you,’ I said again.
‘I value it, as we all do, almost as much as I cherish your compassion – compassion for a bear!’
I zanged the bear with my sonar, and I heard the quickened heart beats that betrayed his fear. Did he sense my family’s holding a conference beneath the waters near his island? What, I wondered, could the bear be thinking?
‘How often,’ I said to Chara, ‘has Grandmother averred that we must have compassion for all things?’
‘And we do! We do!’ she called out. ‘We sing to the diatoms and have family-feeling for the broken shells of the mollusks – even for the bubbles of oxygen in the water that long in their innermost part to be incorporated once again into an inspired young whale such as you who exalts the beauty of compassion.’
Alnitak, less loquacious than Chara, beat his flukes through the sun-dappled water and said simply, ‘I would relish the novelty and satisfaction of saving this bear, but it is too far for us to swim right now. Are we not, ourselves, weak with hunger?’
This was true. Days and days had it been since any of us had eaten! Where had the fish gone? No one could say. We all knew, however, that huge, lovely Grandmother had grown much too thin and my sister Turais had nearly lost her milk and could barely feed the insatiable little Porrima. And Mira, my melancholy aunt, worried about her child Kajam. If our luck did not improve, very soon Kajam would begin to starve along with the rest of us and would likely come down with one of the fevers that had carried off Mira’s first born to the other side of the sea. Her second born had died of a peculiar stomach obstruction, while her third had been born with a deformed tongue and jaw, which had made it impossible for the child to eat. Poor Mira now invested her hope for the future in the young and frail Kajam.
‘All right,’ I finally said, out of frustration, ‘then I will push the bear myself to the pack ice. Perhaps I will encounter fish along the way and return to lead you to them.’
Alarmed at the earnestness in my voice, my mother Rana swam up to me. Her streamlined form, nearly perfect in proportion, flowed through the water along with her concerned words: ‘There is much bravura in what you propose, but also the folly of misplaced pride. This cannot be the great deed you wish to do.’
Chara’s second daughter Talitha, who was only three years old and didn’t know any better, gave voice to one of the usually unvoiced principles by which we live: ‘But you cannot leave your family, cousin Arjuna!’
She loved me a great deal, tiny Talitha did. No words could I find for her. I did not really want to leave her.
We concluded our conference with a decision that I should remain with everyone else. Again my grandmother turned to abandon the bear to the tender mercies of the sea.
‘Wait!’ I cried out. A wild, wild idea rose out of the unknown part of me with all the shock of a tidal wave. ‘Why don’t we eat the bear?’
For a whale, the sea can never be completely quiet, yet I swear that for a moment all sound died into a vast silence. I might as well have suggested eating Grandmother.
Talitha again spoke of the obvious, something my elders knew that I knew very well: ‘But we cannot eat a bear! That would break the First Covenant!’
She went on to recount one of the most important lessons that she had learned: how long ago the orcas had split into two kindreds, one which ate only fish while the other hunted seals and bears and almost any animal made of warm blood and red meat. These Others, who looked much the same as any orca of my clan, almost never mingled with us. We had promised to leave each other alone and never to interfere with the different ways by which we made our livings. Even so, we knew each other’s stories and songs. If we killed the bear, the sea itself would sing of our desperate act, and the Others would eventually learn of how we had broken our covenant with them.
My grandmother moved closer to me through the cold water. Her eyes, as blue and liquid as the ocean, caught me up in her fondness for me and swept me into deeper currents of cobalt, indigo, and ultramarine, and the secret blue-inside-blue that flows within the heart of all things. She asked, ‘Do you remember what I said about you on the day you were born?’
‘You said many things, Grandmother.’
‘Yes, I did and these words I would like you to remember: How noble you are, in both form and faculty, Arjuna, how like an angel in action, and in apprehension like a god! The beauty of the world you are and all of my delight.’
I did remember her saying that. She told all her grandchildren the same thing.
‘How noble would it be,’ she now asked me, ‘for us to break our promise to the Others?’
‘But we are so hungry! They would not mind if we took a single bear.’
‘The Covenant is the Covenant,’ she told me, ‘whether or not you think the Others would mind.’
‘But we made it so long ago, in a different age. The world is changing.’
‘The world is always the world, just as our word is always our word.’
‘Can we never break our word, even as the ice breaks into nothingness while the world grows warmer?’
‘The ice has broken before,’ my grandmother reminded me.
For a while, she sang to me and our family of our great memories of the past: of ages of ice and times of the sun’s heat when the world had been cooler or warmer.
‘Yes, but something is different this time,’ I replied. ‘The world has warmed much too quickly.’
Although she could not deny this, she said, ‘The world has its own ways.’
‘Yes, and those ways are changing.’
Alnitak came closer and so did my mother, and through the turbid, gray waters we debated how the northern ice sheet could have possibly melted so much in the span of a few generations. As I was still a young, not-quite-adult whale, I should have deferred to my elders. I should have felt shame at my questioning of them. Who was I to think that I might have discerned something they had not? And yet I did, and I sensed something wrong in my family’s understanding. In this, I experienced a secret pride in my insight and in my otherness from people who had seemed so like myself in sensibility and so close to my heart.
‘It is the humans,’ I said. ‘The humans are warming the world with the heat we have felt emanating from their boats.’
‘That cannot be enough heat to melt the ice,’ Alnitak said.
‘Only a few generations ago,’ I retorted, ‘only a few humans dared the ocean in cockle shells that we could have splintered with one snap of our jaws. Now their great metal ships are everywhere.’
‘To suppose that therefore the humans can be blamed for the ocean’s warming,’ my grandmother said, ‘is a wild leap in logic.’
‘But they are to blame! I know they are!’
‘How can you be sure?’ And then, as if I was still a babe drinking milk, she chided me for making a basic philosophical error: ‘A correlation does not prove a causation.’
And chided I was. To hide my embarrassment (and
