What I have Seen

I was born as the eldest english oaks were dying. My first breath as they felt their last. A bloodthirsty king who chopped down trunks as happily as he discarded wives. The things they had seen put my own experiences to shame. I may have followed the smoky scent of Viking braids, but those trees watched the Romans leave. Drank from rivers annointed by Celtic druids and weathered storms in the company of Ursidae and Wapiti.

To say I breathed is not a whole truth. Just as the exchange of one element for another makes it more valid than not. I am a sleeper. A dormant diver. A ruthless and indiscriminate killer.

Do not underestimate me. You will not see me coming. I am the vulture of the Sea and I fear no one.

I do not seek human meat though. No, that bland and unseasoned flesh suits me even less than the taste of my own suits them. Disgusting creatures. Vile and toxic. Even if they were gourmet dining, I would not be tempted. I have watched them scatter across the icy carpet and chased their fallen ships to the ocean floor. My Father did the same. The longboats cast lovely shadows upon the water. They danced along the rippled sand.

Once, I rested there, resting my blunt nose on the shelf of a trench, watching as the timber decayed, rotted and broke apart. The captain thought he was the first. They always do. Never accounting that the locals never thought to name the land that they lived and died upon as anything other than, 'home'. Even those Viking raiders arrived before he did. History can be fluid, depending on who you talk to.

You want to know more about me. I can tell. There is a spark in your eye that speaks of burning questions. That fire can be dangerous. Watch that you contain it. I have watched so many things burn. Forests, ships, towns. Nothing compares to the rage of Mother Earth. It happens rarely, but I have seen it twice, when she spits out her breath and erupts with heat. I do not like warm water, so when the volcanos spill into the sea I fear it and head for the depths. There are long blanks in my memory, filled with nothing but darkness and the lanterns of hangar fish.

Some time in my foolish youth, I thought to venture further afield. I followed a ship - fat as a melon and filled with clanking chains - until it crossed paths with one that stank of gold. That ship sailed around the world and back again, the men aboard left as paupers and returned to wealth.

I have seen so many wonderous things, but always there is war. Ships filled with toy soldiers and cannon fodder. So much blood that it turns the salty water iron red. A Crimson flower upon the sea.

Whenever I see that flower bloom, I retire again from the world of man. I pass my time beneath the great ice sheets of the north, never swimming higher than the twilight zone of the Kalaalit Nunaat. It is peaceful there. Thick with silence and swollen still. The weight of the ocean is like a comfort blanket, cool on my back.

I hear things sometimes, when I graze on the fish trapped in the nets that the fishermen so kindly leave out for me. A violin, a lover's spat, the excited quarrel of men sent out to make their maps. I still remember the first night that a plane flew overhead. Much noisier than my friend the Albatross. Its wings blocked out the stars and left trails in the sky. I dreamed that I was a plane that night and for several days afterwards. Dreaming of flying even as I swam slowly with the current.

Eventually, the gentle murmurings of the fisher folk turned into news reports and bulletins. The bombs splashed in the water. Mushrooms of sand and filth. A pup from our shark's shiver died. We dive deeper, embracing the cold. There in an anchor at the bottom of the ocean so large that even I am dwarfed by it. It is covered in molluscs and lichen and half submerged. Whenever I see it I know that I am close to my shiver. It failed in its duties, but it anchors me.

I was close to that anchor the night that a soldier fell from the sky. His silhouette slowly leaked and his limbs, half tangled in strings, were held up by a billowing fold of fabric that made me think for a moment of a monsterous jellyfish. My shiver still tease me about the way that I charged up at it, opening my jaws wide and crunching down on the trailing legs. What I remember, is the startled look in that soldier's eyes when he saw my sharp teeth closing just an inch from his nose. They were a blue as a morning sky and his loose, blonde hair floated loosely around his temple.

My mouth was full of twine and wax. Several of my teeth still are. Somewhere. He realised that he was free and swam upwards awkwardly, clutching deperately at the oars of the boats above him until there was a sharp exclamation followed by a swift and daring rescue.

As for me? I slunk away in shame, delving downwards so swiftly that no other human saw me. For a long time, I swam alone.

Until she found me. She too had been swimming solo and when I saw her face it seemed to say that she was sick of mankind too. When we embraced I found that I was several metres longer and far, far weightier. She bore me eight sons and two daughters that spring and hundreds more. I named her Bella, because she was beautiful to me and I brought her eels, flounders and sculpins whenever I could. In return, she led me to the rotting carcass of a polar bear and found me a moose that had fallen through the ice.

We voyaged together, charting our own path, threading our way through the Arctic Sea. She showed me fjords and shallow trenches. I took her to Ireland, Scotland and Spain.

We swam silently alongside coastal paths and slithered through the shallow reefs. I have seen little legs in life rings and larger legs without socks. Once, a diver found us and we circled her in her cage, admiring her iron lungs while she photographed us relentlessly. The strobe like flashing light gave me a headache.

My mate swims with me no more and I cannot take another. I mourn like a whale, without her song. It would have been better if they had harvested her for liver oil. I could swallow it then, but instead she lay rotting in a fisherman's net, caught up with his catch. He compared her to the foul excretion of a dog. I resent him still. There is no capacity for forgiveness in me. I do sometimes forget.

The ice has always been a territory of our own, but it is melting now. Each year it shrinks and lingers less and although I first enjoy the cool kiss of water I must then endure the aftermath of heat.

Is it my addled memory, perhaps rose tinted specs, but I'm sure the water tastes different now. I feel full even when I have not eaten. Sluggish and unclean. My nose is pockmarked by the scratches of discarded waste and one fin is now shorted than the other. I snarled it in a loop of plastic debris.

It is impossible for you to grasp the weight of what I have seen. Even with my failing eyes, pestered by parasites, I see more than you.

I saw Shakespeare die and watched the Mayflower pass overhead. You must protect the planet. It cannot carry on this way.