Filed to story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
“Dad!”
“How?”
Orly sighs. “One bite at a time. Okay-but we’re not forgetting about them.”
“We’re not,” his dad agrees.
The kids hurry into action but I take Dom’s arm and pull him aside.
“We shouldn’t do this,” I say.
“Do what?”
“We should take the kids away from this beach and put them back on the seeds. That might actually be achievable.”
Dom frowns, searching my face.
“This is not. This is cruel,” I say. “It will be backbreaking work for hours, purely to watch the animals die.”
Dom looks at the whales, and then his kids, considering my words.
I will him silently to listen to me. To not put them through this. He meets my eyes. “You’re probably right,” he says. “But I think not trying would haunt them more.”
On the crest of the hill I look down at the creatures on the sand. They are close to the waterline; at high tide that water will come up and over them, but I don’t think it will be enough to wash them free. We are doing this, Dom has decided. So we may as well do it properly. My mind starts thinking about angles and equipment. I don’t think we have a crane at our disposal, but I definitely saw a tractor with a bucket attachment, so that will have to do. The baby will be easier to refloat but I don’t need Raff to tell me it won’t survive without its mother. I’m not sure she would survive either, without her baby. There is no point saving one without the other.
We have the weather on our side. There is no sun to harm the whales’ skin, and there is a light drizzle to help keep them wet and cool. We wet the sheets and blankets and drape them over the huge bodies, covering as much area as we can, and we move quickly to dig the holes for their fins, so they can lie comfortably. These holes we fill with seawater to help keep them cool, and then we are running up and down from the water with buckets.
I signal to Dom. “You and I will need to think about how to move them. We’ve got about eleven hours until high tide.”
“No crane,” he says.
“No, so it’s trenches, and that’s best done while tide’s low.”
We leave the kids to keep filling buckets while we jog over to the storage unit at the base. The tractor, as well as having a forklift, has a long-armed bucket excavator we can use in the sand. Dom fills the tractor with diesel. I drag things out of the way so it has a clear exit through the roller door, and he drives the old yellow vehicle onto the beach. The wheels are so enormous that they aren’t bothered by the seawater lapping at them; I am hoping like hell it doesn’t get bogged,
and Dom manages to steer it up onto the sand and back over to the whales. He works the controls so the bucket takes huge mouthfuls of sand and dumps them to the side, slowly gouging the beginnings of a trench. I worry about the noise freaking the whales out.
I take the moment to remind the kids to have some water. Raff is running himself into the ground. Hours pass. Fen, who has taken to timing the whales’ breaths, says their breathing has slowed and become more regular. Hopefully this means they are less stressed. On a five-minute break somewhere in the afternoon, I move so I can see the mother’s right eye, trained always to rest on her calf where it lies beside her.
I look at this whale’s skin, all the scratches and barnacles I can recall so clearly in my mind. I place a flat hand on her body and I try to feel the beat of her heart.
“I washed up on this beach,” I tell her softly. “My body was brought here by the sea and lived. Yours will too.”
Her eyelid falls closed and in this moment she seems so weary. But it opens again and she looks at me, and I know why.
“What do you want me to tell it?” I ask her, but I already know.
I don’t want to go to the baby. I can’t bear the thought of it, have been trying to pretend it’s not even here. But I think this mother needs me to and I think I would do anything for her. So I walk over to this smaller whale and I place my hand gently on its head, near its open eye that is looking at me. “Little one,” I say softly. “You’re not alone.”
The tide is coming back in now. We still have a few hours until it’s at its highest, and Dom is making great progress. The trench for the adult whale is done-he has dug a long pathway as far into the water as he can move the tractor, and he is now working on the same kind of pathway for the baby.
Fen and I start getting a tarp beneath the smaller creature. We stand on either side and work the material slowly and carefully down into the sand, sliding it inch by inch under the weight of the huge body. It’s slow, difficult work, tiring on our hands and backs and necks, but soon it’s done. There’s no point trying to do the same for the mother-even if we could get one underneath her, she’s far too heavy for a tarp to
make any difference. Instead we work on digging the trench up around her body.
All day I have been readying myself for this not to work. I think of how we will console the kids. But here is the nature of life. That we must love things with our whole selves, knowing they will die.
It’s raining hard when the tide reaches us, too soon. The ocean will need to do its work for the mother whale; there’s nothing more we can do for her now, so we set to dragging the baby out into the waves. I think it probably weighs about a ton. We aren’t making much difference. Too few bodies, one of them a child. Though he is straining as hard as the rest of us, using everything he has. I can see tears streaming down Raff’s cheeks and I don’t know if it’s the effort or the knowledge that this won’t work. The baby isn’t moving. But we keep pulling, all of us. I have spent many years working my body hard, but I have never asked it for this much, I have never demanded anything of the sort, and I think we will all, at least, know we left nothing behind. We gave it everything. We tried for them. And as we pull and pull and pull, with waves smashing into us and Dom pulling the greatest load of all, I start to feel a little give. As the water flows over the smaller body, as it sucks powerfully back out and we drag in time with it, the tarp moves. Water gets in under it and with every wave the baby whale is lifted a touch more, is inched farther out until finally the water is deep enough that the creature can float. We see its fins lift, we see its small knobby dorsal, we see its body move from side to side, finding its balance, and then we see it start to swim, and we are all of us cheering, our throats raw, our bodies spent.
As one we turn to the mother, who has not moved.
Rowan
My mother and I have not spoken much in the time we’ve spent here on her couches. We haven’t spoken much in many years, really, but today I am determined to cover a little ground with her, to make sense of some things because it is clear to me that she does not have a lot of time. I don’t make the mistake of pausing the film she’s put on, I just talk over the top of it.
“Why did we live on the boat?” I ask.
She doesn’t look at me. “What?”
“Why did you want to live on a boat with four little kids?”
“What do you mean? We all loved the boat.”
“Yeah, I know, but what made you choose it in the first place?”
Maybe I am expecting some story of wanting a life of adventure, but she says, irritated, “A flood destroyed our home, and we didn’t have a cent between us or anywhere to go.”
I stare at her.
I have never in my life heard her speak of such a thing. I can’t wrap my head around it, and my first instinct is mistrust, but there is no reason for her to lie. My mind darts back, touching upon memories, trying to reshape them. What had my parents gone through and why was it a secret? Why was I responsible enough to look after my brother and sisters but not to know the reason I had to work so hard to keep them safe?
“Why didn’t you tell us that?” I ask.
“We spared you from it. You were little.”
“Okay,” I say, keeping my voice level. “Then did it not seem irresponsible to leave babies alone on a boat?”
“We didn’t leave him alone,” she says. “He was with you.”