Leviathan or The Whale

a brush with fishing line, has the white marks around her tail stock to prove it, while Meteor’s right-hand fluke is ripped like a piece of paper torn to mark a page. It is salutary to see, after my years of watching these animals, how many of them bear such scars.
    Most famous of all is Salt, the first of Cape Cod’s whales to be named by Al Avellar, founder of whale watching in Provincetown, and known by her dorsal which looks as though it was sprinkled with the condiment. She is still bearing calves–humpbacks remain fertile all their lives–and is now a great-great-grandmother, with a family tree to rival any out of the
Almanac de Gotha
. Anchor’s calf twists like an acrobat in the air, riding the wind as it rises from the sea, as if using its white pleated belly as a sail. Another, as yet unidentified, whale slaps its flippers so hard that it draws blood on the white skin where it has dislodged irritating barnacles. I can see the pink creases under its armpits, as if the animal were glowing from within. Such gestures seem almost lazy, but some researchers believe them to be acts of aggression.
    Others clearly are not. Ventisca, notorious for her close boat approaches, rolls over and over on her back, flippers splashing me in the face; every ventral pleat is evident, running right down to her umbilical. When Nile sounds close to the boat, her sublime undercurve reveals a large melon-like lump; and as a young male swims by belly up, its genital slit is clearly displayed.
    It is almost indecent to see the whales in such detail. I wonder, guiltily, if I ought to avert my eyes for fear of finding them too sensual–just as I admit that sometimes whales have the capacity to revolt me with their serpentine animalness, and I question why I invest so much of myself in them. Even now, I cannot reconcile myself to their corporeality. Then there are days when they seem all the more pristine for their appearance out of water, as if newborn. One afternoon, an unnamed yearling presented pure white patches on its upper flukes, its chin and over its eye, so sharply contrasted, one eyelid black, the other white. For a few seconds–it cannot have been longer, although it seemed so–its eye met mine. Far from the dumb insolence of a horse or a dog’s pleading fidelity, it fixed me with a stare which I found, and still find, disconcerting.
    As three humpbacks travel across our bow, one is identified as Sockeye; it has a pronounced overbite resembling a salmon’s. As it passes again, I notice a rope trailing from the animal’s mouth, snagged in the baleen like a piece of floss; and as it sounds, I see that the line extends all the way back to its tail. It is entangled, a dog caught in its own lead without the wherewithal to free itself.
    The passengers applaud the crew for choreographing them such a close encounter, but aloft the atmosphere changes. Karen Rankin, the naturalist, has already called the Center’s disentanglement team, and as we return to Provincetown, the
Ibis
speeds out of the harbour, radioing us for details. I tell Scott Landry what I saw. Out at sea, the three whales surface close enough to allow the team to attach a grapple and slow Sockeye’s progress, before cutting away ninety metres of gill net. In the process, the whale loses a tubercle–one of the sensitive, hairy nodes on its head–but it is a small price to pay for its liberty.
    These are the new dangers the whales must face. At the peak of summer, there are near-misses with leisure craft. At one point, three finbacks are forced to dive abruptly under a cruiser that has drifted across their path. Karen issues a reprimand over our sound system; the offenders are lucky that Captain Joe Bones’s decidedly less polite comments are not similarly broadcast.
    A SELECT WHALE-WATCHING CAPTAIN’S GLOSSARY
Cameras!:
Captain’s exclamation on encountering good whales
Dutch boys:
unexciting whales (as in watching paint dry)
Finback Alley:
a stretch of water from Race Point to Peaked Hill, often frequented by
Balænoptera physalus
Flashing:
sight of the belly of a breaching whale
Hail Mary:
a breaching whale
Lag:
Atlantic white-sided dolphin (as in
Lagenorhyncus acutus)
Mosquito:
annoying civilian craft which tail the whale-watch boats
Mugger:
close approaching whale
Old Bag:
Salt, grande dame of these waters
Old Reliable:
Loon, distinctively marked & frequently seen ‘finner’
Pick my pocket:
a whale stolen by another boat
Plastic:
small boats,