Song of the Sound

by Jeff Gulvin

  ‘No sense, no feeling,’ came the whisper from behind her.

  The dolphins were heading straight for the boat, moving in unison through Nine Fathom Passage to the south of Cooper Island. Libby saw dorsal fins break the surface and she eased back on the throttle and reached instinctively for her camera. She focused and snapped the dorsal fins as the dolphins moved. Good shots: each fin would be different, would show variations of colour, markings, little nicks in the flesh. It was the first step towards identification; sexing them would come later when she got the underwater video set up.

  She counted ten dorsal fins in all, and the dolphins circled the boat but did not approach too closely. She eased the throttle forward again and headed away from them, hoping the bow wave would attract them. She could snap them up close and, if they rolled, sex them. They didn’t come, though, and she slowed again, arced in the channel and tailed them at fifty metres. They were chasing fish, hunting high in the head of the sound. They moved into Shark Cove and Libby was reminded of Pole’s plans for floating hotels. She imagined high-speed boats, floatplanes coming in and helicopter pads. Jet skis maybe in summer.

  She eased the Wave Dancer into a clump of silver beech trees that jutted out from the bush, branches growing up at right angles from the tangled trunks, in search of sunlight. She strapped on her tank, fixed fins and mask and entered the time on the dive computer strapped to her wrist. She called her position over the radio and was answered by a crayfish boat at the head of the sound. She did as John-Cody had told her, letting the boat know how long she would be down. Then she ran the dive flag up the aerial mast, stepped over the side of the boat and was engulfed in sudden darkness.

  The water was cold, even through the drysuit: cold and very dark. Initially it was unnerving. She could see nothing, and very slowly she sank into the gloom. The fresh-water layer was ten feet thick here, though sometimes it was as much as thirty after particularly heavy rains, and it was stained brown by tannin seeping from fallen vegetation. Slowly she descended, bubbles rising from the demand valve in her mouth. She cleared her mask and gradually the blackness gave way to a yellow oily layer and then she was in salt water and visibility returned. Yet it was still pretty dark and she could feel the chill against her face as she moved in a slow circle to get her bearings.

  She checked her depth then finned towards the walls of the fiord that dropped away sharply. Further into the middle the depth plummeted to three hundred feet and it was as great as a thousand in some places. Nothing grew here, no plant life: the rocks were bare and grey, brown in places and black among the shadows. Black coral clung to the wall, white in the gloom where the live coral grew round the black skeleton. Purple-coloured snake stars, resident cleaners who stripped away the waste and allowed the arms of the coral to grow, wrapped themselves round its stems. Libby’s underwater camera hung from its tape and she moved along the wall, looking down into the darkness.

  And then she heard the clicks as they scanned her, echolocating; and a smile leaked water into the sides of her mouth. Turning with a gentle sweep of her arms she still could not see them, but the clicks buzzed and rattled as sonic pulses bounced off her, forming three-dimensional images in the heads of the dozen bottlenose hunters that grew up out of the shadows. She lifted her camera and photographed them as they approached her.

  The pod swam close, phosphorescent in the sunlight that broke through the layer of fresh water. One of them — white on the belly with nicks at both the top and base of its dorsal fin — came very near. It slowed and its eye met hers, then it wheeled in for another look. Libby held out her hand and the dolphin dipped away with a thrust of powerful flukes; she was rocked back in the wake, but picked out the genital slits and felt a rush of excitement. The first member of the pod was identified and sexed in the same moment: Libby estimated him to be eight or nine feet long and she knew she would recognize that dorsal fin again.

  She snapped the others as best she could, then the pod disappeared into the gloom and she was left alone with the silence of Fiordland underwater. Checking her dive gauge she rose slowly to the surface and came up some distance from the boat. She rolled on her back and, looking up at the grey of the sky, she saw a floatplane descending between the clouds.

  Back in the boat she peeled off her harness and tank and started the engine. She had a name in her head: the first resident of Dusky Sound would be logged as Old Nick. She couldn’t wait to tell Bree.

