Blood in the Water

“Should we go to meet them,” he asked to Grayer who swam ahead of him.

“Go if you want,” she said, “I don’t think it will matter much to them. You’re just a little bull after all.”

Ceto listened to hear the direction from which the bulls were coming. Their voices were fading.

“Diving,” he thought, and listened again.

The voices had nearly disappeared into the endless undertone of the ocean at rest.

“It will be a while now,” he thought, “must be hungry. They’ll want to breach and bask when they’ve had their fill too. It could be hours before they arrive.”

Ceto listened again. There was something this time. But it was not a Bull.

“What is that sound,” he thought to himself, “It’s not one of our tribe certainly. It’s not a mathematical language.”

The sound he heard was more like to what you and I would call singing. Whales of Ceto’s tribe did not sing so much as they clicked. The sound came through the nose of the whale and not the mouth as it would for you or me.

The clicks had proved a very useful form of communication for his people and they had advanced their language to the point that it exceeded many of the languages of men. For one thing, the clicks communicated not just words and expressions, but also information about the depth or temperature of water. Direction and speed and other navigational information was also part of common discourse. And much of this was communicated in what we would think of as numerical sequences.

“Three - Seven - Seventy Five - Eight - Twenty Two - Down,” or something very much like that. I suppose if you or I heard it without any translation it would sound like a lot of un-intelligable number gibberish. Like a man calling out numbers to a crowd of people and not knowing if he were talking about money or a bus schedule or a game of bingo.

But this sound. This was like something more that a person would understand. It had tone and pitch and resonance. Ceto had heard something like this before when he was with his mother.

“Grass eater,” she said, hearing the sound, “Harmless old cow. Just ignore it.”

But at the time, the sound had been bouyant, happy, almost exhillerating in it’s song. Ceto didn’t understand a word of it, but the resonance as it hit his body and thrummed through his nose was like a massage to a man who had long stooped over some dull task.

This sound was mournful, and though equally sensational in it’s feeling, it felt like a dirge was being sung.

“Don’t seek out the others in the water,” were the words of his aunts an mother, “Leave the wild place to it’s own business. It’s full of the care of creatures that thrive on blood. Take no part in it.”

“Blood,” thought Ceto with a shiver, “I can’t imagine living like that.”

The whales of Ceto’s line had given up their taste for blood in an immemorial age beyond the reach of song or history. It had been so long indeed since they had hunted in the water with their teeth that only the lower set of their jaws still held visible teeth. Their mouth they rarely used for anything other than sucking in the squid that was the largest part of their diet.

Squid they considered a bloodless creature, and the truth be told, they considered them hardly more alive than we would consider a field of wheat to be alive.

The creatures of the ocean that throve on blood they considered in the lesser ones such as small fish, pitiable, and in the greater ones, cannibals. Sharks and Killer Whales they regarded with the same disgust that we regard the lowest orders of people, pirate or brigands or any breed of people whose customs are brutal and thrive on cruelty.

The sounds were growing more distinct now and among the notes of the other whale, Ceto could discern the light grating sounds of a small boat. In that moment, it was the instincts of his people that drove him to seek out the other creature. For they were a kindly race, and time had made them more protective than predatory.

As he approached the spot the color and texture of the water changed. It was thick with blood. Only once before in his life had Ceto encountered such a quantity of blood in the water. It had been an attack of Killer Whales on a lone mother and her cub. Ceto did not like to think of that encounter. The Killer Whales had drowned them both through exhaustion and then eaten only the parts of their dead bodies that they preferred, leaving the remainder to rot and sink to the bottom and defile the sacred fishing rivers. Then he had been among many, and though revolted by the sight, he had not felt the utter horror that he felt now.

He surfaced among a confusion of sounds in the dazzling light of the open ocean. Waves were rough and he peered through his right eye at a scene that he would never forget. Knots of men in small boats were lashing the great body of the singing whale to the side of their small boat while he bled and sang his life away.

He was maybe fifty yards from the scene of carnage when he felt a sharp burning pain in his own back. He could not see what it was, but he knew he had been hurt. He yanked and pulled away from the pain instinctively and felt the pain increase and his body drag. But even in such a pass, and at less than full size, Ceto had great strength. Driven by what counter impulse, he did not know, he turned back, and fortunately for him, directly into his attackers.

His head drove into their small boat broad sided and he felt the keel grate over his back and the small forms of the men spill out of the craft and onto and off of his back like pellets of water. The pain was there, but the drag on his heft was gone. He heard the shouts of the men and the dwindling song of the dying whale opposite him. He turned again and for a moment found himself eye to eye with the alien creature. Something, some say a spirit of understanding passed between them in that fleeting moment, and Ceto’s fate was sealed. He dove, taking (had he known it) a heavy Nantucket line, harpoon and net along with him.

He swam with what strength remained to him back towards the meeting place of his Gam and as he heard the familiar sound of the voices come up to meet him, faded into a long spell of unknowing thought.