‘What do they eat?’
‘Seals and penguins and things like that.’
‘Do you think he’d eat some fish?’
‘Did you bring any fish?’
‘I’ve got a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.’
‘Did you ever give a dog peanut butter? They lick their teeth for like an hour ’cause they can’t get it off.’
‘We’re not going to give an orca peanut butter!’
‘What do you think he wants?’
I moved in as close to the boat as I could.
‘Listen! Listen! Listen!’ I said. I spoke as slowly as I could. ‘W-wait-wait-wait-A-wait-wait-wait-T-wait-wait-wait-E-wait-wait-wait-R!’
‘I don’t know, but it sounds like he’s in distress.’
‘I think he just wants attention. He’s a pushy little whale.’
‘Maybe we should play him some music. I hear whales like music.’
‘What kind?’
‘I don’t know – what do you have?’
One of the humans, with a hairy face and a second skin of sheeny blue, lifted a black object onto the wooden surface near the boat’s tail. He did something to it with the tentacles of his hands.
‘I hope he likes it.’
A great noise burst from the black object and broke through the air. The noise drove against my skin and set the very water around me humming. It took a few moments for me to realize that the noise comprised different strands of sound: human voices and howling vibrations and a relentless thumping like that of a heart beating with an insane rhythm.
Boom boom anger anger anger! Boom boom anger anger anger! Boom boom …
‘Please stop!’ I cried out. ‘It hurts my head, hurts my soul!’
I came up out of the water, spy-hopping, which brought my head nearly level with the booming black thing. I opened my mouth, thinking I might be able to snatch it from between the human’s hands and crush it between my jaws.
‘Look! Bobo is smiling! He likes it – turn it louder!’
Boom! Boom! Boom …
As other humans had set fire to the sea’s surface with their dirty oil, these humans made even the water itself sick with sound. Although I longed to speak with them – particularly with the yellow-haired female – I had to get away from them and their boat as quickly as I could. I dove, but at first that only exacerbated the torment of the hideous noise, for sound moves more quickly and completely through water than it does through air. Only by swimming as far as I could away from the boat would I be able to make the noise attenuate to a distant and tolerable irritation.
And swim I did. For the rest of that day, and during the days that followed, I explored the large bay I had entered. I never really escaped the noise of the humans, for they were everywhere on the bay and on the shore surrounding it. Many boats disturbed the bay’s blue waters, and most of them sent high-pitched, shrieking sounds piercing every nook and cove. From the forests rising up from the sea came a similar buzz and clash, as if the very air were being torn apart. From time to time, great trees broke into splinters and crashed to the earth. Humans dropped the bare spines of the tree’s corpses into the water with splash after tremendous splash.
How long, I wondered, would I be able to live amidst this cacophony without falling as insane as the humans themselves seemed to be? Could I bear another day, another hour, another moment? Somehow, I told myself, I had to bear it. In the way my mother had showed me many years before, I must learn to dwell within softer, interior sounds called up from memory or imagination, which would overpower all the human noise and drive it away.
It dismayed me that the humans fouled the pretty bay with things other than noise. I found floating on the water many objects that the humans cast from their boats. Some were second skins made of that highly shapeable substance the humans used for so many unfathomable purposes. Because I needed a name for this unnatural substance, I thought of it as excrescence. Excrescence composed most of the objects the humans handled, as it did the bodies of their boats. I zanged as well metallic and clear stone shells from which they drank various liquids. Everywhere I went, the water tasted of oils suppurating from their boats and from the bitter cream the humans rubbed into their skin.
Except for the ubiquitous excrescence, which could be found floating in island-like masses even on the northern oceans, the worst of the humans’ befoulment was the feces that poured from many streams into the bay. Why, I wondered, did humans drop their feces into water when they were creatures of the land? Why did they concentrate it into a brownish sludge? Did they wish to flavor the water through which they swam? That seemed to me unlikely, for when I put tongue to their feces, I detect traces of boat oil, excrescence, and other poisons that could only have tasted as unpleasant to the humans as they did to me.
I came across a hint of an answer to these questions as I was exploring a peninsula on the east side of the bay. Two tongues of land licked out from the peninsula’s tip into the water. On one of these tongues – treeless and covered with grass – humans stood striking shiny metal sticks against spherical white eggs which arced through the air before falling to earth and rolling across the grass. From time to time, one of the eggs, made of yet another kind of excrescence, would sail off the peninsula and plop into the water. Then the humans would call out such stridencies as ‘Goddamned ball is unbalanced!’ and other sounds that made no sense to me.
On the other bit of land, across a slip of water, trees grew out an expanse of grass. There humans reclined on second skins and cast other kinds of eggs at each other. They burned fish in fires, shouted out cries to each other, and they did a thing with feces that fascinated me.
Some sort of mammal – some looked like little wolves – accompanied many of the humans. Long strands probably made of excrescence connected the two-legged to four-legged. The little wolves would dart about, put nose to ground, and cause the humans’ limbs to jerk in whatever direction the wolves chose to move. Whenever the wolves arched their backs to defecate, the humans waited by their sides. At the completion of each defecation, the humans made cooing sounds as if pleased to receive what the wolves had given them. They gathered up the feces in clear skins of excrescence, which they carried proudly in their hands as the wolves led them on a continuation of their erratic journey across the grass.
Why, I wondered, did the humans gather up wolf feces? Did they eat it as snails eat the excretions of fish? Did they lick down the feces of their own kind? That could not be possible. And yet, when it came to humans, almost nothing seemed impossible. I could be sure of little more than the fact that humans collected feces of varying kinds. Perhaps when these collections grew too large, the humans vented some into the sea.
My puzzlement at the humans’ diet caused me to realize that it had been too long since I had eaten. I badly wanted and needed to catch a few salmon or perhaps some more delicious herring. However, the channel through which I swam formed a part of the traditional fishing grounds of the Truthful Word Painter Clan. I felt sure that these distant cousins of mine would not begrudge me a few mouthfuls of fish, but good manners dictated that I first ask permission before indulging in such a feast. I had to wait through many days of rumbling in my empty belly before I had a chance to do so. One clear night, with the moon-silvered waters around me rippling in a soft breeze, the orcas of the Scarlett Tiralee family of the Truthful Word Painter Clan swam into the channel and made my acquaintance.
Only six of them did I greet: Mother Agena and her three children, Diadem, Furud, and Mekbuda, and Agena’s sister Celaeno, who had recently given birth to Baby Kornephoros. When I asked after their health, Agena told me, ‘We are well enough now, though misfortunes have reduced our family, as you can see.’