  She followed the pod along Cook Channel where the dozen from Shark Cove were greeted by whistling, leaping dolphins coming in the other direction. Libby followed them between the islands and figured they were heading for the Acheron Passage.

  As she came out beyond East Point she saw the floatplane riding the waves in the deep water and a tall man standing on one of the floats. She eased the boat closer and recognized the height and build of Nehemiah Pole. The radio crackled from the speaker on the dashboard in front of her.

  ‘Wave Dancer, Wave Dancer, this is the floatplane Indigo 99. Do you copy?’

  Libby lifted the handset. ‘This is the Wave Dancer, reading you loud and clear. Over.’

  ‘If you’re looking for dolphins they’re heading up the Acheron Passage.’

  Libby paused for a moment. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen them.’

  It was Pole’s voice. She could see now that he had a walkie-talkie in his hand.

  ‘Is everything OK?’ he asked. ‘Anything we can do for you?’

  Libby held the handset but did not respond immediately: she was watching the pilot keeping the nose of the plane turned into the wind. ‘Thank you, Mr Pole,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing I need right now. Wave Dancer out.’ She eased open the throttle and headed for the Acheron Passage.

  Pole stood and watched her go, the water lapping over his boots. He gripped the wing strut with the door open then swung up into the seat alongside the pilot.

  ‘So that’s Liberty Bass,’ his wife said from the seat behind him. ‘She looks young and pretty.’

  Pole squinted over his shoulder at her.

  ‘Is she going to be trouble?’

  Pole didn’t miss the intonation in her voice and he stared after Libby’s boat. ‘I don’t know. Depends on what she can prove, I suppose.’

  ‘Well, she can’t prove that noise affects dolphins.’ Jane Pole stared at the back of the pilot’s head. ‘Not in the time that she has anyway.’

  Pole looked back at her again. ‘What if she proves the existence of the pod?’

  ‘That they’re resident?’ His wife arched her eyebrows. ‘She won’t do that either: not definitively. Not in time.’ She touched the pilot on the shoulder and he eased the plane into the wind, increasing the strain on the engine. Jane looked back at her husband. ‘I think we can deal with Liberty Bass,’ she said. ‘John-Cody Gibbs is our real problem. The proverbial thorn in the side: a thorn that needs to be dug out before infection sets in.’ She pursed her mouth, puckering thin red lips into a twisted line. ‘What I didn’t tell you, Nehemiah, is that though they’re keen, our friends in the States are becoming rather irritated. If something isn’t done about Gibbs soon they might just look elsewhere.’

  Pole’s face lost its colour.

  ‘Yes, my darling,’ she said. ‘And with what you’ve done to our property that leaves us high and dry. Actually it leaves you high and dry. I’ve got a good law practice back in the States, maybe it’s time I paid more attention to it.’

  Pole was silent for a moment, silent and embarrassed in front of the pilot. This was humiliation. He was the big man, the personality chosen to head up this deal, the one who had credibility with the hunters and fishermen the company were proposing to fly in. Yet Jane could cut him dead with a word. He stared through the windscreen, grinding his teeth. He felt her hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Don’t fret just yet, dear,’ she said. ‘In my considerable experience every man has some skeletons in his cupboard. The company wants to know what’s buried in John-Cody
’s.’

  Bree wrote another letter to her father, pad of paper hunched up on her knee as she rode home on the bus. She had an envelope in her bag and would post it as soon as she got off. She was seated on her own, oblivious to Hunter a few seats behind.

