Macree and Wharac (4)

I was knocked out of my dolphin pondering by a call from my mother, the Matriarch. “Mac, check on that surface blip at forty degrees will you.” I was on the pod’s extreme right and best placed to investigate the contact. It was several leagues out and I pinged at it regularly as I came closer. As a clearer shape came into hearing, I found myself slowing down, partially in surprise and partially, I confess, in fear. Sure, I’ve seen dead Killer Whales, they stop swimming from time-to-time, but I’d never before seen only a part of a Killer Whale!

Floating amid small bits of blubber and flesh I came up to it from behind. The lapping of wavelets moved the large tail fluke up and down slightly so that my eye first fell on the white of its underside before the black of the gruesome thing’s upper surface was gently pushed under the water. I felt the protection of the Eternal Mother suddenly if briefly abandon me at the very moment I accepted full realization of what I was sensing. Before circling for a closer examination, I hollered back to the Family that they needed to come take a look. To be honest, I strongly doubted that they would believe me without seeing the terrible thing for themselves.

In hindsound, I should possibly have asked only Lillic, Horrim and maybe Clarrumph to come to me as it probably would have been better had Wharac and the three small ones not actually come close enough for a clear examination of the tail. It was a gory picture. Carcar arrived ahead of the others and when she received a clearer image, she inhaled a deep, shaky breath, a threatened breath of a kind I’d not heard before. “Eternal Mother’s Blood, what happened here?” she wailed and then, “Who was this?” Her mouth was wide open between a threat response and simple awe. I tried to make my own fearful expression more closely resemble Carcar’s in order to present a more prepared, warlike impression as the others arrived. I’m sure I failed.

Braver than any of us, little Wharac whistled, “Wow, what a mess! What could do this?” She paused and examined the remains more closely, using her right eye. It was clearly the severed fluke of a big Killer Whale about Horrim’s size. I recall realizing that this fact was probably where I got the otherwise unsupported impression that the dead one had been a male. No blood remained in the appendage as his life force had completely drained and was already returned to mingle with Her blood. This dead One was back with the Eternal Mother on the Forever Swim.

“Salt of our salt; Gnash of teeth and flash of white; May you ever hunt till we’re all called again by the Eternal Wave.” Clarrumph observed the short version of the Incantation to the Dead as we had no idea who this was. Aside from a single vertebrae of the spinal column jutting from ragged white flesh, the blubber and skin, black but for the underside white beneath the tail, were the only features beyond the obvious outline of a Killer Whale’s tail fluke. The twins and the littlest one both arrived then and temporarily blotted out any hope of deliberation with their screams. They were traumatized for weeks after they realized what the object was.

He’d been silently investigating the remains, keeping his own council, but finally Whirl turned to Lillic, “Matriarch, have you ever heard of anything at all like this? What happened to this One?” He faced her melon-to-melon in hope of a reassuring answer, and it suddenly occurred to me that it was uncertainty which had joined us in that bubble of sunrays so strongly pushing through the sheet of surface silver to fade into the darkness below. We had little familiarity with uncertainty.

Lillic hid her shock behind a mask of stoicism. In answer to Whirl’s question, she waved a flipper in the up and down gesture of surprise. “I’ve never heard of such a thing, Jawbone;” this was our nickname for Whirl, and it was a poor choice in the circumstances. “It’s disturbing, one of the more disturbing things I’ve ever encountered.” She had no vocabulary for what we were all feeling. The Matriarch appeared to shiver slightly before she turned her back on the grisly mystery. “Nothing we know of could have done such a thing to one of the Magnificent. We will spread out to full array and listen carefully for anything unusual.” Clarrumph nodded his acceptance of the instruction though he didn’t notice the momentary uncertainty I saw in Lillic’s expression. I felt fear for the first time in my adulthood. All that wisdom and experience was fumbling at this unnatural moment. Finally, Lillic signaled the proceed motion and swam away from that horrible, bodiless tail fluke, leaving the dead in the womb of our Eternal Mother.

Spread out appropriately we moved on, screaming intermittently into the blue and listening tight-jawed for anything unusual in the echo-shapes returning to us. Tension seemed to grow instead of diminish, yet nothing frightening happened. With our bellies still full from the Big One we’d caught, play and amusement would have been our normal activities as we travelled, but no one felt remotely rambunctious. The need to be on careful watch for something we didn’t even vaguely understand stopped up the possibility of any silliness.

Eventually, the Family began to draw nearer as a powerful weariness again started to muffle our hearing. The ocean seemed empty and the effort to search so loudly into the soft swells and limpid distance took its toll. The youngsters especially faded quickly, seeking relief in the closeness of older pod members. The twins bracketed Carcar and I felt the brush of Wharac’s flipper as she gracefully passed beneath me. Her light touch reassured me a little. I slowed, contributing my own commitment to the growing inertia.

Wharac surfaced on my opposite side. “I’m frightened Mac. It’s been a while since I felt anything like this feeling. I’d hoped that it was gone with my orange patches.”

She looked as worried as she sounded so I stifled a sudden impulse to laugh. To my mind she still looked so much like a child even though the last of her baby orangeness had faded to gray-white over two years ago. I hesitated for a moment before admitting my own misgivings, “Yeah, I’m feeling pretty jumpy myself. That was a grim discovery and then there was Lillic’s uncertainty…” I didn’t know what else to say which had the hope of comforting my cousin. Weirdly, I was also finally feeling sleepy for the first time in days. I guess both hemispheres of my brain were deciding to demand rest all at once. My thinking became sluggish.

Above the air Her Eternal Inner Eye was beginning to lower itself to the surface; the bright yellow left eye of day, not the grayish, skymarked right one of night. The gentlest of swells lifted us and lowered us with Her Eternal Breathing. Her Womb, the bubble in which we floated, was wholly empty but for our black and whiteness. Carcar and Lillic generously took up the sentry positions Clarrumph and I more frequently occupied during rest periods. I gave myself permission to drift off into illucidity on the burbling swell as Wharac’s steady breathing beside me signaled that she too had located a sleep spot in her mind and settled in to it. A single directionless blatt from her melon told me she was dreaming of listening for something. I hoped it was something pleasant and not one of the reptilian or shark monsters which sometimes can haunt our dreams.

My own struggle with the phantasm of Megalodon rising from the solid black depths almost awakened me. Ancestral memories of the horror and fear of those long extinguished corporeal nightmares filled with jaws and teeth began to flow into the thought of that bobbing dismembered tail of hours earlier, but the lucid portion of my consciousness fought those images away, allowing me to continue my drift into peaceful silence.

This story is completed with "Macree and Wharac" (5)

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