course you were, my dear. And I do love it so! I have no words to tell you how much I look forward to the day when it is you who teaches me.’
‘I am sure that you could think of a few words, Grandmother.’
‘Well, perhaps a few.’
‘I await your wisdom.’
‘I can hear that you do,’ she said. ‘Then listen to me: it is a heavy responsibility being the wisest of the family – perhaps you could relieve me of it.’
‘No, I cannot,’ I said sincerely. ‘You know I cannot.’
‘Then will you let us leave this bear to his fate?’
All my life, my grandmother had warned me that my innate tenacity could harden into pertinacity if I allowed this. Did anyone know me as did my grandmother?
‘We are hungry,’ I said simply.
‘We have been hungry before.’
‘Never like this. Where have the fish gone? Not even the ocean can tell us.’
‘We will swim to a place where there are many fish.’
‘We would swim more surely with this bear’s life to strengthen us.’
‘Yes, and with our bellies full of bear meat, what shall we say to the Others?’
‘Why must we say anything at all?’
‘In saying nothing, we would say everything. How can a whale speak other than the truth?’
‘But what is true, grandmother?’
‘The Covenant is true – a true expression of our desire to live in harmony with the Others.’
‘But have you not taught me that the only absolute truth is that there is no absolute truth?’
Indeed she had. My grandmother relished self-referential statements and the paradoxes they engendered as an invitation for one’s consciousness to reflect back and forth on itself into a bright infinity that illuminated the deepest of depths.
‘Yes, I did teach you that,’ she said. ‘You were too young, however, for me to tell you that if there is no absolute truth, then we cannot know with certainty that there is no absolute truth.’
My grandmother played a deeper game than I – a game that could go on forever if I let it.
‘Then do you believe there is an absolute truth?’
‘You are perceptive, Arjuna.’
‘What is this truth then? Is it just life, itself?’
‘You really do not know?’
‘But what could be truer than life?’
In answer, my grandmother sang to me in a thunderous silence that I could not quite comprehend. I needed to answer her, but what should I say? Only words that would gnaw at her and lay her heart bare.
‘Look at Kajam,’ I called out. I swam over to him and nudged the child with my head. ‘He is so hungry!’
Kajam, small for his four years and thin with deprivation, protested this: ‘I am not too hungry to swim night and day as far as we must. Let us surface and I will show you.’
It had been a while since any of my family had drawn breath. Because the bear could do nothing about his plight, we had no need to conceal our conference beneath the water or to keep silence. And so almost as one, we breached and blew out stale air in loud, steamy clouds, and we drew in fresh breaths. To prove his strength, Kajam dove down and swam up through the water at speed; he breached and with a powerful beat of his tail, drove himself up into the air in a perfectly calculated arc that carried him over my back so that he plunged headfirst into the sea in a great splash. Everyone celebrated this feat. Almost immediately, however, Kajam had to blow air again. He gulped at it in a desperate need that he could not hide.
‘Listen to his heartbeats!’ I said to grandmother. ‘How long will it be before his blood begins burning with a fever?’
My grandmother listened, and so did my mother, along with Alnitak, Dheneb, and Chara. The third generation of our family listened, too: my sisters Turais and Nashira, my little brother Caph, and my cousins Naos, Haedi, and Talitha. Even Turais’s children, Alnath and Porrima, concentrated on the strained pulses sounding within the center of Kajam’s body. And of course Mira listened the most intently of all.
‘Compassion,’ my grandmother said to me, ‘impelled you to want to save this bear, and now you wish to eat him?’
‘Would that not be the easiest of the bear’s possible deaths?’
‘And compassion you have for Kajam and the rest of our family. We all know this about you, Arjuna.’
In silence, I tried to sense what my grandmother was thinking.
‘Now listen to my heart,’ she told me. ‘You persist in trying to persuade me in the same way that the wind whips up water. Am I so weak that you think mere words will move me?’
‘Not mere words, Grandmother. I know how you love Kajam. It is your own heart that will move you.’
‘But you believe that mine needs a nudge from yours?’
‘Not really. I think you wish that I would give voice to what you really want to do and so make it easier for you to do it.’
‘How kind of you to ease me into an agonizing dilemma! You can be cruel in your compassion, my beautiful, beloved grandson.’
In her wry laughter that followed, I detected a note of pride in the manner that I had tried to clear the way toward a decision that we both knew she had secretly wished (and perhaps resolved) to make all along. What was the First Covenant against the much greater pledge of life that Grandmother had made to her family? She would battle all the monsters of the deep in order to protect one of her babies.
We held a quick conference and made our plans. Alnitak pushed himself up out of the water, spy-hopping in order to get a better look at the bear. Dheneb did, too, and so did I. Did the bear recognize our kind and conclude that he was as safe sharing the sea with us as if we were guppies? Or might he mistake us for the Others? Who could say what a bear might know?
We had watched the Others stalking seals and other sea mammals, and so we knew many of the Others’ hunting techniques. We had also learned their stories, which provided many images to guide us. Of course, transforming an image in the mind into a coordinated motion of the body can take much practice. Did we have days and seasons and years to perfect a prowess of hunting dangerous mammals that our kind had never needed? No, we did not. Still, I argued, taking this bear should not prove too difficult.
Our whole family swam up to the bear and surrounded his ice floe. Respecting the ancient forms, I came up out of the water and asked the bear if he was ready to die. Bears cannot, of course, speak as we do, but this brave bear answered me with a glint of his eyes and a weak roar of acceptance: ‘Yes, I am ready.’
We
