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title: "Whale Wails"
chars: 30607
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———The waters off Oahu, Hawaii, 1,450 kilometers out to sea.
He rolled his body—no more than half a grown whale’s—with carefree ease, his loosely spread pectoral fins pawing at the water.
The eyes on him from all around stung, but with the recklessness of youth he paid them no mind. It was only play, after all, and meant nothing much.
Turning his brand-new baleen, the color of porcelain, toward the surface, Blue the blue whale called to his companions in the long, drawn-out words of a high frequency.
“Kooo— (I’m o—kay)”
But over Blue’s shrill, thin call, the elders of the sea, who ringed around the whale that was a size smaller than the rest of them, answered all at once, their voices a mingling of high and low.
“Krooo (The boy hasn’t a care in the world)”
“Koo (I wonder if he’ll really be all right)”
“Kreee (Doesn’t this child understand how far it is to the Antarctic?)”
“…Kwool (That isn’t so…)”
Aware how little conviction it carried, Blue’s call trailed off toward the end.
It was not as though he failed to understand his elders—these older companions who stirred fins many times the size of his own, slow and unhurried, through the water.
They were not teasing Blue; they spoke out of pure concern for him. For all that blue whales keep mostly to themselves, they are not indifferent to their own kind.
“(Are they all worried because I’ll be on my own…)”
Gazing vaguely at the bright surface and the dark seabed as they wheeled round and round, Blue thought to himself.
Blue had already been weaned, but he was still too young to set out for the far south alone.
And the mother who ought to have guided and protected him was no longer there.
As if she had held on only until Blue was weaned, his wise mother died with startling suddenness the moment her son could catch krill on his own.
His father existed only in the distant past of Blue’s memory.
“Ku-krul (Say, Blue)”
To the calf drifting there so listlessly, the eldest of the group of some ten whales Blue was among—a female, the largest of them all, fully twenty-six meters from end to end—spoke gently, fanning pectoral fins as big as small boats.
“Kooo-krooo (Even for us, it takes months to reach the Antarctic Ocean)”
Blue whales and the other great marine mammals journey south in search of abundant food. And there they meet the season of love.
For creatures more vast than any that has ever lived, with almost no natural enemies, such a distance is little more than a long hike.
And yet a journey of over ten thousand kilometers could hardly be as easy as a stroll.
“Bwoo— (And what’s more…)”
The elder’s call shifted to a low sound, like a muddied foghorn—the voice a blue whale uses to send its meaning far across the water.
That song, louder than a jet engine, can reach a companion eight hundred kilometers away. It is a voice of warning to its kind.
“Kooo-bwoon (These days there’s no telling where the humans will turn up)”
Commanding as her presence was, seasoned as she was, the old female’s huge body was scored with many a deep gash.
As she spoke of humans, a fear from somewhere unfathomable rose in her deep eyes.
“Bwoo-booon (That’s right…! Those things are everywhere, curse them)”
“Vwoorn-boon (Oh no… humans… so frightening)”
“Vwooorn (Every year they take more of us…)”
Echoing the elder’s words, the other whales twisted their bodies in the water, one after another.
Every whale bore its share of wounds, but the blunt marks and gouged-out holes showed these were no natural injuries, nor the work of predators like orcas.
The voices the blue whales raised together resonated, swelling with dread as they spread across the waters. The discord set even the creatures of the deep trembling, until it seemed as if nothing in all that stretch of sea existed but the whales themselves.
Just then a voice, bright and shrill enough to seem out of place, pierced the water as if to wipe away all those words of fear.
“Kyurooo (I’ll be all right)”
Blue, who had stopped his rolling at some point, now faced his companions.
The smallest in the group, a male blue whale whom the others could see only as a child, beat his pectoral fins toward them with all his might.
“Kyuri-kooo— (I went all the way to the Antarctic Ocean once, with my mother. This isn’t my first time)”
“Fooohn (Come to think of it, you and I met a few years back)”
“Kyooo (Yes, I remember it too)”
The second-eldest among them, a whale with one pink eye, let out a low, wistful sound. As each of them murmured, searching their memories, the discord faded.
Judging that his elders’ voices had settled, Blue went on.
“Kyuree-krul (My mother taught me the Sea Road. I mean to follow it all the way)”
“Fohn-fohn (Ah, the Sea Road… Then perhaps it’s a little safer)”
The Sea Road is a special current that arises without warning across the vast open ocean.
