Why the Whales Came. Michael Morpurgo

‘He’s giving it to you,’ I said. ‘He wants you to take it.’

      ‘For us is it?’ Daniel asked the dog and he took the cormorant out of its mouth. ‘Did he send you then, did the Birdman send you?’ And the dog licked his lips and shook the sand out of his mouth. Daniel patted him and parted the hair over his face to reveal two shining black eyes. ‘How can you see through all this lot?’ he said.

      And then the dog pricked up his ears, stood up and looked around towards the cottage. He stopped panting for a moment and listened. Before we knew it he was bounding away over the sand and had vanished into the dunes. Neither of us had heard a whistle, but neither of us had any doubt at all that he had been called back.

      ‘Must have been watching us,’ I said. ‘He must have seen me kick it over, mustn’t he?’

      Daniel brushed the sand off the cormorant’s head. ‘See, I told you, Gracie, didn’t I? He just wants to be friendly, that’s all.’ And he dropped to his knees in the sand. ‘Come on. We’ve got to thank him, haven’t we?’

      We never spoke a word after that but knelt in the sand together and collected all the shells we were going to need. Then I wrote out in orange shells: ‘Thanks for the cormorant.’ And both of us signed our names in shells underneath.

      We stayed all day sailing our boats on Rushy Bay and even when Daniel suggested the sea was getting too rough I insisted we stayed on, just to prove to myself, to him and to the Birdman that I was no longer frightened. True, I did keep my eye on Heathy Hill, but now I was almost hoping the Birdman would come down to the beach with his dog. He did not come however, and my new-found courage was not put to the test, not yet anyway. As we left the beach Daniel cupped his hands to his mouth and called out, ‘Goodbye’, in the direction of the cottage, and I waved with him because I felt sure that the Birdman would be watching us.

      Back in Daniel’s boatshed that evening we stood by his workbench and examined the cormorant closely. ‘One day, Gracie,’ he said, ‘one day, I’m going to be able to make something like that.’

      ‘What happens if someone finds it?’ I asked. ‘What are we going to say?’

      ‘Just tell them I made it,’ he said laughing. ‘But they may not believe us, so better if they don’t find it. I haven’t got a room of my own to hide it and I haven’t got anywhere to put anything, not anywhere private anyway. You got a room of your own, Gracie, you keep it. It’ll be safer with you. If Father finds it, he’ll only want to know where it comes from and Big Tim will torture me till I tell him.’ And he handed the cormorant carefully to me. I already knew where I would hide it – I was only worried about how I was going to get it there without being discovered.

      ‘I’ve been thinking, Gracie,’ Daniel said. ‘He gave us this cormorant to show us he was friendly, didn’t he? So we’ve got to do the same, haven’t we? We’ve got to give him something back so’s he knows we want to be friends as well. I’ve been thinking. D’you think he’d like it if we made him one of our boats?’

      ‘Could call her Woodcock, couldn’t we?’ I said. ‘We’ve got to name it after a bird, like all the others are. Woodcock’s a kind of bird, isn’t it?’

      ‘Never seen one,’ said Daniel, ‘but I think it is.’

      And so I went home that evening with the Birdman’s cormorant stuffed inside my blouse. Mother paid me no attention as I came in; she was busy over the stove and I reached the safety of my room without her even seeing me.

      We built Woodcock together that spring, but it was nearly summer before she was ready for launching. We had never taken so much trouble over a boat as we did with Woodcock. Nothing was ever right until it was perfect. We took her to Rushy Bay for her trials and pushed her out towards Samson Island. She danced out over the waves, her sail catching the wind and leaning her over so that she sped out to sea. I think she might have gone all the way to Samson had we not waded waist high into the sea after her and brought her back. She was quite magnificent with her shiny blue hull, her white stripe and her brick-red sail. Daniel was satisfied. So we left her, beached well above the high-water mark; and we left too a long shell message for the Birdman in the sand. It read: ‘We name this boat Woodcock. May God bless her and all who sail her’; and we signed it, ‘Daniel and Grace’.

      We waited until sundown in the purple humming heather on Samson Hill to see if the Birdman would come for it, but he never came. We could not stay any longer for mother always liked me to be home before dark. But first thing the next morning we went back to Rushy Bay and found the boat gone. In its place there was this message: ‘Thanks. Beautiful.’ And underneath, ‘Zachariah Woodcock.’