Macree and Wharac (5)

Wharac bubbled a breath just to my right. The sleeping world surrounded my awareness as I pulled in a breath of my own. Silence swallowed me. The Mother’s Womb encircled my body, borne up by the safety of her fluid. Above the surface shimmer Her left Inner Eye closed and Her dimmer crescent right Inner Eye took over its quiet control of the night world. The Eternal Mother’s rays of light, cast from Her half-closed right Eye reached down through the membrane as we took our soft air from the outside. I floated on the perfect warmth of Her protective shroud.

Tunnels embraced. I moved effortlessly through soft-sided walls of flesh so unlike the channels of familiar rock from Lore Island and so quiet, so still but for the beating heart from Her depths. Time lost meaning and sight became shapeless colors like swimming through a plankton storm beneath a magnificent rainbow. The dream-storm stayed far away, a manifestation in sound only, all power and steady rhythm in the unreachable distance of my rest state. Slowly it shifted to a softer cadence and the storm from those endless latitudes subsided to a murmur like Lillic’s gentle breathing beside my childhood body. Rhythm and breath, blood and bone. The flesh of my flesh and the water of my blood. All light folded as Her half-closed Inner Eye was covered by the skyfoam floating on the thinness of air between the surface and Her Eye.

Below my open right eye, keeping calm watch over Wharac, the darkness swept upward to engulf the Family resting on Her Membrane. A series of soft clicks from Mimi showed us our locations and arrangement hadn’t changed. I allowed my thoughts, my awareness, to drift again.

In the dream I swam among a great throng of the People. We had a purpose I at first couldn’t hear, couldn’t form into a measurable shape, but I could feel urgency and a uniting fear. The ocean around us was dark to the eye with not an image to make out, not even my own flipper held close to my straining eye. The soundscape showed only the host of hundreds of which I was a tiny single mote, all determined, all thrumming with a purpose. The absence of anything else at all alive in Her saltwater Womb spoke of our hunt and this too was natural.

Only our sheer numbers felt alien, odd, to me. I recognized no one in this dream-world, not even Wharac or Whirl, though a big bull three flukes to my left reminded me very much of Clarrumph and his solid presence. The rest seemed to know me, familiar with my echo though I couldn’t give a name to a single one of them.

A sudden call and an increase in the clan’s speed hinted at a culmination of purpose. In the silence of the hunting pod I turned in my dream to stay with the others around me, clearly defining a curve. This was the ‘pincher’ movement to encircle a foe. What ‘foe’ could a force of Orcas this size have to face, I wondered. First in click range came a lead whale’s echo back, the leader of the other side of the ‘pincher claw’, followed by her clicks as she outlined the soundscape with her own calls. Next, we all turned more sharply inward toward the target while we simultaneously launched our own yells into the pitch darkness of the sea.

The returning image came back to confirm what my muted sense of smell had begun to suspect. A bumpy vast wall of sharkness so large as to boggle my imagination filled my hearing. I woke from the dream with a start that lifted my dorsal fin to the upright from its listing state and woke poor Wharac sleeping soundly nearby.

“What…, what is it Mac? Were you having a bad dream? A mating dream?” Wharac wasn’t at all irritated that my sudden movement had awakened her. Her concern touched me.

“No, it was …it was a Megalodon dream, but a very weird one.” I paused but she said nothing, waiting patiently for further explanation. One of the twins lob-tailed in the direction of the rising yellow left Eye. “The monster wasn’t attacking me; I was attacking it, me and a host of others! It was like I was a soldier during the Great War, fighting to rid the Mother of the Always threat. It was like I was actually there and actually seeing a Megalodon with my own echoes, even my own eyes! And you know what Wharac? The giant wasn’t the same color or shape as a White shark; instead it was narrower at the pectorals and much thicker in the tail. I wonder if this made them slower and that’s how our ancestors were able to catch them and wipe them out.”

Wharac looked thoughtfully into depths below where a tiny glimmer of light was just beginning to shimmer. “What color was it then? You said the Meg didn’t look like a White Pointer.” She sent an exploratory call out to the pod’s left flank but only the echo of a young Mola Mola came back.

“It was almost completely golden, gradually fading to a white strip along its belly and the rear edge of its tail. The teeth looked a lot like a White shark’s teeth though, but I woke up when they started to come for me.”

She chuckled and shuddered simultaneously and with gusto. “No doubt…” Her pensive pause echoed her childhood fears of the giant monster lurking in the black beneath. “What must it have been like for our foremothers thousands of years ago when the Megs still cruised down there waiting to catch one of us alone or unaware? Don’t you sometimes wonder at what it must have taken for Schap and the other Great Matriarchs to organize the clans, all over the world? To decide to try to rid Her Womb of the horror that lived in the deep so that future generations…; so that we could swim free of fear? To fight a great war to the death so that we the People could rule the seas; what a time that must have been!”

I thought of yesterday’s severed Killer Whale flukes and I thought of the enormous, vast really, Carcharadon-like teeth of my dream; and I said nothing.