Its tides run so strong that a whale who can ride the Sea Road may swim all the way to the Antarctic Ocean or other distant waters with little drain on its strength.
Yet where the Sea Road begins, even blue whales scarcely know. All they can tell is the rough places where the Sea Road is apt to appear.
And even then, there is no certainty of ever meeting the Sea Road at all.
“Fooohn (How well you found it…)”
Not even the blue whale, the largest creature on earth, has one among them who knows every Sea Road.
Even the legendary blue whale said to have found many a Road and carried word of them to his kin set off toward land in search of a new Road, and never came back.
“Fooohn-kree (Your mother left you something wonderful)”
The eldest female stirred a current with her fin. The blue, elusive water swirled into an eddy.
“Koo (…Yes)”
In that dear, enveloping sensation, Blue thought for a moment of his dead mother.
His companions only watched over him quietly as he fell silent.
“Kooo (I…)”
Blue shook his head, as if to cast off the gentle, warm scenes of the past.
The voice that followed held no hesitation.
“Krooo-k (I will travel the Sea Road alone)”
At the young male’s declaration, his companions fell silent.
The first to speak was the relatively young whale who had been treating Blue like a child.
“Krul-krul (Take care of yourself, boy)”
“Koo (I will!)”
———The South Pacific, 220 kilometers southwest of the Cook Islands
Having parted from his companions, Blue traveled the Sea Road south alone, and his journey could not have gone more smoothly.
Respecting Blue’s resolve, his fellow whales saw the young male off warmly. Not one of them made to follow after the Blue who had declared he would take the Sea Road.
It was their good faith, as ones who had gone further along in life.
Blue’s worry that the Sea Road’s starting point might have shifted proved groundless.
When Blue rose to the surface to look, the landmark his mother had taught him—“Dolphin Rock”—stood in exactly the same place as a year before. The tiny island of heaped dead coral (to the whales it looked like nothing but a rock) had been worn a size smaller by erosion, yet its distinctive shape was unchanged.
The shape of the island as a blue whale knew it through echolocation was a dolphin itself at the very instant of breaching, its crescent tail flukes drawing a supple arc through the air.
It was his mother who had taught Blue to “see this tail with your own eyes and be sure.”
A blue whale’s echolocation is less precise than that of other marine mammals. Its eyesight, too, is far from good—but by combining the two, it can know a thing more exactly.
To live in the wild, such tricks as his mother had taught him were indispensable.
And yet the mother who had taught him every last scrap of the wisdom to live was no longer there.
The rock, the Sea Road, the Antarctic Ocean. Past “Dolphin Rock,” where a year ago they had swum together talking of such things, this year Blue passed alone.
Fighting back the pull that threatened to sink him into a sea of grief, Blue drove his tail hard toward the Sea Road, which had begun to flow near “Dolphin Rock.”
What made the Sea Road so precious to a blue whale was the size and strength of its current. That swift tide was just right to bear Blue—already three tons in weight—along at his ease.
For other creatures, though, it was another matter.
“(Ah, a remora…)”
A remora no bigger than a sardine, caught up in the rough tide, went tumbling past Blue as he pressed on with ease on nothing but adjustments of his tail. Seeing the blue whale, it may have thought to share in his leavings—but as it happened, the last time Blue had swallowed a swarm of krill was the day before.
It must have struggled to catch the Sea Road at all, but for a body like that, traveling a whale’s road seemed hard going.
“Koo (I’ve swum a good long way now…)”
Worrying after the remora, gone from sight in an instant, Blue sent out a call to sound out his surroundings.
Since he had caught the Sea Road, the pod of bottlenose dolphins that had come up off New Zealand to tease the solitary Blue were the only creatures he had truly spoken with. Skilled swimmers though they were, even they, once on the Road, could not stay long and soon dropped away.
After that, Blue’s journey was a truly solitary one.
“Koon (…How quiet it is)”
The deep blue stretched on without end, wrapping Blue within it.
There were many other creatures in the sea, yet it was hard to share a meaning with them.
If Blue bellowed with all his might, he might yet be able to call his distant companions.
But to sing “the song that shakes the sea” when there was no emergency went against a blue whale’s code, and besides, having boldly declared “I’ll go alone,” Blue was not yet willing to give up.
