Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
“All the same.”
I swallow and nod. I will try.
Back down the hill we go. God I am over this hill. It’s not just that it’s a hill, and it’s painful to go both up and down. It’s also that it’s so loud. It is a tunnel for the wind to shriek along and the more I traverse it-the more familiar my feet become with its lumps and grooves, its gullies and ditches-the louder it gets. I find myself dislodged, lifting my eyes to orient myself with the sea. I find myself hearing movement
behind me and turning to see nothing but rustling tussock. I wonder if this is how it started for Hank. I wonder if everyone on this island is descending steadily into a shared psychosis.
Fen doesn’t come-she is on seal pup duty-but she waves to us from the other end of the beach. Raff and I head out in the Zodiac. I sit at the back this time, where there is less spray and movement. Still, I feel a low queasiness at the thought of how close the ocean is, how flimsy this craft.
“What do you think it could be?” I ask Raff.
“I’ve learned not to trust Orly’s clues,” he says with a quick smile.
“But what are the options?” I press, wanting to get him talking.
“Plenty of things.”
“Oh, I see, fascinating.”
He relents. “Down here we get a mix of toothed and baleen whales. We’ll look at where the dorsal fin is, that’ll help identify it. Any markings on the skin, if it’s smooth or wrinkly. What its blow is like. How many there are. Certain whales travel in large numbers, others like to be solitary.” He adjusts his trajectory, eyes scanning. “Pilots for example are pack whales-they follow a single leader, and they’re so loyal they’d even follow it to their deaths.”
I think now that he’s started, he’s quite enjoying talking about them.
“Orcas are matriarchal-they hunt in packs and come up with intelligent ways of herding their prey into danger zones. It won’t be a beaked whale, I don’t think. They’re very elusive, and most of what we know about them is from dead ones. Same with sperms. It could have been a fin or a minke. Or a sei, or a right. I dunno, there’s loads.”
“What are you hoping it’ll be?” I ask.
He shakes his head as if refusing to jinx it. “They’ve changed their routes a bit in the last few years,” he says. “I’ve noticed they come in closer than they used to.”
“Less food for them, maybe.”
I realize belatedly that we are heading straight out to sea, directly away from the island. Things inside me go to liquid. I grip the rope handles with white knuckles and force my mind away from the great expanse of ocean beneath me.
“There,” Raff says, pointing, and I follow his finger to a smattering of dark, swift birds flying low over the water.
“What are they?” I ask.
“Sooty shearwaters,” he explains. “They often follow whales to feed.” Then he adds, “They breed in huge colonies, but they’re smart-they don’t visit their nests unless it’s a moonless night, so they don’t lead predators to the babies. Sometimes they’re called moonbirds.”
“You kids are all certainly full of interesting factoids,” I point out. “You’ll be good on trivia nights.”
Raff thinks about this. “Yeah. I guess Dad’s always tried to encourage us to be curious about the world.”
I watch the moonbirds. They fly fast and low over the water, and their crisp, sharp wings dip from side to side, almost cutting through the waves. Beneath them I glimpse a number of fins emerging smoothly.
“Fin whales,” Raff smiles. “They travel in huge numbers.”
He is right, there seem to be dozens of them. The clear blue ocean is broken all over by sliding backs and dorsals and pectorals. Raff keeps steering closer to them and my excitement shifts to fear.
“Stop,” I say. “Don’t get too close.”
“They won’t hurt us,” he says.
“Maybe not intentionally!”
Raff ignores me and my heart is lurching as he guides us into the pod. A fin rises up beside us, like a wave. I gasp, peering over the edge at the sight of thirty or forty enormous whales swimming beneath and around us; one of them glides directly below our boat, tilted so I can see that the underside of its mouth is pale and striped, and it’s opening that mouth wider and wider to swallow what must be tons of water and krill. Raff gets his recording equipment and holds the microphone under the cold water. The terror does not leave me-any one of these creatures could breach a fraction too close and we will be capsized and I can see our tiny bodies down there among their enormous ones, I can see us battered and crushed into the depths. But they don’t harm us, whether by luck or design, they swim on and away, and soon they have left us, and Raff doesn’t chase after.
“You don’t want to follow?” I ask.
“Sometimes I think it’s better not to bother them too much.”
In their absence he goes quiet. The joy seems sucked out of his face, leaving him tense.
“Are you okay?”
He starts the engine and steers back toward land.
I will only have minutes now. “Can you take me to the seed vault, Raff?”
“Why?”
“I want to see where my husband worked.”
“Dad already took you, didn’t he?” There is that shrewdness again, he is dissecting me with his eyes. Suspicious.
“I saw something I didn’t like down there. Your dad ignored me, but I need to take another look.”
“What was it?”
“I’ll show you.”
“We can’t go south without letting them know,” he says.
“Do you think he’ll let you?”
Raff considers me for a good long while. Then without a word he changes course.
“It’s called concrete cancer,” I explain, pointing to the flaky patch on the vault wall. “It means water’s getting in around the steel reinforcing, which is rusting and expanding and weakening the concrete. It’ll be worse than what we can see. This entire wall is about to come down.”