“Did you see that?” she said quietly, to anyone who was listening. “Did you see the way it flashed us with the white side of its jaw?” She could imagine now what she’d only read, that biologists speculated that the jaw coloring had to do with that fish herding Ray had just mentioned. Fin whales were known to circle clockwise, which meant the white jaw would be visible to the fish, could be like a flashing light. But why would they want to circle only clockwise? Why not have two white jaws and be an ambidextrous circler?
The scientist in her wanted a theory, wanted to understand, needed more than awe.
A voice came from beside her. “Can you imagine anyone wanting to kill such a magnificent creature?”
It was the artist, the woman she’d met briefly at the safety orientation when they first boarded and then later had the short conversation with about seasickness meds. Now here she was, googly-eyed about the whales.
“Actually, yes,” Helen said. “Native people hunt and eat whales. Not fin whales, not in Alaska, but bowheads and belugas, and in Russia, gray whales.”
The woman—petite in an oversized and overstuffed parka, with bleached-blond hair matted into dreadlocks and dangling beads—turned to her. Helen watched her register dark hair, dark eyes, skin a little yellowish, Mongolian eye fold, whoops. Now the woman looked embarrassed. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean that. I meant the Japanese commercial whalers that do it for the meat. The Inuit have a different relationship, I know.”
“The whales give themselves to the people.” Helen said this instinctively, rhetorically, defensively. It was what she’d been raised to know, and if she didn’t actually believe this—she was a scientist, after all—many of her relatives did. While it might not be literal truth, the belief centered on respect; if you behaved well and were grateful for your food the animals would see that you didn’t go hungry. She wasn’t sure why she’d made such a bald statement to a strange woman, except that she was annoyed by her attitude and her use of the word “Inuit.” It was not a name that Alaska Natives used for themselves.
“Yes,” the woman said, and Helen noticed she was quite a bit older than she’d first thought. Her face was like a shriveled apple, like the faces of apple-headed dolls some of the grannies sold at Native arts fairs. Helen didn’t understand why a woman that age, even an artist, would be wearing at sea spackled tights, pink ballet slippers, and a giant puffy parka.
The woman asked, “Do you think the smaller one is the baby of the other one?”
“I’m not a whale expert,” Helen said, “but that’s probably a good bet.”
The smaller one—the likely calf—was at the surface now, exhausting spray that nearly reached the ship. Helen breathed deeply, hoping for a whiff of fishy breath. The ship was one hundred twenty feet long, and the whales beside it—approaching half that length—made it feel small and insubstantial, as though it were a toy boat and they were little Lego people snapped onto it.
“They’re telling us something,” the woman said. She held her digital camera at arm’s length, shooting in directions and at angles that seemed odd to Helen.
Helen was trying very hard not to be rude. “What are they telling you?”
“They’re sizing us up. They’re saying, ‘OK, you’re innocuous.’ Or they might be saying, ‘Screw you, stop messing up our home and stealing our food.’ The water’s reflective, so it’s hard for me to read the energy field.”
Helen resisted expressing an opinion about energy fields. The larger whale was sinking lower, not diving but sinking like a submarine, its blue back blurring into the depths. Then it was under the ship, and everyone inhaled and turned to the other rail. Both whales were leaving them, off to that side and moving away, just the pencil lines of their backs showing as they surfaced, and then just the vapor of their twin breaths.
The ship began to move again. The captain, out on the bridge wing, waved his cap and called to them, “I have never seen whales that fucking good, and I’ve been doing this for thirty years!”
After that night’s dinner, Tina organized two teams for charades. Book and movie titles were popular, as were marine themes. Silent Spring was easy. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was hard. Cinda was surprisingly good at acting, and Colin made up new rules. The artist, Annabel—Helen had finally learned her name—contributed titles and song lyrics that no one else knew and was very loud and random in shouting out her guesses. She had a laugh like a goose cackle and kept, for some reason, repeating “caudal peduncle.” Ray joined them, but when the clue from Alex was “jumping jacks,” he went from “jacks” to “jack to “Jackson Oakley” and made a snide comment about “our missing colleague who was too important to be here.”
Helen covered her discomfort by getting a glass of water. She understood why Ray would be unhappy with Jackson, but she didn’t think it was very professional for one professor to criticize another in front of students. She’d never heard Jackson say anything bad about Ray. He didn’t talk about him at all.
The correct answer was Jacques Cousteau, which someone guessed after Alex pretended to be a pigeon, cooing.
After that they played Cinda’s game, which wasn’t really a game. Helen knew it from cultural training sessions, where it was called “values clarification.” If you were a color, what color would you be? The group was mostly shades of green, and Aurora was purple. If you were a bird, what bird would you be? Arctic tern, chickadee, harlequin duck, sandhill crane, peregrine falcon. Helen said she’d be the blue of glacier ice and a golden plover. She was glad she wasn’t a psychologist, because even to a non-psychologist the immediate and rather flippant associations the group tossed out seemed to tell more about each of them than they knew. Including herself—was she really like ice? Ray, of course, had to be especially flippant. If he was a bird, he’d be an Eskimo curlew because, “then the Eskimo curlew wouldn’t be extinct, which it seems to be, or else, I guess, I’d be extinct.”
Ray offered up the next category: “If you were a pteropod, which would you be, Limacina or Clione, shelled or naked?” Most of them wanted to identify with Limacina, the “sea butterfly,” because the shell was so jewel-like, as well as protective, and to “fly” through the sea with its winged foot was pretty cool. Only Ray and Colin chose the carnivorous Clione—for its own exotic beauty, they said.
“It eats the other ones,” Aurora complained.
“We all have to eat,” Marybeth said.
“Circle of life,” Tina intoned. “Circle of life.”
When everyone had gone off to prepare for the night shift or to watch a movie or sleep, Helen settled into a corner of the galley with licorice from the candy drawer and began reading her advanced organic chemistry text, the section on aliphatic nucleophilic substitution. She was still on the first page when Annabel returned—wrapped now in a pink woven shawl pinned at her chest with a green papier-mâché brooch the size of a fist. “I don’t want to bother you,” she said. “I can see you’re studying. But I’m told you’re the one I should talk to about ocean acidification. I need to understand the chemistry. Can we talk sometime?”
Helen closed her book on a scrap of napkin. “We could do it right now if you want.” She’d heard this at a conference: never pass up an opportunity to educate.
Annabel nodded vigorously, hair beads jangling. “Formidable!” she shouted in a French accent. “Tout de suite I’ll be back.”
And she was, as though she had flown to her cabin. She thumped onto the bench across from Helen and opened her drawing pad to a clean sheet. “Pretend I’m a third-grader,” she said. “I’m that stupid.”
“I doubt you’re stupid,” Helen had to say. “But stop me if I start getting too detailed for