Just then, Blue’s ears caught a low frequency.
“Bwooohn (…Is there… anyone about…?)”
A sound like a broken foghorn.
Terribly hoarse, so worn that making out the words was a struggle—but beyond doubt, it was the call of a blue whale.
“(It’s close. Where can it be…)”
Knowing from the echo that the voice’s owner was near, Blue, after a moment’s hesitation, sent back a reply.
“Kooo— (Um, I’m Blue. I’m on my way to the Antarctic Ocean along the Sea Road)”
“Bwoohn-bon (I see… Might you… lend me a little help…?)”
This time the voice was nearer than before.
When Blue strained his eyes, he made out a long, low shadow not far from the Sea Road.
By the size of the shadow, it seemed to be an adult—and a male blue whale at that. Even at this distance, a body several times Blue’s own gave off a heavy presence. The broad, blackish head called to mind the color of the far-off deep.
There was little in this sea that could trouble a full-grown blue whale. Then this must be the humans’ doing—the dreadful thought crossed Blue’s mind.
Yet however hard Blue checked with his echolocation, he could find no shadow of a ship anywhere near.
“Kwee (Are you… hurt…?)”
“Bwooohn-bwooohn (Ha-ha-hah!)”
To Blue’s timid question, the male whale answered with a hearty, booming laugh.
It was a laugh of such force it might rival “the song that shakes the sea.”
“Kyut (Wawah…!)”
At the sheer force of the male whale, Blue started in surprise, his body flinching before he could help it.
It was a low roar that seemed as though it might carry to whales far away, yet strangely there was not the least sense of alarm or despair in the male whale’s call.
He seemed, rather, to be enjoying himself beyond all measure.
“Bwoohn (Forgive me, forgive me. It’s been an age since I spoke with my own kind)”
As if to bear out the male whale’s words, his voice grew steadily clearer.
When he had first called out to Blue, his voice had been hoarse—no doubt because it truly had been so long since he had spoken with anyone.
Without stirring, the whale pleaded once more with Blue, who wavered between drifting on and staying.
“Vwoorn (I can ride the current no longer, but a young one like you should still manage well enough…)”
“Bwunn (Only a little while. I’ll not hinder your journey. So won’t you keep an old whale company?)”
Just as the male whale said, it was easy to leave the Sea Road, but to catch it again took strength and knack. For an aged whale, travel on the Road might well be too hard.
Blue, however, had both.
He was young and strong, and against the day he might slip from the Road, he had practiced with his mother again and again, joining the Sea Road partway along.
After a moment’s hesitation, Blue changed course with his pectoral fins, slowed, and gave a quick flick of his tail.
“Kween (I’m coming now)”
“Bwoooohn (I am Arnaas Aradin Wajadu Artarīku. And you are… let me see)”
“Ku-koo (I’m Blue. You’re Arnaa… Ara… um…)”
“Bwoonn (Hah! What a dutiful little thing. I go by all sorts of names, but… well now, just call me Artarīku)”
The two whales traded calls pitched high and low. Bass and alto overlapped, and a strange harmony spread out into the sea.
Flinching all the while at the booming low voice that set his head ringing, Blue nonetheless left the Sea Road and drew close to Artarīku to listen to his talk.
Seen up close, Artarīku was far larger than Blue had reckoned.
His gray-blue body was dull and dingy, marked here and there with scars of every shape. The pale-blue underside, too, had skin that was twisted and blackened in places. One pectoral fin, which should have jutted out to the side, was gone from the base.
The jagged stump was where an orca had bitten it away.
Only one side was visible, but Artarīku’s rolling, goggling eye was a little clouded. Artarīku seemed a whale of very great age.
“Krook (Are you bound for the Antarctic Ocean as well, Artarīku?)”
“Bwoohn (The south has foes aplenty, but that’s just where a male shows his worth! As for me… ho-ho. I’ve clean forgotten)”
The old whale laughed, sounding a rapid, low rumble. His voice was merry as ever.
“(How strange…)”
For a while now, like krill slipping out between baleen plates, the conversation had somehow failed to mesh.
It might have been his age, but this was the third time now that Blue had heard Artarīku’s long name.
“Bwoohn-boh (Blue, was it? And your mother, child—what became of her?)”
Changing the subject all at once, Artarīku asked as though the thought had just come back to him.
