The Whale's Footprints - Rick Boyer

by Rick Boyer

  "And when he didn't find it down here, he assumed Andy had taken it with him up to our cottage."

  "Right. And when he had a chance, he went up there and tossed the Breakers, trying to recover it."

  "That's interesting, Joe. Because just yesterday Jack hefted Andy's duffel bag and said that it was a lot heavier on the way up to Eastham. So maybe Andy did rip off old man Hartzell. And maybe he did hide the stuff in the cottage."

  "And maybe Hartzell recovered it. Lot of good it'll do him in the slammer."

  "Even though Jack's convinced Andy didn't take anything of Hartzell's."

  "Well, considering the circumstances, Doc, maybe Jack should keep his mouth shut about that. Savvy?"

  "Gotcha. Hey, here they come now. This is what I've been waiting for."

  We watched the thirty-foot sea skiff round the point and head toward us. Built for offshore expeditions, the Mala Mala was powered by twin stern-drive Volvo engines, each over a hundred horsepower. It resembled a cross between an open, deep-water lobster boat and a big Boston Whaler. As an open boat, it had no cabin, instead relying for shelter on its high, wide bow with lots of flair. The bow was kicking up a nice wave with two pretty fans of spray. Jack was at the wheel, with Tony and Tom McDonnough on either side of him, sitting at the big center control console. On the boat's side was the Department of Commerce logo and the words NATIONAL MARINE FISHERIES.

  "You sure you don't wanna come along?" I asked Joe.

  "I'm sure. You ask me, you guys are nitwits, going out to look at whales in that thing. Hell, they're twice as long and thirty times heavier than that little boat. They get the slightest little bit pissed off, it's all she wrote."

  "Yeah, but they won't get pissed off. They're nice. They love people."

  "That's what jonah thought," he said, getting up and brushing off the seat of his pants. "And poor old Ahab, too. When you get back, let me know if you'll be needing a wooden leg."

  "It was an ivory leg, not a wooden one. And besides, Moby Dick was a sperm whale, a toothed whale. These are humpback whales, baleen whales that aren't aggressive . . . I think."

  "You hope. Arrivederla.

  And so he sauntered off toward the docks with that rolling, elephantine shuffle of his.

  * * *

  We were out there. Way, way out there, riding the soft, slow swells of the big water. We'd raced over the waves for an hour, and were almost thirty miles offshore, in the neighborhood of the treacherous Nantucket Shoals. Tom worked the helm, keeping his eyes on the horizon and on the console compass, while I watched the chart that was stretched over my knees, the corners of the paper rattling in the wind. Together we would keep a rough estimate of our position. No land was visible; we could have been in the mid-Atlantic. This is an unsettling feeling, especially in a thirty-foot open boat with nothing over your head, not even a mast and sails. Jack and Tony glassed the ocean with marine binoculars, searching for that telltale puff of breath vapor, the spout that signaled a surfacing whale. So far, we'd had no luck.

  A tuna boat came chugging into view. Jack told me it was what's called a "stick boat," meaning a harpoon boat. It had a long bowsprit and high spotting tower that gave it a rickety, insectlike appearance. Its diesel engine gave off a faint rhum-rhum-rhum that came to us over the slick, oily-smooth water. The tuna boat rolled in the big swells, the high tower swaying in a ten-foot arc, the spotter sitting Indian fashion on the tiny plywood platform eighteen feet above the deck, gripping the stays with his crossed legs. He wore big, wrap-around dark glasses, and his nose and cheekbones were painted mime white with zinc oxide ointment. He held a huge pair of naval binoculars. When he spotted the Marine Fisheries logo on the side of the Mala Mala, he pointed northeast, making a dipping, diving motion with his flattened palm.

  "He's telling us there are whales further out," said Tom as he spun the wheel, heading us over to the fishing boat. The tuna boat was old, its planked sides flaking paint chips and stained with rust streaks. Two of the cabin windows were cracked and the smokestack was solid rust. Guy wires ran from the long bowsprit pole back to the bow, and also up to the tower from the deck and topsides, and then down to the bowsprit tip from above, much like the standing rigging of a Grand Banks schooner. But the wire was old, tightened and repaired with turnbuckles, bolt clamps, and wound coils. The entire vessel had a frail, rickety appearance, resembling a giant, splayed cricket, or perhaps a water strider that ticked and groaned its way through the sea. It looked as if it would come apart any second.

