Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

whales was actually the singer.
    "Wait a second," Amy said. "Shut down the engine."
    And then she did something that Quinn had seen no one do for twenty-five years, and then it had been his mentor, Gerard Ryder, who most people agreed had been eccentric to the point of being full-blown bat shit. Amy hung over the side by her knees and put her head in the water. After about thirty seconds she swung up, spraying a great crest of seawater all over the boat, then pointed north.
    "He's over there."
    "That doesn't work, you know," said Quinn. It was pretty much accepted that humans didn't have directional hearing underwater. He was just gently trying to remind her.
    "Go that way. That's where our whale is."
    "Okay, there may indeed be a singer over there, but you didn't locate him by hearing him."
    She just stood there next to him – dripping on his feet, the console, the field notes – looking at him.
    "Okay, I'm going." He started the engine and pushed the throttle over. "Tell me when I get there."
    A couple of minutes later Amy signaled for him to cut the engine, and she was hanging over the side with her head in the water while the boat was still coasting.
    "Well, this is just stupid," Nate said while Amy was submerged.
    Amy dedunked long enough to say, "I heard that."
    "Looks like you're bobbing for whales, is what it looks like."
    "Shut up," said Amy, up for a breath. "I'm trying to listen."
    "You look like that cartoon character in 'B.C.' that used to watch fish all day."
    "That way," said Amy, up again, pointing and dog-shaking the water out of her hair onto the Ph.D. "About six hundred yards."
    "Six hundred yards? You're sure?"
    "Give or take fifty."
    "If we're within a half mile of a singer, I'll buy you dinner."
    " 'Kay. What do you suppose the freight is to fly a lobster from Maine to my plate in Lahaina?"
    "I'm not going to need to know that."
    "Drive the boat, please. Over there." And she pointed again, not unlike Babe Ruth indicating the Wrigley Field fence over which he would hit the famous promised home run (except Amy was thin, a girl, and alive).
    Quinn heard the singer even before they put the hydrophone in the water. The whole boat started resonating to the song as they coasted into a drift.
    Amy hopped up on the bow and pointed to some white spots dancing below the surface – pectoral fins and a tail. "There he is!"
    If there had been a crowd, they would have gone wild.
    Quinn smiled. Amy looked back at him and grinned. "Steak and lobster," she said. "Something red and French and expensive for the wine, something on fire for dessert – don't care what it is, long as there's flames coming off it – then a backrub before I send you back to your cabin alone, disappointed and confused. Ha!"
    "It's a date," said Quinn.
    "No, it's not a date. It's a bet, which you have lost miserably because you had the audacity to doubt me, and for which you shall remain ever sorry. Ha!"
    "Shall we work now? Or would you like to gloat a bit longer?"
    "Hmmm, let me think about it…"
    She's so small, yet she contains so much evil, Quinn thought. He threw the field journal at her and read her the longitude and latitude off the GPS. "Film's in the camera. New roll. I loaded it this morning."
    "I was thinking I'd gloat some more." Amy picked up the notebook, then paused as she opened it to begin writing. "Singing stopped."
    "Sometimes I think they just stop singing to freak me out."
    "He's moving," Amy said, pointing.
    "Moving," Quinn repeated. He looked over the side and saw the white pec fins and flukes flash out of sight. "Hold on." He started the engine.
    "They can hunt these kind, as far as I'm concerned," Quinn said after they'd been on the whale for two hours.
    They'd recorded three full cycles of the song and gotten a crossbow biopsy, but the whale simply would not fluke, so they hadn't been able to get an ID photo. A lot of good it did to have a DNA sample when you couldn't identify the animal.
    "Hunt them and make them into pet food," Nate continued. "Get their tainted, nonfluking genes out of the gene pool."
    "Maybe you should have a doughnut or something, get your blood sugar up," Amy said.
    "Use their pathetic, nonfluking baleen for corsets and umbrella stays. Use their vertebrae for footstools. Use their intestines to make giant, nonfluking whale sausages to serve at state fairs. Remove their putrid unfluking gonads and -"
    "I thought you liked these animals."
    "Yeah, but not when they won't