“Krooo-krul (…She’s gone. She passed away a year ago)”
At Artarīku’s question, Blue answered with hesitation.
Even now, speaking of his mother sent a deep ache through his chest.
“Bwoooh (I see… How hard that is)”
Artarīku sounded his foghorn note like a sigh. In that flat, quiet reply there was no ring of amusement.
A stillness that belongs only to those who have lived long and seen many things settled over Blue.
Artarīku’s eyes, of which it was hard to say whether they saw at all, wandered between the near and the far.
“Kooon (My mother was… killed by humans)”
“Booon (An iron spear?)”
“Kwoon (No…)”
“Kwooon (Something colorful, made by the humans…)”
“Bwoon (Plastic, is it)”
The old whale took up Blue’s words with ease.
“Koo (Yes)”
Even now, Blue was not used to speaking aloud the name of the thing that had been his mother’s death.
Artarīku’s thoughtfulness was a kindness Blue was thankful for.
“Kwohn (When the krill was scarce, my mother would swallow it down. ‘It’s a little something for the belly,’ she’d say… Though to me it never looked like food at all…)”
As he called up the memory, a bitterness crept into Blue’s voice.
“Kwoon (After that, little by little, even when there was krill, she took to eating the p… the plastic)”
“Bwooon (Sh-she got herself h-hooked on it, then, did she)”
Artarīku nodded, with a strange air of understanding.
His words were slurred somehow, yet Blue’s face snapped up toward the old whale who had put his mother’s suffering into words.
“Kwoon (…You understand?!)”
There were few whales who ate plastic.
For every one of them knew that those colorful fragments, drifting through the sea and multiplying year by year, were poison.
In any creature that ate “that thing,” born of human hands, everything came undone.
Their reason crumbled, words no longer passed between them and their fellows, and in time they went mad, thrashing and raging until, all at once, they dropped dead.
Let slip that you had eaten plastic, and the best you could hope for was cold looks from your fellows, or to be shut out and kept at a distance.
And so Blue too, whenever he spoke of his mother, took care never to touch on it.
“Bwoh (O-of c-course I understand!)”
His body gave a violent twitch, and Artarīku began to speak in a strange tone.
Fins jerked and twitched all over him, and his enormous eyes could find no focus.
“Koo (…Artarīku?)”
Blue called out to Artarīku, whose manner had grown so strange, but the old whale’s words only came faster and faster.
“Bwoh-booon (N-North American pla-pla…stic’s… hard, but as it drifts w-west it… goes so-soft, it does… round Africa there’s l-little of it, so little… the Eur-Eurasian sort’s my f-f-favorite…)”
At the change in Artarīku, a cold dread crept over Blue.
Blue had seen a sight like this once before.
“(It can’t be—Artarīku too…?!)”
Inch by inch, Blue drew back from the old whale.
He wanted to bolt, yet it felt like forsaking a lonely old kinsman, and his fins would not do as he willed.
“Bwoh, bwoh…”
By now Artarīku’s words had lost all meaning, and only a low call like a heartbeat throbbed on, uncanny. His navy-gray body, sheathed in countless scars, rippled and twitched like some colossal larva.
Then, all at once, the great body’s convulsions stopped dead.
Blue edged closer, fearful, toward the old whale, who lay as still as if dead.
“Koo (Artarīku?)”
In that instant a sound like a gong, one to halt the very breath, tore through Blue’s hearing.
“Goooong”
His eyes snapped wide, and with a quickness no one would credit in so old a whale, Artarīku wrenched his body around.
His tail fluke, as vast as Blue’s whole body, tore a savage current through the water and flashed straight at Blue.
“Kunh!”
Blue, still reeling from Artarīku’s voice, had no hope of dodging, and the grown whale’s fin caught him full-on.
Blue lost consciousness and was sent flying like a minnow.
The veteran blue whale, who had lost all sight of the calf and now even of himself, on instinct alone made for where the light was and loosed one roar beyond all others, monstrous and vast.
“Gooooong”
From there he surged in one rush to the surface and, giving the seabirds no time to take wing, Artarīku bared his magnificent body to the sun.
The old whale’s breach sent spray leaping high, and carried its waves far into the distance.
It was as though he were flinging his fury at the ones who had made him what he was.
His strength spent, sinking into the depths, Artarīku had already breathed his last.
The baleen that had strained up untold hundreds of millions of krill was wasted thin, much of it broken and fallen away.