  There were three men aboard: the skipper, the lookout, and the harpooner, who was busy coiling lines into plastic tubs on the foredeck. Two harpoon shafts were braced against the cabin sides, and three old beer kegs, spray-painted Day-glo orange for visibility, stood in a crude rack. Reminded me of the movie jaws.

  "You see whales?" shouted Jack to the lookout.

  "Yeah!" shouted the man with the binoculars. "Fins and humpbacks, about four miles up the line. Maybe six miles by now." We thanked the men and headed on, looking back to see the vessel's name on her wide, low transom: the Auk.

  We saw the tuna boat grow small in the distance, then disappear over the southern horizon. I thought of that frail machine crawling over the wide ocean and shuddered. How presumptuous of man to head out over the deep in crafts like that. Down below us, in the several hundred feet of cold darkness, giant forms pushed through the water, six or seven times the mass of the biggest African bull elephants, moving soundlessly, gliding through the black, steep-walled undersea canyons. Huge slimy things lurked on or near the bottom, with gnashing beaks, poison spines, sucking mouths. Razor-toothed Sea-raptors prowled the blackness, too, waiting for a chance to attack animals of all sizes and engage in silent combat, with billowing, red-brown clouds of blood and shivering, trembling masses of injured muscle and severed nerves . . .

  There was a whole lot of bad jazz down there. Oodles of it, including a spiny fish the size of a toad that can kill a horse with its venom, and a stomatopod as long as a cigar, called a mantis shrimp, that can crack your skull with a flip of its forelegs. And here we were in our little skiff, crawling our feeble way over the top of it all.

  It was almost two o'clock when we saw the first pod of humpbacks. Following my sons' pointing fingers, I saw the occasional cloud of vapor coming up from the surface of the ocean, but no whales were visible. Accustomed to old whaling prints showing breaching whales leaping over whaleboats, with the terrified occupants scrambling for their lives, I expected at least to see a lot of animal. Instead, when we drew near, I saw a dark, slick mass rolling gently over on the water, perhaps two feet high at its tallest point. A section of blacktop highway, sliding over. Big deal. But then the surprise: after twenty feet or so of this slick macadam came the tail. The tail was horizontal, with flukes set wide like the wings of a jet, each the size and shape of a small dingy, measuring nine feet from tip to tip. It was jet black and shiny, gently serrated along its rear edge, maybe two feet thick in the center, tapering to mere inches at the tips. It moved with absolute grace, lifting a few feet, standing clear of the water, dripping at its drooped edges like a fresh-plucked lily pad, and then sliding under, without a sound and with scarcely a ripple.

  Great God almighty . . .

  "Dad? Dad, you okay?" asked Jack, who was bending over to speak urgently in my ear.

  "Yeah, I'm okay," I answered finally, as soon as I could work my jaw, "I'm fine."

  "How big was he?" asked Tony. The boy's tone was hushed, reverent.

  "Maybe fifty feet," said Tom, leaning over the starboard bow and trying to peer into the deep. "And, it might be a girl. We won't know until it surfaces again."

  We motored along, cut to a crawl, and waited and watched. ffffffff0000sh! . .fffffffff00000shh!

  Two whales surfaced in unison, blowing enough air between them to last a man a day and a half. I saw their heads: from above, the taper in front resembled a blunt Gothic arch. The tops of the heads were relatively flat, and were covered wi
th patterned bumps several inches across. These bumps, which Jack told me later were enlarged hair follicles, looked almost exactly like rivet heads, making the whales' heads look like the blackened metal boilerplate side of old steamships. They looked, in fact, like the Disney rendition of Captain Nemo's Nautilus.

  We watched the two whales roll forward, tucking their heads and letting their long, wet-asphalt backs slide forward, then there was a repeat vision of those beautiful tails, each powerful enough to smash our thirty-foot skiff into splinters with one swipe.

  Picture yourself walking out of the African scrub onto a parched plain on which forty huge elephants are feeding. Think of walking out into this herd, standing in front of, behind, underneath them as they feed, hearing the muted grinding of their molars, the loud, damp plats of their bowling-ball-sized droppings, the sound of their stomachs and bowels rumbling wet . . . perhaps the rough rasp of their trunks as they slide past you . . . seeing the dusty, dry flap of their billboard-sized ears. And you're out there on that parched plain totally exposed. There's nothing but you and all of them—no trees to climb, no place to hide. And all you can do is stand there amazed and awed, and hope like hell they don't get steamed and stomp you into grease, or maybe skewer you with one of their tusks.

