Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

blubber the size of a pencil eraser before the wide plastic tip stopped the penetration.
    The whale lifted his tail out of the water and snapped it in the air, making a sound like a giant knuckle cracking as the massive tail muscles contracted.
    "He's pissed," Nate said. "Let's go for a measurement."
    "Now?" Amy questioned. Normally they would wait for another dive cycle. Obviously Nate thought that because of their taking the skin sample the whale might start traveling. They could lose him before getting a measurement.
    "Now. I'll shoot, you work the rangefinder."
    Nate backed off the throttle a bit, so he would be able to catch the entire tail fluke in the camera frame when the whale dove. Amy grabbed the laser rangefinder, which looked very much like a pair of binoculars made for a cyclops. By taking a distance measurement from the animal's tail with the rangefinder and comparing the size of the tail in the frame of the picture, they could measure the relative size of the entire animal. Nate had come up with an algorithm that, so far, gave them the length of a whale with 98 percent accuracy. Just a few years ago they would've had to have been in an aircraft to measure the length of a whale.
    "Ready," Amy said.
    The whale blew and arched its back into a high hump as he readied for the dive (the reason whalers had named them humpbacks in the first place). Amy fixed the rangefinder on the whale's back; Nate trained the camera's telephoto on the same spot, and the autofocus motors made tiny adjustments with the movement of the boat.
    The whale fluked, raising its tail high in the air, and there, instead of the distinct pattern of black-and-white markings by which all humpbacks were identified, were – spelled out in foot-high black letters across the white – the words BITE ME!
    Nate hit the shutter button. Shocked, he fell into the captain's chair, pulling back the throttle as he slumped. He let the Nikon sag in his lap.
    "Holy shit!" Nate said. "Did you see that?"
    * * *
    "See what? I got seventy-three feet," Amy said, pulling down the rangefinder. "Probably seventy-six from where you are. What were your frame numbers?" She was reaching for the notebook as she looked back at Nate. "Are you okay?"
    "Fine. Frame twenty-six, but I missed it," he lied. His mind was shuffling though a huge stack of index cards, searching a million article abstracts he had read to find some explanation for what he'd just seen. It couldn't possibly have been real. The film would show it. "You didn't see any unusual markings when you did the ID photo?"
    "No, did you?"
    "No, never mind."
    "Don't sweat it, Nate. We'll get it next time he comes up," Amy said.
    "Let's go in."
    "You don't want to try again for a measurement?" To make the data sample complete, they needed an ID photo, a recording of at least a full cycle of the song, a skin sample for DNA and toxin figures, and a measurement. The morning was wasted without the measurement.
    "Let's go back to Lahaina," Nate said, staring down at the camera in his lap. "You drive."

CHAPTER TWO
    Maui No Ka Oi (Maui Is the Best)
    At first it was that old trickster Maui who cast his fishing line from his canoe and pulled the islands up from the bottom of the sea. When he was done fishing, he looked at those islands he had pulled up, and smack in the middle of the chain was one that was made up of two big volcanoes, sitting there together like the friendly, lopsided bosoms of the sea. Between them was a deep valley that Maui thought looked very much like cleavage, which he very much liked. And so, to that bumpy-bits island Maui gave his name, and its nickname became "The Cleavage Island," which it stayed until some missionaries came along and renamed it "The Valley Island" (because if there's anything missionaries do well, it's seek out and destroy fun). Then Maui landed his canoe at a calm little beach on the west coast of his new island and said to himself, "I could do with a few cocktails and some nookie. I shall go into Lahaina and get some."
    Well, time passed and some whalers came to the island, bringing steel tools and syphilis and other wonders from the West, and before anyone knew what was happening, they, too, were thinking that they wouldn't mind a few cocktails and a measure of nookie. So rather than sail back around the Horn to Nantucket to hoist noggins of grog and the skirts of the odd Hester, Millicent, or Prudence (so fast the dear woman would think she'd fallen down a chimney and