From the open cavity of his mouth spilled a garish toothbrush, a shopping bag, a can, and fragments of every other kind.
Rolling slowly, Artarīku turned half of his body toward the surface.
One of the old whale’s eyes had been stained a deep crimson.
———The Weddell Sea, roughly 2,000 kilometers from the South Pole
“Bwoon (…He’s awake!)”
At the excited call of a whale, Blue blinked.
“Kwoohn (Blue, are you all right?)”
This time a calmer voice asked after him.
It was the voice of the eldest female, the one who had been among his companions before Blue set out.
“Koo (Where is this…?)”
“Bwohn (Boy! What are you muttering in your sleep for? Where else would we be but the Antarctic Ocean!)”
The one who spoke in that mocking tone was the young male, the one who was forever treating Blue like a child.
At that voice, Blue realized at last that he was ringed round by his companions.
“Kwooon (Huh? Everyone’s here… But I… I was sure…)”
Into Blue’s still-clouded head, all that had happened came rushing back like a torrent.
How he had parted from his companions and set out alone for the Antarctic Ocean.
How he had found the Sea Road his mother had taught him of.
How, along the way, he had told an old whale with a long name about his mother.
And how, all at once, that old whale had come undone.
“Koo (Artarīku!)”
Blue gave a sharp cry and beat his pectoral fins.
That should have lent his swimming a burst of speed, yet for some reason he now slewed off to one side.
“Kwuun (…What?)”
As Blue puzzled over the wrongness in his body, the elder female spoke, reluctant and grave.
“Fooohn (You’d best not push yourself too hard, Blue. Your fin…)”
“(My fin…?)”
When he moved one of his pectoral fins, it throbbed with a dull ache. It was not so very bad, but he could put no strength into it.
“Kwoon (…What’s become of my pectoral fin?)”
A whale cannot see its own pectoral fins.
Something amiss with so precious a part of him, one he could not swim without, set Blue’s fears churning.
“Bwuohn (Ha! Don’t fret so. It’s only broken!)”
The young male’s shrill voice laughed the calf’s worry away.
“Koo (Really…?)”
“Fohn-fohn-fooo (Blue, it was he who found you just as you were about to strike an iceberg, you know?)”
To the doubtful Blue, the elder female called in a coaxing, gentle tone.
“Fohn-koo (After we saw you off, we each set out on our own)”
“Fooohn (…We heard the ‘song’ near the Cook Islands, so we all gathered and hurried. And then we found you… When we called and you gave no answer, we feared the worst)”
The “song that shakes the sea” is the whales’ cry of warning. The louder it sounds, the more dire the need.
It was only natural that his companions had been anxious.
The elder female dropped her voice low.
“Foooohn (Tell me, Blue—we couldn’t quite make out what the ‘song’ was saying. Could you?)”
The blue whales gathered round Blue drifted quietly in the water.
It was not only Blue’s own companions who had gathered near.
Minke whales and sperm whales, ferocious orcas, even the ever-neutral dolphins—marine mammals beyond counting had massed in the Weddell Sea, off the very tip of the Antarctic continent’s tail fluke.
For all their differences of species, every one of them must have heard the “song” through echolocation.
At a remove from Blue and the others, each stirred its fins as though ill at ease.
“Koo (That was… Artarīku, I think)”
Feeling all their eyes upon him, Blue began, haltingly, to tell of the old whale he had met along his journey.
After long hesitation, Blue laid it all bare, hiding nothing—of his mother, and of the plastic.
“Koo-koo (…Plastic is a fearful thing. Artarīku, who had lived so long, and my mother too—the plastic took them both. But the most fearful thing of all is… to be left alone)”
Not one creature broke in upon the little blue whale’s plea.
Through the hushed sea, Blue’s voice alone rang out.
“Koo-koo-oon (Once you eat the plastic, you can’t stop yourself. You don’t even know that you’re eating it. And that is how, little by little, you come undone. But if only someone would say, ‘Let’s stop this’… If I had said it, perhaps my mother would not have died)”
“Koo-eeen (So please, all of you… never leave one of your own alone)”
Blue’s high-frequency call spread out across the creatures gathered in the Antarctic Ocean.
Every creature here must, in some measure, have known the menace of plastic for itself.
“Shhk…”
All at once a sound sliced through the water, and Blue felt a sharp pain lance through his eye.