  Dear Dad

  Bad day at black rock. I mean really bad day. Wish you were here. Mum’s in Dusky Sound hunting dolphins and Alex is looking after me. I told you about Alex. She’s really nice, but it’s not the same. School is worse than I thought. I told you about this girl who thinks she’s clever. She’s calling me a Pom, Dad, the one thing I didn’t want to happen. They all call me Cheesy but she’s really nasty about it. You know, Bree and Cheese, Smelly and stuff like that. Jessica, that’s the bad one, is picking on me in class. Everyone’s scared of her so they all avoid me. I haven’t got any friends. It’s horrible with Mum away. There’s no-one to tell. What could she do anyway? Wish you were here, we could sit on this cool rock by the lake and talk about it. You’d know how to handle it. I know you would. Lessons are all right, but break time is horrible. Jessica and her friends come looking for me and there’s nothing I can do about it. The girl I sit next to leaves me on my own because she doesn’t want to get picked on. It only happens to me because I’m new. Why do I always have to be the new girl? I don’t want to be new. Being new makes you stand out and I just want to blend in with everyone else. How long is it going to be before they accept me? I was doing really well in France, but now I could just cry. Sorry if this upsets you, it’s not meant to.

  Love from Bree

  NINE

  NOVEMBER BECAME DECEMBER and pretty soon it was Christmas: Bree broke up from school still the new girl, still isolated and ridiculed by Jessica Lowden and her cronies. She told no-one, bore her secret in silence and was just thankful when the term ended. No sooner was Christmas over, though, than they were into the new year and she had to face it all again. The world was tarnished, the beauty of Fiordland, the garden, walks with Sierra along the shores of Lake Manapouri all spoiled. School dominated her thoughts, stalking her like a silent ominous spectre, and the southern summer sunshine was dappled with spots of grey.

  Libby had set up a series of hydra-phones in Dusky Sound. She spent weeks sitting in her boat attempting to identify the dolphin pod, and so far she had seventeen dorsal fin markings in her collection of photographs. The hydra-phones were situated in various underwater locations throughout the fiord, and linked to her laptop and the computer program she was running. Her days were spent alone on the boat with only the blowing of the dolphins and the crackle of static for company. She spent a lot of time diving, slowly getting used to the darkness and the silent chill of the water.

  She had procured a surface-mounted underwater camera and now she was able visually to monitor the activity underwater while she was driving the boat. In the beginning finding the dolphins each day had been the difficult part, but that was no longer a problem; she was already an accepted part of the sound and the pod generally came visiting when she was out in the boat. The play or mating time was the best. She had learned from the reports of previous researchers that the females of Doubtful Sound gave birth annually and in summer, because they lived so far south. Dolphins were far from monogamous; they mated or made love all year round for recreation and social cohesion. Libby would observe them with the underwater camera, the male underneath, flipper to flipper, penis erect and easing his body against the female, their beaks together in a kiss.

  She trawled the arms of Dusky Sound in the Wave Dancer and watched the high-frequency pulses appear as lines on her computer screen as the pod hunted and played and mated. Occasionally she saw the patterns alter as fishing boats moved past her and she thought of the floating hotel scheme, what John-Cody had said about jet skis and speedboats. Jet skis would be less of a problem for the dolphins as they were jet-driven with no propeller vibration. She knew there hadn’t been any systematic research anywhere in the world regarding the effect of floatplanes on cetacean behaviour. She was sure of one thing, however: bottlenose dolphins were territorial and they would try to adapt; they would put up with a hell of a lot of disturbance before they were forced from their home. Finding a new home would inevitably mean crossing the path of another resident pod and that would involve a fight.

  She heard them now as clicks through her headset. The spectrograph was moving, shadowy black lines on the screen, which rested on the little stand she had rigged up. Gently she eased the throttle forward and headed up the Acheron Passage. The day was bright with plenty of sucker holes in the cloud for the sun to peek through and Libby wore a sweatshirt and shorts and a pair of deck shoes. She kept close to the starboard wall where circular wisps of cloud wrapped round the silver beech trees that covered the rock like fur. Limbs stretched here and there, jagged and moss-bound, poking horizontally out from the rock to twist their fingertips skyward.

  She saw the dolphins surface on the port bow and eased back on the throttle. Picking up binoculars, she counted fifteen animals moving slowly north and she could tell by the symmetry of their movement that they were hunting. She considered the importance of her research. It was an opportunity to lay down some hard facts as to the effect of man-made noise on a resident population of dolphins. To get any definitive information would take a hell of a lot longer than two years though. There was so much to consider: the nature of the fiord itself, relatively deep water in an enclosed space; the walls of rock would reverberate with any noise, making the consequences much harder to predict. Not only that, but there were all the islands, over three hundred and sixty solid structures that lifted in great water-bound stalks from the silted bottom of the glacial trough.