  That's the feeling of being in the middle of a pod of whales in an open skiff thirty miles offshore. Except that each whale weighs forty or fifty tons, not six or seven.

  The two tails slid under. We waited about forty seconds to see the animals surface again. They reappeared, puffing great gray clouds of vapor, then slid under again. At no time were the tops of their backs more than a few feet out of the water. But the third time they surfaced they showed their heads clearly as they came up. Their giant puffy breathing was louder, and after their front halves went under, their backs had a much more pronounced arch.

  "See them hunching up like that, Dad? They're getting ready to sound. That's how they got their name: humpback."

  The tails came up, up, towering ten feet above us, spread out and dripping, like the wings of an airborne manta ray. Then the entire stem and tail of each whale stiffened straight up and shot downward with a speed and finality that meant we wouldn't see them for a while. I couldn't say anything, not even gee or golly. I just sat there dumbfounded, amazed that a creature so gigantic could surface, breathe, and dive within twenty yards of us and do it with such grace, and, except for the big puff of blowing air, in total silence.

  "Did you see the markings on the underside of the tails, Dad?" asked Jack.

  "Well, I saw a lot of white, with black blotches, if that's what you mean/'

  "That's what I mean. Those markings are different for each animal, and it's how we tell them apart. The one on the left was Churchill, the guy on the right was Roy."

  "You mean you know each whale? You've given them names?"

  "Oh sure. There are several pods in these waters. Most of the whales come back each year and we know them intimately. Now Churchill's been around for years, but Roy's a rookie. Churchill got his name for the V-shaped notch on his flukes. Look here . . ."

  Jack went to the bow and leaned over, pointing at the water.

  Where the two whales had sounded was a pair of swirling depressions in the sea, two whirlpools as wide as living rooms.

  "The whales' footprints," he said triumphantly. "When they sound, whales always leave footprints."

  I stared at the gently swirling, shallow conical depressions on the ocean's surface. They remained perhaps half a minute, then disappeared.

  "Footprints, eh? What good are footprints that disappear?"

  "Everything disappears, Dad, given time."

  I pondered this metaphysical tidbit while we waited for the pair to come back up. They stayed down over thirty minutes, then surfaced two hundred yards off our port bow, spurting those gray plumes of vapor and sliding their black, slick shapes forward and under. We were so busy watching the antics of Churchill and Roy that we forgot the water right under us.

  "Ooo, wow!" said Tom McDonnough, "look below us. We got company."

  Well offshore, the ocean is quite clear, unclouded by river runoff. In strong light, you can see thirty or forty feet down with no problem, especially if what you're gawking at is as big as a pair of hitched locomotives. Below us was a whale, perhaps thirty feet directly under the boat, hovering there in the wavy green shimmer. It was my first look at the whole thing at once, rather than its various parts exposed to the surface in sequence. It took my breath away. I noticed how really long the humpback's flippers were. They were whitish gray, in contrast to the black of the body, and were about eighteen feet long, swept back in a crescent. The animal looked almost like a deformed jumbo jet, with its streamlined, fat body and rear-swept flippers that seemed way too big for flippers, way too small for wings....

  Then it came up. It rose without effort or apparent motion; we simply saw it getting bigger and bigger, closer and closer, until at last there it was, right alongside us, floating motionless next to the boat, its exposed portion about as large as a black, shiny, bumpy, shuffleboard court. My heart was doing the shimmy-shake, and seemed to want to leave my chest and dance around on the gunwale awhile until it calmed down.

  "Let's get the hell out of—”

  "Wait a second, that's Crystal. HI CRYSTAL!" shouted Jack, leaning over the rail and waving. It was the dumbest thing I've ever seen, and I told him so. But then, lo and behold, if the whale, Crystal, didn't do the most amazing thing. She rolled on her side and swatted the ocean with her port flipper. Whap! Whap! Whap! It wasn't a hard swat, but rather a gentle patting, though I'm sure you could have heard it a hundred yards away.

  "Why's she doing that?" asked Tony.