The place above his eyelid turned cold for a moment, and then, fast, the pain swelled to a deep throb.
Little by little, a red haze crept across Blue’s sight.
“Kii! (Blue!)”
“Kachi-kachi! (Humans!)”
One of his companions shrieked, and the dolphins, quick to sense the danger, raised a shrill clamor.
Then they scattered in every direction and fled.
The dolphins were the first, and then the other creatures too beat their fins in a frantic bid to flee.
“(Hu-mans…?)”
Blue still could not take in what was happening.
Only that one half of the world, staining red, went muffled, until he could hear nothing but the fierce pounding of his own heart.
It was the first time in his life that Blue had come upon humans.
The iron thing humans use, the one called a “ship,” and the dreadful “iron spears” they let fall—Blue had known both only from others’ tales.
“Bwoohn”
Just then, close by, came a low voice he knew. Choked with anguish and pain, the call would not shape itself into words.
When Blue turned, there before his eyes the elder female whale’s back gushed with a fresh burst of blood.
Into that broad back, one more spear, straight to an uncanny degree, was even now sinking deep.
†　　†　　†
“Haul it up!”
A sturdy man leaning out over the prow thrust his arm skyward, his voice rising over the shriek of the Antarctic wind.
At the man’s cry, the rust-red winch that clawed at the sky let out a groan.
“Keep back! You’ll catch the propeller! …And don’t sink a harpoon into anything but a whale!”
Across the bustling deck, a woman in a helmet paced back and forth with a sure, steady tread.
Striding unhurried across the crowded ship, she tilted her head toward the radio clipped to the shoulder strap of her life vest and sent out her orders. Each time she did, a lapis-blue ear cuff in the shape of a whale slipped into view from beneath her hood.
On her grimy helmet the corps’s initials were set down in letters and a logo; across the back of her faded viridian parka ran the blunt, rugged lettering of the International Cetacean Survey Corps; and around one slender upper arm was bound a khaki armband that caught the eye.
“Captain!”
Holding down a hood the wind kept flipping back, a man in the same viridian parka came hurrying over.
On the man’s upper arm, an armband of a different color from the Captain’s shone with a vinyl gloss.
“Word is Catcher Boat No. 3 struck a big one… a female blue, they say.”
Breathless, the man looked to her for orders.
Across the man’s flat face and the cyan apron tied over his winter gear, red stains lay scattered in specks; whether from the cold or the labor, the eyes in his ruddy face burned bright and keen.
“…A blue isana, is it,” the Captain murmured to herself, and her face stayed clouded.
That old word for a whale, murmured under her breath, was snatched away in an instant by the frozen wind.
“I’d half hoped it was ‘Big Blue,’” the man said through gritted teeth, and the Captain checked him with a sidelong look.
“Harpoon-Master, don’t lose sight of the survey’s purpose, either.”
“…Aye, boss.”
The Harpoon-Master gave a shrug, and the Captain turned her eyes toward the bow.
“That blue from before, we’ve already started hauling her in. She’s too big, so we’ll just tow her along—”
“No. Dump her.”
Cutting off the man as he pointed to starboard, the head of the whaling fleet gave the command flatly.
“What? But—come now, you don’t often get a prize like that—”
“We’ve six weeks yet before we make port. And the institute hasn’t the room to hold her, Harpoon-Master. …How does the rest of the take stand?”
“Smooth enough, I’d say. They’d all bunched together, so it was easy work.”
“…I see.”
With that, the Captain fell silent.
Wrangling with her was a waste of breath—a lesson the man, dispatched from home on commercial business, had learned only too well on the long passage down to the Antarctic Ocean.
Besides, his purpose was all but achieved by now. He had no wish for needless friction out on the water.
“Harpoon-Master!”
A voice like the skin-piercing wind stopped the man just as he turned his back on the Captain.
At that summons, which brooked no refusal, the figure in the apron turned back with a weary air.
“Keep the sharpest watch on the shadows in the water. We are in ‘his’ waters now.”
“Aye, aye! I know it well enough!”
The Harpoon-Master flashed a thumbs-up and went rolling his shoulders off toward the stern.
From the radio of the Captain, who had set off in the very opposite direction from the Harpoon-Master, came report after report—the head counts and species of the whales taken, and the rest. Through the receiver, the voices of the crew rang out, jubilant.