  There were also the different types of boats, the helicopters and the floating hotels themselves. Pole planned to use decommissioned cruise ships with their own generators. They would emit low-frequency sound, which could well interfere with the communication of the pod. The dolphins echolocated and communicated with one another at two very different frequencies: who knew which would be affected the most? They might not be able to talk to each other any more. They might not be able to hunt.

  Libby looked at the tannin stain in the water and thought about how you could measure the impact. She couldn’t do it alone, there was far too much work involved. Every arm of the fiord was contoured differently, the fingerprint of each rock formation totally unique. They would have to be seismically mapped and then the maths done, taking into account the density of the fresh-water layer on the surface, which altered depending on tides and the amount of rainfall.

  She had been here a couple of months already and had identified only seventeen animals, and that was without sexing them all. The surface-mounted camera helped as she could often see the dorsal fin and genital slits at the same time: females were easier to sex if they were nursing because their lactation grooves would be swollen.

  Libby moved closer to the hunters now and they swung in an arc towards the boat. One breached and she recognized Old Nick. He was a mature male and very big and whenever she had seen him he seemed to have a senior role in the pod. Was he the patriarch or could there be a dominant female? Most pods she had observed over the years were matriarchal. Old Nick was busy, though; he hustled and cajoled the smaller animals he swam with and breached higher than most.

  Breaching was difficult to quantify in terms of behaviour, even after all the years of research on captive animals. She recalled asking her father when she was a child just why the dolphins leaped out of the water like they did. He had indicated that it might be because they were showing off to a prospective partner, but it was probably also for fun.

  Libby watched Nick breach again then roll on his back and swim with his flippers out of the water. He dived and came up close to the boat, clearly showing his identification marks, and he whistled at her then dived once more and she saw him surface and blow and lead the pod further up the passage. A second dolphin joined him and Libby stood up in the boat, eyes sharp all at once:
a smaller animal with a stubby flat-fluked tail. Something about him intrigued her and gently she increased the revs and followed the pod towards Wet Jacket Arm. The smaller dolphin breached again and Libby watched through binoculars. He was deformed: the tail looked disjointed as if it had been amputated and then sewn back at a shorter angle. The dolphin was almost a hunchback.

  ‘My God, Quasimodo.’ Libby spoke his name aloud then picked up the radio.

  ‘Korimako, Korimako, Korimako; this is the Wave Dancer. Do you copy, John-Cody?’ She released the handset, caught a bite of static and then his voice came over the airwaves.

  ‘Loud and clear, Wave Dancer: what can I do for you?’

  ‘Listen, when was the last time you saw Quasimodo?’

  ‘I haven’t seen him for ages. Why?’

  The dolphin leaped again and Libby felt the thrill rush through her. ‘Because he’s right here now, I’m watching him breach, halfway up the Acheron Passage.’

  For a moment all she heard was static and then John-Cody spoke again.

  ‘That’s a first, Lib. I’ve never seen him in Dusky before.’

  ‘Has anybody?’

  ‘Not that I know of. What do you reckon — he’s got visitation rights?’

  ‘Possibly. But maybe it’s the same pod. Maybe they split their time between Doubtful and Dusky.’

  ‘No.’ John-Cody sounded very sure. ‘There’s been too many occasions when I’ve seen them in large numbers here and down there on the same day. There are definitely two pods.’

  Libby thought for a moment. ‘There’s always the coalition theory.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘It’s something we considered when I was working on the European dolphin watch project. Five or six males moving between pods to ensure that the gene pool is deep and fertile. It stops one pod from becoming overly inbred.’

  John-Cody laughed suddenly. ‘You might have a point there, Lib. Quasimodo always swims with his willie out. You think he’s some kind of inter-sound stud or something?’