Macree and Wharac

The Eternal Mother surrounds and supports us but can she actually be thought of as a place? Above is the air, the sky. The birds wheel there like we make our curves on the Mother’s skin. Her water turns to air and the air gives her back her water. We circle with the currents of her blood.

Forgive me, I get a bit silly and elegiac sometimes after a big meal when the Family rests and breathes quietly. Clurumph, my grandfather, blames my youth but I’ve been an adult for three years now and I still lose myself in the word games when I should be resting my mind; resting and breathing. Dreaming.

The great albatross love to join us then. They seem to enjoy the association with our magnificence, but who can really know what an albatross thinks; for all their grandeur they’re still just birdbrains after all. Personally, I like them. Their beautiful shadows travel as widely as we do. I once scolded my younger cousin Wharac for killing and eating an albatross, more out of boredom than any sense of hunger.

“What,” she gestured, “It’s just a bird. It was sitting on the food, and I bit it by mistake.”

This was an outright lie. Wharac had already had her fill of the Big One we’d caught roaming too close to land for its own good and she was lollygagging, floating along behind the Big One’s great mottled flukes and probably having her usual difficulty slowing her thoughts down enough to find the dreaming place. This I could sympathize with but pointlessly killing the marvelous wandering bird irked me. Wharac was in no way too young to have heard of the taboo against slaying an albatross, old pod tale that it might be.

She had moved away before I could start an argument, smart move for a little kid. She knew I wouldn’t raise my voice while the Family slept nearby. Wharac settled in between Lillic, my own mother, and her mother, my Aunt Carcar, shooting me a dirty look through the blue veil of water between us. Pretending to ignore her I stared down at the endless black of the Eternal Mother before shooting a few inquisitive clicks out into the open blue and away from my resting family. My poor sleep habits made me, among other things, a useful sentinel while the Family dreamed and breathed in peace. Floating beside Carcar, Wharac ruefully settled into the wheeling rhythm of the others, whooshing out a breath every time her nostril emerged.

Like some other males my age I’m cursed with an overabundance of energy and have trouble reaching the rest state where the dreaming half of the brain can take over. It makes me a useful guard, but it leaves me with what Lillic considers too much idle time. While I watch for trouble which is unlikely to appear I’ve developed a couple of eccentric hobbies. One is trying to assemble the seaweed, when it’s available, into effigies. Fleeting effigies of course, but they’re images of the creatures around us; other pods of the Magnificent Ones and to my own detriment, the occasional likeness of a member of the Family. I’ve been punished for this once or twice when it wasn’t taken as a compliment. Once, my sculpture of Horrim, my probable father, was so easily recognizable from the bite a sea lion took out of his great dorsal fin that I was made to follow fifty Big Ones’ lengths behind the Family for three whole days! I got the message and stuck with mostly sculpting images of food after that, the birds from the land-end place being my favorite.

My other hobby is even stranger, but judging by the knowledge accumulated from past generations, I’m definitely not unique in my curiosity. I suffer from a mostly pointless fascination with the land creatures who haunt the tidal regions, the Littoral where we hunt from time-to-time. I’ll be talking a lot more about that hobby later on. For now, let’s just say it got me in real trouble earlier this season.

I floated along on the gentle swells and tried to let my mind wander. Nothing overly interesting was happening. A few of the arrow-thin deep water blue sharks, eyes like denuded sea urchins bulging out past their pale skin, had been drawn into shallower water by the smell of the corpse of the Big One. Our Family tolerates them since they’re essentially harmless. I like them as I find them beautiful to watch. Their economy of movement is admirable even for a shark.

I felt more than heard Wharac’s puff of air as she slid up beside me, she couldn’t get to sleep either. “I’ll leave the birds alone Macree, I know you love them.”

She was on my left and I examined her silently through my left eye. Her ventral pattern had a little more white than usual for a girl; something I hoped wouldn’t mess up her romantic life one day. Otherwise, she was a regular kid. Like any regular kid I had to wonder if she wasn’t trying to tease me about the birds. I almost spoke up to correct her before I decided she was genuinely trying to make amends. I let it go.

If I had been in a more pedantic state-of-mind, like I usually was with Wharac, I would have told her I don’t love birds. I tolerate them and I admire some species like the various albatrosses, the terns and some of the cliff hawks that hunt from the high crags at the sea’s edge. On the other hand, I have no use for the thieving eagles and most of the gulls. I blow at the gulls- sometimes literally! “Can’t find sleep again, huh,” I said to her.

“Maybe I just don’t need sleep, Bully,” her private nickname for me which I’ve always assumed was more a reference to my gender than my behavior. At least that’s what I hope she meant.

She looked relieved when I laughed at this. I said, “The oldsters are always going on about sleep, aren’t they?”

“Why is that?” she asked with genuine curiosity.

“Drowned if I know. Maybe they prefer being asleep to being awake. I have to admit, dreaming is mostly a nice thing if you can get there.”

She looked at me in mild surprise though she often did just that, a peculiarity in the way her right eye sat under a ridge on her brow and left her looking befuddled even when she wasn’t actually uncertain about anything. “Do you ever have scary dreams?” She adjusted her right fluke to correct her leeway drift. “I do and I don’t like them one bit.”

On the mention of fear, I was reminded to shoot a sonic bolt sweeping out into the deep blue. Aside from a shoal of yellow fin tuna nothing much bounced back to me. My jaw picked up no warning signs. Wharac also read the echoes and puffed a sigh from her blowhole. She let a wavelet sweep over her head and stayed underwater, floating softly just beneath the surface shimmer.

“Scary dreams usually mostly seem to end after you grow up,” I told her. “It helps to be the biggest and smartest,” I paused, “and toothiest (I smiled) things in the Eternal Mother!” In answer, the kid bit into my left flipper and hung on hard, flashing a grin of her own. “Hey, what’d I do to deserve that, Puny?”

“Just showing you who’s the real predator here dummy. You think you have all the answers just ‘cause you’re older, don’t you? Well, I’m a girl and I’ll be Top Mother someday. I’ll boss around big dopes like you, and I’ll have all the answers when the questions are asked.” If only she’d known then how great a curse she conjured at that moment. If only we’d all known.

This story continues with "Macree and Wharac" (2)

https://vocal.media/fiction/macree-and-wharac-2