  "He, Dad. Crystal's a guy. He's glad to see us. I can recognize Crystal from front and top by his barnacles. See those three huge growths on his lip? That's Crystal. Of course, when he sounds, we can always tell him by his tail markings, too. Now watch! He's gonna open his mouth for us."

  Lucky us. The huge creature rolled over again, making the skiff pitch and roll, and then the enormous upper jaw opened. It resembled a giant car hood and gave the impression that the animal was upside down. It wasn't of course. Jack explained it was just the shape of the baleen whale's mouth. The flat, pointed, black top of Crystal's head lifted up, revealing rows and rows of hanging baleen plates inside. His mouth looked large enough to hold ten or twelve men, which meant that while a whale couldn't actually swallow Jonah, it could sure as hell hold him in its mouth with no problem. The baleen plates, all seven hundred of them, were triangular, fringed and fibrous, and colored brownish black. They looked more vegetable than animal. It looked as if poor Crystal had tried to swallow a dozen rotting palm trees. Or maybe two tons of dead eucalyptus bark. The mouth was wondrous, amazing, surrealistic. It was also disgusting.

  The odor that issued forth was nothing to brag about, either. As an oral surgeon, I'm an expert on halitosis, and believe me, Crystal the humpback was in the running for the Bad Breath of the Universe award. In fact, with his warty, rivet-head hair follicles, his bumpy, grayish white clusters of barnacles, and his weird, otherworldly appearance, it was difficult to call Crystal handsome, and I told Jack so.

  Jack frowned in my direction. "Handsome is as handsome does," he said. And he continued to talk and coo to his enormous friend, telling us what a rotten shame it was he hadn't brought the hydrophone, so we could all hear the whales talking underwater. I leaned way over, almost touching the animal, and saw his tiny eye, two feet under the surface, staring at us.

  "His eyes are sure small; they're out of proportion to the rest of him," I said.

  "Uh-huh. Horses' eyes are bigger. Whales don't use their eyes a whole lot. So long, kid . . ."

  Crystal eased forward and down, thrashed his immense flukes against the sea, and was gone.

  "Wow!" said Tony softly.

  "Yeah," I agreed, as Tom throttled up. We saw fourteen more whales that afternoon, including a mother with h
er calf. It sure beat the hell out of anything I'd ever seen before, or have seen I since.

  ' On our way back to Great Harbor I asked Jack if he remembered that summer back in 1970 when the whales died on the beach and he cried for a week, and then we went to see the dolphin , show up in Brewster where the dolphins clapped their flippers on the water just the way Crystal had done. He said he didn't remember it. I asked him again, just to make sure, and he said the same thing. I guess maybe he'd repressed the painful memory. For some reason, it made me very sad. A powerful, shared experience had crumbled with time.

  SIXTEEN

  JOE'S KNOCKING at our door woke us up a little after eight. It was Wednesday morning, the day after the whale watch. I was tired after our day on the water, still feeling stunned by the experience. I had been dreaming about the whales sliding along through the swells, their dripping tails following behind . . .

  "C'mon you two—get up. I just got a call from Keegan. He says Slinky and company are on their way up here from Providence. Mary, you keep saying you want to see a real mobster—

  "I do, I do," she said, bounding out of bed bare-ass.

  I still can't get used to the way these two siblings parade around naked in front of each other. We WASPs frown on such impropriety.

  "Keegan's a wonder kid," I said. "How'd he manage to collar Slinky anyway?"

  "Let's just say, diplomatic pressure applied by our Rhode Island counterparts. But I think the kid's cooperation makes him look pretty good, frankly. Although Keegan warned me Slinky will have his mouthpiece with him. I'll go down to town and get coffee and rolls. You guys hurry up and be ready when I get back."

  Keegan joined us over coffee, and the four of us were waiting on the steps of Lillie Hall when the big white Caddy slid up Water Street and came to a halt in front of us. It was a Mafia wagon all right. The windows were so dark you couldn't see inside. I noticed two fancy antennae riding on the rear deck, right in front of the continental kit holding the spare tire. The spoked wheels were all shined up. The driver's door opened and a huge man got out, walked across the street, and positioned himself nonchalantly on a bench overlooking the beach. Nobody would notice him, of course, just your average 270-pound chauffeur wearing shades, a cream-white tropical wool sport coat, burgundy slacks, and alligator shoes so shiny they gave off sunbeams. He didn't stand out in Woods Hole. Nooooo. Not any more than the Colossus of Rhodes . . .