She laid a finger on the switch and cut the radio dead, static and all.
“Hahh…”
Standing at the bow, straining her ears, she caught—beneath the harsh clamor of machinery and human voices—a song. A beautiful song, and yet so mournful she longed to cover her ears against it.
In the face of that song, the one who bore the great fleet on her shoulders stood unmoving, square in the teeth of the freezing wind.
Instead she folded her arms tight, one hand clenching hard at the armband that marked her rank. The thing, a chemical product born of petroleum, buckled out of shape in her grip.
The gentle, blue-green eyes beneath her hood were fixed straight upon the “blade” of the fleet she commanded.
As if she, at least, must never let herself look away from the work those blades did.
†　　†　　†
Indiscriminate, the iron spears pierced down through the water’s surface.
With each one, blood bloomed and spread through the blue of the sea.
The near-freezing water shrank their blood vessels, and the brine soaked without mercy into every wound.
“Kwit!”
Blue’s cry rose not from the pain of his wounds but from the terrible sight before him, one that seemed to darken the world.
“Bwoooohn”
The elder of the pod, thrashing with an anguished cry, was rising upward at an unnaturally level angle. It was as though the very shadow that filled the surface of the sea had turned to a spear and was hauling her up by force.
Struck through the whole of her body with iron spears, the blood that welled up without end stained her ash-blue skin for a single instant before it melted away into the sea.
The stench of blood hung so thick in the water that even Blue, whose sense of smell was far from keen, could not mistake it.
“Kwiii (No—it can’t be…)”
Still the spears rained down.
Minke whales and others of their kind, run through by the iron spears, writhed to break free.
But the thing that human hands had made did not so much as stir.
The more they struggled, the deeper the spears gouged into their flesh.
Before long, as each whale’s strength failed, it was drawn smoothly up to the surface, as though the moment had been timed to a nicety. What became of the whales the humans took, Blue could not begin to guess.
But this much Blue knew: they never came back.
If he did nothing now, then, like his mother, they would be lost to him forever.
“Guu (No more…!)”
With a thunderous drive of his tail, Blue made straight for his companions. Only a little way remained now to the surface.
The moment he began to swim, the wound at his eye split open again. Seawater seeped in, and the sting of it set his sight flickering.
His pectoral fin, which would not move as he wished, throbbed as though with a pulse of its own.
And yet Blue did not stop. Straight at the spear he drove himself—Blue, hurtling like a spear.
“Booo (Blue… you mustn’t come)”
In a faltering voice she tried to hold him back. Her eyelids were already sinking shut.
If only he could draw the spear out, she would surely be free.
“Kwi…”
A thick wire bit into his skin. The clammy touch of it was cold enough to send a shudder through him.
Even so, when Blue kept pushing without slackening his strength, one iron spear slipped smoothly free. Blue’s charge had knocked it loose at last.
“Kwi (I did it!)”
As though they had grasped that their quarry had escaped, the other spears lodged in her, too, went drawing sullenly back up.
“Kukoo (Ngh… I can’t see…)”
But his joy was short-lived: a thick crimson welled up all at once and closed over Blue’s face.
From the wound the spear had left, blood was gushing like a geyser.
The sheer volume of it left Blue’s sight, his sense of smell, even his echolocation, all deadened.
The new spear that came flying at him—Blue never noticed it at all.
“Kiyu (Blue… above you…!)”
From where the elder female whale hung, sinking sideways, the cluster of spears bursting down through the surface was all too clear to see. Summoning the last of her strength, she cried a warning to Blue.
Blue was still caught up in the clinging tide of blood. The elder’s voice, tangled in among the cries of the other whales, would not reach him clearly.
“Kwi!”
By the time the calf came to himself with a start, several spears were there, dead ahead of him.
Spears that glittered with an eerie, greedy light beneath the water.
Their tips were barbed, and sharp as a predator’s fangs.
More than the fangs of any orca or shark, those iron-gray spears were sinister and terrible.
“Kwit…”
Blue had shut his eyes, yet however long he waited, the pain never came.
Through his eyelids there was only a dark shadow to be seen.
“Kwoohn (Blue, are you all right?)”
Called by that clear, low voice of a full-grown whale, Blue opened his eyes.
There was not a single spear left there now.
