Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
Morning is bad. We have barely slept. I knew we would be punished for this and we are, we are a chorus of moans and groans as we drag ourselves up to start another day. It’s been raining on and off but any larger storms have not yet reached us. Nobody talks much as we travel down the coast and then splash our way through the tunnel to the vault. But it is a different kind of silence than the depressed trudging we have taken to lately: this is a silence that holds purpose. A great crack has opened in the concrete of the back wall and water is gushing from the schism. The decision is made for us: there will be no more futile patching, no more scrambling to remove water. We are surrendering this vault to the sea, and we are going to save as many packets of seeds as we can by ferrying them up to our lighthouse freezer. And maybe there are too many, and maybe there isn’t enough time, but we will just?… keep going. We will run, for every second of the time we have left.
We speed like mad up the coast of Shearwater to our beach, where we pile the first load onto a pallet. The pallet is attached to the back of the quad bike and then dragged up to the lighthouse freezer. And then we run back down the hill for another load. It is grueling, and the rain is harder and more lashing than we’d like, but we keep on. The vault floor is underwater, the empty bottom shelf submerged. The pump does next to nothing. The crack gushes.
I have felt this kind of frenzied focus before.
But the end of all that effort came to nothing. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t save my home. We were forced to flee,
Hank forced me to flee. And I saw, in my effort-and Hank’s lack of effort-a simple
truth I did not want to acknowledge. He did not love our home like I loved it. Not even the garden we grew together. He did not love it like it was his body back up on the hill, burning.
We went to sleep that night on the ground of a crowded evacuation point, a showground filled with displaced people. We lay under a sky of falling ash, drifting and dreamy like snow. I imagined it falling to cover my body, to embalm me.
But tonight sleep comes easily, knowing the people around me care the same way I do, they care more, they are willing to fight.
The next morning, there is a throng of seabirds not far off the coastline. They dive and squawk and wheel through the air.
“There’ll be a big school of fish out there,” Raff tells me. He and I are in the front Zodiac, returning from the vault with our first load for the day. Fen is in the boat behind us, and following up at the rear are Dominic and Orly in the Frog.
The rain has paused, but the charcoal sky remains full and poised. I hear a clap of thunder off in the distance. Huge waves look white on the horizon.
“There’s rips all through here,” Raff tells me as he steers out of them. “Sea’s not happy today.”
The birds don’t seem it either; there is something tense about the sound of them, though they should be joyful at such a buffet. I can see the school shimmering at the surface of the water, a broiling pot.
And then for the second time in a short span, Raff and I round the rocks of the headland and come in toward our beach, and we see our two humpbacks. Only this time it’s not their tails arching gracefully out of the water or the sprays of their blowholes. It’s their bodies on the black sand.
Raff lets go of the throttle and the boat comes to a stop, lifted by the waves. He has gone bone white.
“What are you doing?” I ask over the crash of surf.
“They’re dead.”
“Maybe not.”
“Even if they’re not, we can’t refloat them.”
“Let’s at least investigate,” I say, though I know he’s right.
He steers the Zodiac onto the shore. The rest of his family have seen the whales now, they’re nearing the sand too. I don’t wait for them but run to the mother whale. She doesn’t seem as big as she did when she was falling on top of me; nonetheless she is a very large creature. The curve of her back is about as high as my head, her length many times mine. I can’t tell if she’s alive. There is no breathing happening, no movement. Raff goes to her closed eye, which is as big as a grapefruit. He very gently touches the eyelid, and it opens.
We both gasp. The whale’s eye swivels to us. “It’s okay,” I say, needing to comfort her.
A burst of air leaves her blowhole.
“Pull something over your nose and mouth,” Raff tells me. “They carry heaps of bacteria.”
Dominic, Fen, and Orly are joining us now and we all pull our neck gators or scarves over our faces. Dom moves past us to check on the baby, and his kids are following, but I find I can’t go over there, I can’t even look at it.
“It’s alive!” Orly shouts at me and I could dissolve with relief, although maybe this is worse because all it means is witnessing a slow death.
We convene a little way up the beach.
“What do we do?” Fen asks. “We have to keep them wet, I know that much.”
“Raff?”
“There’s no use,” he says.
“Mate,” Dom says softly, pulling his son’s gaze to him. “Let’s just talk it through, get it straight. What are the main concerns?”
Raff rubs his eyes, maybe searching his memory for what he knows about strandings.
“Their own weight is crushing them,” he says. “And they’re over
heating. We have to stabilize them before we can think about trying to get them back into the water.”
“Good,” Dom says. “How do we do that?”
“Like Fen said, keep their skin wet and covered so it doesn’t get damaged by the sun.”
“Okay, so we’ll set up tarps,” Dom says calmly. “And we can cover them in wet sheets, and we’ll use buckets. What else.”
“I think we have to help their fins from getting fractured,” Raff says. “You dig holes for them.”
The mother whale’s fins do look at an awkward angle on the sand.
“When’s high tide?” I ask.
“It’s falling now,” Fen says, “lowest around four this arv, then it’ll be back in tonight around eleven.”
“That’s our timeline, then,” Dom says. “We’ll need high tide to get them out.”
But Orly is shaking his head. “What about the seeds?” he asks. “We’re not even close to finished.”
It is a disaster, there is no doubt about that. We don’t have enough bodies, enough hands.
“How do you eat an elephant?” Dom asks him.