The Sea Inside

clicking clans, Hal organises whale society into four categories, defined by space and number:
concentrations
spread in areas over hundreds of kilometres;
aggregations
, of ten to twenty kilometres;
groups
, over areas from hundreds to thousands of metres; and
clusters
, animals within a body length of each other. The greater of these gatherings are invisible to us, simply too big to see; we can only detect them in scientific or statistical time, as it were. But we can sense they are there, like those exosolar planets, wandering through a watery universe.
    Again and again over these days at sea, as I enter the water I gradually get better at judging what the whales will do and how they might react to me. I realise how subtle the signs are, in the same way that you can see in a person’s eyes what they think of you long before they might put it into words. I swim alongside a large juvenile, lingering long enough to take it all in, from head to fin, from the glowing white mandible to the chunk taken out of its caudal peduncle, a ferocious scar above its tail. Later, I see the same whale even closer, an encounter which leaves us both open-mouthed, the animal’s jaw agape, slowly opening and shutting. Afterwards I wonder if it was out of stress, just as ravens will half-open their beaks in fright.
    Whales would do well to fear our world. Many have marks and wounds, testaments to struggles with fishing gear or ship-strikes. ‘They’re tough,’ says João when I climb back into the boat, babbling my description. ‘They heal very well.’ Their bodies appear as forbearing as their cetacean souls, although I was once rebuked for daring to presume that a whale might possess such a thing.
    I think João is laughing at me.
    Back down below, a young calf eyes me up, then spy-hops at the surface for a better look. Underwater, it’s pale, cherubic and innocent, till it lets slip a cloud of runny poo in my face
–
possibly an act of defensive deception, or maybe even play. It’s joined by another, equally inquisitive juvenile. Emboldened by each other, they come a little closer.
    Suddenly, their number is dramatically swollen: a huge female, with an additional two calves, twirling around to appear out of the turquoise gloom. I sing to myself as I’m caught up in the crowd; I’ve never shared the water with so many whales. There are whales across the entirety of my vision; wall-to-wall whales wending this way and that; perpendicular, horizontal, vertical columns in the sea. More than ever, their subtle colours shine through the water; the filtered light playing on their backs, dancing on their sides. Only something so huge could be so elegant; they move more delicately because of, rather than in spite of, their mass.
    Only one of these calves can belong to the large female. What I am witnessing, as these huge animals twist and turn around one another, forever touching, forever re-assuring, is a cetacean crèche. For a moment it seems I might be adopted too. The mother looks at me serenely, perhaps aware of her power, while her brood, encouraged by the protection of her flanks, peer as curiously at me as I peer at them.
    Then she decides it’s time to move on. Gathering her charges together, she takes off into the blue, with barely perceptible acceleration. I’m left treading empty water, surrounded only by ocean.

    On our final day at sea, our licence runs out. The high season is upon us, and we are no longer permitted to enter the water with the whales. We must content ourselves with seeing them from above. It is then that a group of sperm whales chooses to socialise at the surface.
    It is one of the most astonishing sights I have ever seen. Slate-grey shapes in the water, they continually touch one another; it is difficult to tell where one whale starts and the other ends. Heads rise up out of the water as glossy black cylinders, bobbing with specific gravity, glistening like oil. Mouths gape with new young teeth like shiny white buds. To see them in the open air seems almost stranger than witnessing them underwater. I could be watching elephants at a waterhole, although each of these juveniles is bigger than any pachyderm.
    For hour after hour they interact, heedless of our presence, adults and young alike engrossed in themselves. At one point a young whale appears to push itself over another, as if to roll over its back. Another lolls lackadaisically on its side, lulled in the motion of the waves and its