Talitha again spoke of the obvious, something my elders knew that I knew very well: ‘But we cannot eat a bear! That would break the First Covenant!’
She went on to recount one of the most important lessons that she had learned: how long ago the orcas had split into two kindreds, one which ate only fish while the other hunted seals and bears and almost any animal made of warm blood and red meat. These Others, who looked much the same as any orca of my clan, almost never mingled with us. We had promised to leave each other alone and never to interfere with the different ways by which we made our livings. Even so, we knew each other’s stories and songs. If we killed the bear, the sea itself would sing of our desperate act, and the Others would eventually learn of how we had broken our covenant with them.
My grandmother moved closer to me through the cold water. Her eyes, as blue and liquid as the ocean, caught me up in her fondness for me and swept me into deeper currents of cobalt, indigo, and ultramarine, and the secret blue-inside-blue that flows within the heart of all things. She asked, ‘Do you remember what I said about you on the day you were born?’
‘You said many things, Grandmother.’
‘Yes, I did and these words I would like you to remember: How noble you are, in both form and faculty, Arjuna, how like an angel in action, and in apprehension like a god! The beauty of the world you are and all of my delight.’
I did remember her saying that. She told all her grandchildren the same thing.
‘How noble would it be,’ she now asked me, ‘for us to break our promise to the Others?’
‘But we are so hungry! They would not mind if we took a single bear.’
‘The Covenant is the Covenant,’ she told me, ‘whether or not you think the Others would mind.’
‘But we made it so long ago, in a different age. The world is changing.’
‘The world is always the world, just as our word is always our word.’
‘Can we never break our word, even as the ice breaks into nothingness while the world grows warmer?’
‘The ice has broken before,’ my grandmother reminded me.
For a while, she sang to me and our family of our great memories of the past: of ages of ice and times of the sun’s heat when the world had been cooler or warmer.
‘Yes, but something is different this time,’ I replied. ‘The world has warmed much too quickly.’
Although she could not deny this, she said, ‘The world has its own ways.’
‘Yes, and those ways are changing.’
Alnitak came closer and so did my mother, and through the turbid, gray waters we debated how the northern ice sheet could have possibly melted so much in the span of a few generations. As I was still a young, not-quite-adult whale, I should have deferred to my elders. I should have felt shame at my questioning of them. Who was I to think that I might have discerned something they had not? And yet I did, and I sensed something wrong in my family’s understanding. In this, I experienced a secret pride in my insight and in my otherness from people who had seemed so like myself in sensibility and so close to my heart.
‘It is the humans,’ I said. ‘The humans are warming the world with the heat we have felt emanating from their boats.’
‘That cannot be enough heat to melt the ice,’ Alnitak said.
‘Only a few generations ago,’ I retorted, ‘only a few humans dared the ocean in cockle shells that we could have splintered with one snap of our jaws. Now their great metal ships are everywhere.’
‘To suppose that therefore the humans can be blamed for the ocean’s warming,’ my grandmother said, ‘is a wild leap in logic.’
‘But they are to blame! I know they are!’
‘How can you be sure?’ And then, as if I was still a babe drinking milk, she chided me for making a basic philosophical error: ‘A correlation does not prove a causation.’
And chided I was. To hide my embarrassment (and my defiance), I took refuge in a little play: ‘Thank you for the lesson, Grandmother. I was just giving you the chance to exercise your love of pedagogy.’
‘Of course you were, my dear. And I do love it so! I have no words to tell you how much I look forward to the day when it is you who teaches me.’
‘I am sure that you could think of a few words, Grandmother.’
‘Well, perhaps a few.’
‘I await your wisdom.’
‘I can hear that you do,’ she said. ‘Then listen to me: it is a heavy responsibility being the wisest of the family – perhaps you could relieve me of it.’
‘No, I cannot,’ I said sincerely. ‘You know I cannot.’
‘Then will you let us leave this bear to his fate?’
All my life, my grandmother had warned me that my innate tenacity could harden into pertinacity if I allowed this. Did anyone know me as did my grandmother?
‘We are hungry,’ I said simply.
‘We have been hungry before.’
‘Never like this. Where have the fish gone? Not even the ocean can tell us.’
‘We will swim to a place where there are many fish.’
‘We would swim more surely with this bear’s life to strengthen us.’
‘Yes, and with our bellies full of bear meat, what shall we say to the Others?’
‘Why must we say anything at all?’
‘In saying nothing, we would say everything. How can a whale speak other than the truth?’
‘But what is true, grandmother?’
‘The Covenant is true – a true expression of our desire to live in harmony with the Others.’
‘But have you not taught me that the only absolute truth is that there is no absolute truth?’
Indeed she had. My grandmother relished self-referential statements and the paradoxes they engendered as an invitation for one’s consciousness to reflect back and forth on itself into a bright infinity that illuminated the deepest of depths.
‘Yes, I did teach you that,’ she said. ‘You were too young, however, for me to tell you that if there is no absolute truth, then we cannot know with certainty that there is no absolute truth.’
My grandmother played a deeper game than I – a game that could go on forever if I let it.
‘Then do you believe there is an absolute truth?’
‘You are perceptive, Arjuna.’
‘What is this truth then? Is it just life, itself?’
‘You really do not know?’
‘But what could be truer than life?’
In answer, my grandmother sang to me in a thunderous silence that I could not quite comprehend. I needed to answer her, but what should I say? Only words that would gnaw at her and lay her heart bare.
‘Look at Kajam,’ I called out. I swam over to him and nudged the child with my head. ‘He is so hungry!’
Kajam, small for his four years and thin with deprivation, protested this: ‘I am not too hungry to swim night and day as far as we must. Let us surface and I will show you.’
It had been a while since any of my family had drawn breath. Because the bear could do nothing about his plight, we had no need to conceal our conference