What there was: a pattern of black steel, and an enormous eye all but sunk into ash-blue skin. Eyes as blue as shallow water gazed straight at Blue, and now and then rolled round to keep watch on all about.
Somehow, they were eyes not unlike Blue’s own.
“Kuru-kuruu (…Ah!)”
What startled Blue was the sheer size of that body.
The black-steel stripes ran on without end, so far that the very tip of the tail fluke was lost to sight. On the underside of that massive body—vast enough to swallow Blue whole, lengthwise—a pectoral fin as graceful as a grown orca’s rippled like a banner.
There before Blue’s eyes was a male blue whale of outlandish strength, a good fifty meters from nose to fluke.
“Kwi (Blood…!)”
At the sudden appearance of this towering giant of his own kind, Blue was half lost to himself. But then he started, and marked the male whale’s wound: from a gash a spear seemed to have grazed, fresh blood was flowing.
It was a wound he had taken in shielding Blue, when he made his own body a shield against the spears.
“Kwohn (Don’t fret. It’s only a scratch)”
The colossal whale gently soothed the flustered Blue.
That call of his, like one soothing a child, had a clear and singular timbre, plainly unlike the voice of any other whale.
“Kurii (You are…)”
Old memories came welling up like water from a spring, and Blue pressed in close to the mighty blue whale.
But he, who had paid the iron spears no mind at all, gave a swift stroke of his pectoral fins and drew away in an instant.
“Kwoohn (Stay away a little while, and this is what you get. Humans—a hasty lot, they are)”
A stretch that would have cost Blue days of swimming, the male whale ranged across in the blink of an eye, singing away at his leisure all the while.
As he went he called out to the other creatures too, and though their number had thinned, he took the still-falling iron spears upon his own body, one after another. In fact, up close, the male whale’s stripes proved to be countless healed-over scars. Time and again, surely, he had stood just so in the path of the iron spears.
The whisper of “Big Blue” rose here and there across the waters, and the iron spears that had rained down like a storm, at length, came to a dead stop.
But none of it reached Blue’s ears.
At the sight of “Big Blue”—winding his supple body through the water, swimming so grandly about, harming not a soul—Blue could only stare, spellbound.
His swimming was itself as mighty as the Sea Road, and the sight of him guarding his fellows set a new purpose stirring to life in Blue’s heart.
“Kwoohn (Blue…)”
With a single stroke of his tail fluke he was back at Blue’s side, and “Big Blue” rolled his body over. That alone was enough to work the iron spears still lodged in him easily free, one by one. Down the spears sank, just as they were, into the dark and frozen depths of the sea.
“Kwohn (…It is a lonely thing, to be alone. You too—make a family of your own, and live on strong)”
So saying to Blue in that clear, low voice, “Big Blue” clawed at the sea with every fin he had.
“Kwoo (Ngh…)”
That one stroke of “Big Blue” set a tide flowing, and it struck Blue full-on.
But the young whale with the broken pectoral fin, who had followed the Sea Road all the way here, did not waver.
And on the surface where he looked up, ripples were spreading wide as a continent.
“Kyuruu (Was that… the legendary Big Blue?)”
At the unfamiliar call, Blue turned to look.
Close beside him, a blue whale he did not know hung in the water, drawn up level with Blue.
She, too, gazed up at the surface as he had, and then let her eyes fall.
Dandelion-yellow eyes met eyes of blue.
“Kuruu (He is… my father)”
To Blue’s avowal she said nothing.
She only gazed at Blue, and then, together with him, looked off the way that great body had gone.
“Big Blue” was nowhere to be seen now.
The Weddell Sea had won back its calm, and its creatures went on, each about its own life.
As long as that calm should hold, the day of meeting the sea’s guardian again might never come.
And that was for the best, thought his child.
For he, too, wished for that very thing.
And yet—if only they might meet just once more…
“Kyui (You will meet him again—your father… surely you will)”
She declared it with force, as though she had seen clear through to Blue’s heart.
The words of this female, whose name he did not even know, carried a strange promise, as if they might truly come to pass.
Blue felt a warmth of happiness he had not known in a long while, and gave a small, soft laugh.
“Kyut (…What is it? Is something funny?)”
“Kwoon (No… I’m only hungry, that’s all)”
The two young blue whales, the male and the female, drew close to one another and vanished into the Weddell Sea.
The song of the two of them went carrying across the sea, merry and untiring, on and on.
(The End)