Leviathan or The Whale

irritants (see also
Mosquito)
Poison breach:
a whale that breaches only once
Skunked:
the condition of seeing no whales
    Provincetowners all have their whale tales. Mary Martin, staying in an isolated dune shack, swam off Race Point one afternoon to find herself joined by a finback a hundred yards away. Jody Melander, driving on the winter beach in her truck, often sees right whales so close to the shore that she could easily join them, too. Some years ago a stray and possibly disorientated beluga appeared in the harbour, nudging curiously and dangerously around the boats’ propellers. And in the summer of ’82 a fifteen-foot female orca took up residency in the bay, its tameness indicating previous contact with man; some thought it an escaped navy trainee, used for military purposes. Pat de Groot kayaked out to sketch the animal, bobbing alongside it in her slender canoe, feeding it flounder–the fact that it took dead fish was a sign of its habituation towards humans–unafraid of its neat, regular, deadly teeth. Back in her beachside studio, she painted it again and again, in ink on flat grey stones. The whale stayed around, till one day someone decided that it needed a drink and poured whisky in its blowhole. It wasn’t seen again.
    The sea is the colour of steel and the sky. Peering over the prow, I see sand lances erupting at the surface, their dancing, silvery bodies punctuating the water like localized rain. Below them swims a school of bluefin, turquoise torpedoes darting this way and that, mouths open, voraciously.
    Suddenly, a humpback swims under them all. Seen against its pale belly, the tuna seem minnows in comparison. The sand lances scatter like gnats. It is an animated lesson in the food chain. The whales distend their accordion pleats to swallow a ton of fish each day, even as daredevil gulls dive into their open mouths, or stride cockily up and down the whale’s rostrum as if they were perched on a barnacled rock.

    The ocean seems alive in these last days of summer. Three basking sharks swim by in silent convoy their broad dorsal fins and razor tails swishing side to side, so different from cetaceans (it is part of the whale’s essential
unfishiness
that its tail moves in the mammalian tradition). The sharks gape blindly as they feed on unseen plankton, their bodies browny yellow and mottled, almost reptilian, a mark of their own ancientness. A mola mola drifts along, a rudderless pancake of a fish, carried by the currents, warming its great flat body at the surface, its mouth opening and shutting as it gathers its food. White-sided dolphin, fleet and sleek, weave through the waves, a collective intelligence hoovering up the bait. Leaping high out of the water like competitive hurdlers, their teal and beige markings glisten in the sun.
    The scene turns into a feeding frenzy, a sustained symphony of ecstasy. Humpbacks take great mouthfuls of fish which ripple across the surface in a futile attempt to escape. Finbacks lunge on their sides, flashing their prey with their white jaws. Minkes scissor through the same source, outriders to the greater whales. All around me is action, hunger, life and death, the entire natural cycle accelerated in a headlong dash for survival and sustenance.
    The humpbacks gather below, blowing rings of bubbles in fine calibrations, their spiralling ascent announced by a bracelet of green clouds bursting at the surface. It is an unbelievably exciting moment, precisely because I know what is about to happen, announced by the changing colour of the sea, by the boiling cauldron of fish, and by the rousing
whoosh!
as the whales break through, mouths gaping like giant crows, close enough to see their bristly baleen and smell their fishy breath.
    One afternoon I saw sixty or seventy of these animals gathered in a three-mile circle around us, a forest of blows and bubble-nets, some five or six animals in each group, each group multiplied by ten, and each surrounded by its own cloud of squawking gulls. Some were kick-feeding, a technique unique to Gulf of Maine whales, flexing and bucking their tails at the surface, smacking the fish into submission. The ocean itself seemed to be exploding. Our puny craft was completely diminished by the spectacle, a performance played out to a soundtrack of itself: a symphony of cetaceans, rising and falling with their own rhythms and unconscious beauty, repeated over and again in arpeggios of flukes and sinews and swollen throats so close