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"Give or take fifty."
"If we're within a half mile of a singer, I'll buy you di
" 'Kay. What do you suppose the freight is to fly a lobster from Maine to my plate in Lahaina?"
"I'm not going to need to know that."
"Drive the boat, please. Over there." And she pointed again, not unlike Babe Ruth indicating the Wrigley Field fence over which he would hit the famous promised home run (except Amy was thin, a girl, and alive).
Qui
Amy hopped up on the bow and pointed to some white spots dancing below the surface — pectoral fins and a tail. "There he is!"
If there had been a crowd, they would have gone wild.
Qui
"It's a date," said Qui
"No, it's not a date. It's a bet, which you have lost miserably because you had the audacity to doubt me, and for which you shall remain ever sorry. Ha!"
"Shall we work now? Or would you like to gloat a bit longer?"
"Hmmm, let me think about it…"
She's so small, yet she contains so much evil, Qui
"I was thinking I'd gloat some more." Amy picked up the notebook, then paused as she opened it to begin writing. "Singing stopped."
"Sometimes I think they just stop singing to freak me out."
"He's moving," Amy said, pointing.
"Moving," Qui
"They can hunt these kind, as far as I'm concerned," Qui
They'd recorded three full cycles of the song and gotten a crossbow biopsy, but the whale simply would not fluke, so they hadn't been able to get an ID photo. A lot of good it did to have a DNA sample when you couldn't identify the animal.
"Hunt them and make them into pet food," Nate continued. "Get their tainted, nonfluking genes out of the gene pool."
"Maybe you should have a doughnut or something, get your blood sugar up," Amy said.
"Use their pathetic, nonfluking baleen for corsets and umbrella stays. Use their vertebrae for footstools. Use their intestines to make giant, nonfluking whale sausages to serve at state fairs. Remove their putrid unfluking gonads and —»
"I thought you liked these animals."
"Yeah, but not when they won't cooperate."
The whale had led them five miles out toward Molokai and very close to the wind line, where the waves were too big and the current too fast to stay on a singer. If the whale continued in this direction, they would lose him within the next two dive cycles and the day would be wasted. What was even more frustrating was that this animal was hanging in the water and singing with his tail only a few feet below the surface. Typically, a singer in the cha
"He's coming up," Amy said. She grabbed the camera off the seat and aimed it at a spot twenty yards or so in front of the boat so the auto-focus and exposure would already be set.
Nate pulled up the hydrophone with two yanks and started the engine. The whale was moving faster this time. Nate adjusted the throttle to put Amy at the right distance for a full-frame tail shot.
One breath and he was down for ten seconds, another breath twelve seconds, another breath and the great tail peduncle arched high into the air.
"Looks like he's going to do it," Nate said.
"Ready," Amy said.
The tail cleared the water by just a foot, presenting an edge view instead of a flat horizontal view that would give them all the markings, but Nate thought he saw something. Something that looked like black letters on the underside of the tail.
"You get that? You get that?"
"I got what there was. He didn't present very well." Amy had run the motor drive for the whole cycle of the dive, maybe eight frames.
"Did you see those markings? On the underside? The black… uh, stripes?" Qui
"Stripes? Nate, I didn't see anything but edge through the camera."
"Damn it!"
"Look, he fluked. Maybe he will again."
"That's not the point."
"It's not?"
"Get up on the bow, see if you can find him."
Amy stood on the bow and directed Qui
"You're going in the water?"
"Yes."
"But you never go in the water."
"I'm going in the water." Nate opened a plastic Pelican case and pulled out his Nikonos IV underwater camera, checked to make sure it was loaded.
"You're not a water guy."
"See if there's a weight belt in there, too."
"Clay says you're not a water guy. You're a boat guy."
"I'm going to get an ID photo from under his tail. If he's going to be accommodating enough to stay this close to the surface, I'm going to go get the photo."
"Can you do that?"
"Why not?"
She handed him a belt weighted with ten pounds of lead, and Nate buckled it around his hips. He pulled on the mask and fins, then sat on the gunwale with his back to the water. "You're going to drift off of me. I'm not going to try to swim to catch you, so come back and get me. Wait till I wave. I don't want you to start the engine until I'm sure I have the picture. Keep recording until you come get me."
" 'Kay." Amy's mouth was sort of hanging open as if she'd just been slapped.
"This is no big deal."
"Right. You want me to do it? It's my fault I didn't get the shot last time."
"Not your fault. The shot wasn't there. See ya."
Qui
The whale was close, only a hundred or so feet away. The song reverberated in Nate's ribs as he kicked over to it. This had to be the "bite me" whale. Even if he'd somehow been wrong about there actually being letters, there were certainly some strange markings on this animal's tail. And there was more than that, too, if he could prove to himself that this was the same animal. It would mean that the whale had stayed in the general area of the Au'au Cha