sea fans. There were orange and red and purple and rainbow-hued sea stars wrapped around rocky knobs. There were creatures for which I had no names. Huge white stalks topped with carved disks sprouted from the rock like cauliflowers. Squishy things the shape of caterpillars in neon red and yellow crept along the wall. One bright cobalt-blue crawler wore a crown of gold spikes and could audition for a Disney flick. The cracks and fissures of the pinnacle were inhabited by crabs and snails and one tiny red octopus. A thick-lipped thing in a huge scalloped shell hogged an entire ledge to itself.
We ascended the pinnacle, searching for a gaudy purple in the gaudy tapestry.
It was Tolliver who found the hydrocoral, looking like the photo we'd seen in Dr. Russell's office.
Stylaster californicus.
Tolliver pumped his fist.
We were not going to whack at it. The organism took twenty-five years to grow one inch, so I’d read. Taking even a tip would rob it of a few years. Tolliver used his underwater camera to do the sampling.
Walter pried off a pinch of the Franciscan rock near the coral and I marveled that he'd found an unoccupied section of wall to sample.
We’d done well at Target Blue. We’d found a credible source for the kelp and pebble embedded in the holdfast caught in the Outcast anchor. And we had found a credible source of the mineral grains and coral bits embedded in the yellow float's rope. What we had not yet found was any sign of a float anchorage, any reason the float would have been attached to this slice of the pinnacle.
We conferred in sign language.
Consensus: ascend the pinnacle, looking for signs of a float anchorage. Then cross the ridge to Target Red and see what we can find over there.
There was nothing more to be found on the Target Blue pinnacle, other than beauty. When we reached the spot where the pinnacle butted up against the caterpillar ridge, we struck out for Target Red.
And then Tolliver investigated a shortcut, a tunnel through the ridge.
Dim light showed at the other end.
On land, I'd entered tunnels and mines and caves, out of necessity. I wasn't fond of overhead environments but, actually, this one looked navigable.
We all switched on the fat torch lights mounted on our gloves.
The tunnel opening was a toothy triangle that quickly swallowed Tolliver and then Walter and then me.
Finning carefully, silt avoidance technique.
There was life inside the tunnel — some of the same animals clinging to the walls as clung to the pinnacle — but here in the darker realm, in this gullet through the ridge, I did not see beauty. I saw only shadows of life and it wasn’t the shadows per se that unsettled me, it was the imagining of things unseen that tightened my chest.
My bubbles came faster, hit the ceiling of the tunnel, died there.
I angled my torch to illuminate the crowding right-hand wall and calmed myself with a quick and dirty field ID of the rock. Sandstone.
All right, then.
Up ahead, Walter was just exiting the tunnel.
I finned toward the light.
I emerged from the tunnel to find Tolliver and Walter gripping a rock outcrop, bodies drifting in a gentle current.
I too grabbed hold.
My legs trailed.
It wasn’t just the current that had us holding on tight. It was also the scene before us.
I took in this new underwater world.
Was this right?
CHAPTER 26
Target Red was ailing.
Here, just outside the tunnel, the water was edging toward murky.
Farther on, advancing into Target Red, the water degraded like a spreading stain.
Up above, the algal bloom shrouded the surface, a rotten version of a kelp canopy. Down below, the kelp forest was thinned. A forest in distress. Hardly a forest at all.
By the beam of my glove light I saw particulates falling from the plankton bloom above. Dying, decaying, they rained down upon the stunted forest and whatever life lurked unseen and sank to the seafloor below.
Here and there, where the algal bloom had begun to break up, pencils of weak sunlight penetrated the gloom.
As my eyes adjusted to this ghostly undersea world I began to get the lay of the land.
We hung at the mouth of the tunnel. Above us a large overhang jutted out from the ridge crest and below us the ridge sloped down to a steep dropoff. A canyon plummeted who-knew-how-deep into a bowl, a chasm, and above the chasm there rose enclosing canyon walls that seemed to hold this place separate from the main body of Cochrane Bank.
I picked out the rocky reef topping the left-hand canyon wall.