Bear, Elizabeth - Sounding by Bear Elizabeth

Author:Bear, Elizabeth [Bear, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-10-30T15:43:26+00:00

"No, just off."

Pen shrugs. "It got left in the car for a bit. We'll just drink it fast."

Cindy points at the coffee pot. Pen fixes herself a cup and takes it outside to drink on the porch swing, smelling the sea air, looking at the roses. The leaves are turning. Allan should be home any day.

Wherever you go, I will follow.

Winter will be coming soon.

Morgan raises the rifle and points it at the fin whale. "It won't but sting her a little—"

Cully steps between, and puts his hand on the barrel of the gun. "Morgan," he says, so calmly, "would you look at yourself?"

Morgan pauses, gulls whirling behind him. Cully takes a deep breath; the whole world smells like rotting fish. And slowly, Morgan lowers the gun. "Fuck," he says. "I guess she didn't mean anything by it."

"I'm not sure it was the whale," Cully says.

"What the hell else could it have been?"

Cully shrugs and points over the railing. Another whale breaches in the distance—one, two, a pod of humpbacks. They're everywhere, now that Cully's looking for them. Gray whales slipping along the surface not so different from dappled wave-tops themselves. The great pleased grin of a blue whale as it lifts its head from the ocean, blowing plumes of vapor into the perfect sky. Dolphins leaping among the tuna, a softer shade of steel. "You see any hook-marks on her hide? Besides, it's a goddamned endangered species. Do you wanna pay the fine?"

"They can take it out of the tuna she ate," Morgan says, folding his arms over the rail, and Cully doesn't point out that fin whales don't eat tuna. "Besides, you want to talk about a goddamned endangered species? What the hell are we?"

Cully opens his mouth to answer. The tuna turn like steel wheels in the sunlight, iterations from hull to horizon. The hold is two-thirds full, the gleaming fish packed in like bullion. The trip is paid for, the diesel is bought.

If every trip could be like this—

He looks at the whale, who has rolled on her side again, her baby nosing along her belly, looking for the teat. She gazes at him with that wide, alert eye, her flipper upraised, gleaming wet in the sun. She cups it like a woman cupping a hand. She beckons.

She's listening.

"I reckon you're right," Cully says, and boosts himself over the rail. He crouches down, one foot in front of the other, dangling off the side as if trying to scoop something out of the water. The whale rolls, and her flipper brushes Cully's fingers. Cully laughs in wonder and cranes his head to look at Morgan, silhouetted by the sun. "Where do you think they go?" he asks.

"They?"

"When they go extinct. Or nearly so." He gestures at the whale, at the tuna, at himself.

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