Fluke, or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings Chapter 1~2

For Jim Darling, Flip Nicklin,and Meagan J cardinals queer commonwealth who doextraordinary operationFluke (flook) 1. A stroke of good luck2. A chance occurrence an accident3. A barb or frosty head, as on a harpoon4. Either of the twain horizont completelyy flattened divisions of the turd of a goliathPART ONEThe numbersAn ocean with egress itsunnamed monsters would be worry acompletely untroubled sleep. JOHN STEINBECKThe scientific method is nothingmore than a organisition of rules to keep usfrom deception to each other. KEN NORRISCHAPTER ONE extended and Wet bordering Question?Amy called the behemoth punkin.He was fifty feet recollective, wider than a city bus, and weighed eighty thousand pounds. One well-placed slap of his great rotter would reduce the gravy holder to fiberglass splinters and its occupants to red stains drifting in the blue sky Hawaiian waters. Amy leaned over the side of the gravy holder and lowered the hydrophone cut on the whale. Good cockcro w, punkin, she said.Nathan Quinn shook his head and tried not to hurl from the cuteness of it, of her, enchantment surreptitiously sneaking a look at her bottom and feeling a little sleazy more or less it. wisdom fag be complex. Nate was a scientist. Amy was a scientist, too, secure she looked fantastic in a pair of khaki hiking shorts, scientifically speaking.Below, the whale sang on, the boat vibrated with each note. The stainless rail at the bow began to buzz. Nate could feel the heavyer notes vacillate in his rib cage. The whale was into a section of the song they called the blue jet themes, a long series of whoops that sounded comparable an ambulance driving through with(p) pudding. A less develop tendener might expect archetype that the whale was rejoicing, celebrating, sh emerge(p)ing howdy to the world to let e actually(prenominal)one and everything k in a flash that he was live and feeling good, but Nate was a trained listener, perhaps the c meet trai ned listener in the world, and to his expert ears the whale was saying Well, he had no idea what in the hell the whale was saying, did he? Thats why they were out thither vagabonding in that sapphire channel withdraw Maui in a small speedboat, sloshing their break bettings more or less at seven in the sunrise No one knew why the humpbacks sang. Nate had been listening to them, observing them, photographing them, and poking them with sticks for xxv years, and he still had no idea why, exactly, they sang.Hes into his ribbits, Amy said, identifying a section of the whales song that usually came right forward the animal was about to surface. The scientific terminal for this noise was ribbits beca subroutine thats what they sounded handle. perception washbasin be simple.Nate peeked over the side and looked at the whale that was suspended head set ashore in the water about fifty feet below them. His flukes and pectoral fins were white and described a crystal-blue band in t he deep blue water. So still was the great brute that he might pitch been braging in blank, the last lighthouse of many long- unawares space-traveling race except that he was making croaky noises that would be in possession of sounded more appropriate coming out of a two-inch tree salientian than the archaic remnant of a superrace. Nate smiled. He managed ribbits. The whale flicked his fanny once and shot out of Nates field of vision. Hes coming up, Nate said.Amy tore move out her headphones and picked up the motorized Nikon with the three-hundred-millimeter lens. Nate quickly pulled up the hydrophone, allowing the wet cord to reel into a coil at his feet, then turned to the ease and started the engine. indeed they tarryed.There was a blast of air from behind them and they both spun almost to see the column of water vapor hanging in the air, but it was far, perhaps three hundred meters behind them too far outdoor(a) to be their whale. That was the problem wit h the channel between Maui and Lanai where they worked There were so legion(predicate) whales that you often had a hard metre distinguishing the one you were studying from the hundreds of others. The abundance of animals was a both a blessing and a curse. That our guy? Amy asked. all(a) the singers were guys. As far as they knew any right smart. The DNA tests had proven that.Nope.There was other blow to their left, this one much c escaper. Nate could see the white flukes or blades of his do-nothing under the water, even from a hundred meters absent. Amy hit the stop push button on her watch. Nate pushed the hold forward and they were reach. Amy braced a knee against the console to steady herself, keeping the camera pointed toward the whale as the boat bounced along. He would blow three, maybe four times, then fluke and dive. Amy had to be make believe when the whale dove to reduce a clear shot of his flukes so he could be identified and cataloged. When they were within t hirty yards of the whale, Nate backed the grease-gun bring and held them in position. The whale blew again, and they were close enough to catch some(a) of the mist. There was none of the dead fish and massive morning-mouth smell that they would fork up encountered in Alaska. Humpbacks didnt feed while they were in Hawaii.The whale fluked and Amy fired off two quick frames with the Nikon.Good boy, Amy said to the whale. She hit the lap timekeeper button on her watch.Nate cut the engine and the speedboat frametled into the gentle swell. He threw the hydrophone overboard, then hit the record button on the fipple pipe that was bungee-corded to the console. Amy set the camera on the seat in front of the console, then snatched their notebook com flummoxer out of a waterproof pouch.Hes right on sixteen minutes, Amy said, checking the time and recording it in the notebook. She wrote the time and the frame numbers of the film she had respectable shot. Nate read her the footage number o ff the recording equipment, then the longitude and latitude from the portable GPS (global emplacement system) device. She put down the notebook, and they listened. They werent right on top of the whale as they had been in the beginning, but they could hear him singing through the recorders speaker. Nate put on the headphones and sat back to listen.Thats how field research was. Moments of frantic activity followed by long periods of waiting. (Nates first ex-wife had once commented that their sex life could be described in exactly the same focal point, but that was after they had separated, and she was simply macrocosm snotty.) Actually, the wait here in Maui wasnt bad ten, fifteen minutes at a throw. When hed been studying right whales in the North Atlantic, Nate had sometimes waited weeks before he found a whale to study. Usually he liked to use the downtime (literally, the time the whale was down) to think about how he shouldve gotten a real number job, one where you do r eal money and had weekends off, or at to the lowest degree gotten into a branch of the field where the results of his work were more palpable, like drop whaling ships a pirate. You know, security.Today Nate was actively trying not to watch Amy put on sun blocker. Amy was a snowflake in the land of the tanned. Most whale researchers spent a great deal of time outdoors, at sea. They were, for the most part, an intrepid, outdoorsy bunch who wore wind- and sunburn like battle scars, and there were some who didnt sport a semipermanent sunglasses raccoon tan and sun-bleached haircloth or a scaly bald spot. Amy, on the other mass, had milk-white skin and straight, short black hair so dark that the highlights appe atomic number 18d blue in the Hawaiian sun. She was wearing maroon lipstick, which was so wildly irrelevant and out of character for this setting that it approached the comical and made her seem like the goth geek of the Pacific, which was, in fact, one of the reasons he r presence so upset Nate. (He reasoned A well-formed bottom hanging in space is provided a well-formed bottom, but you hook up a well-formed bottom to a whip-smart cleaning lady and apply a nail of the awkward and what youve got yourself is well, trouble.)Nate did not watch her rub the SPF50 on her legs, over her ankles and feet. He did not watch her strip to her bikini top and apply the sunscreen over her chest and shoulders. (Tropical sun can fry you even through a dress.) Nate especially did not notice when she grabbed his hand, squirted lotion into it, then turned, indicating that he should apply it to her back, which he did not noticing anything about her in the process. Professional courtesy. He was running(a). He was a scientist. He was listening to the song of Megaptera novaeangliae ( speculative wings of New England, a scientist had named the whale, thus proving that scientists drink), and he was not intrigued by her intriguing bottom because he had encountered and analyzed similar data in the past. According to Nates analysis, research assistants with intriguing bottoms turned into wives 66.666 percent of the time, and wives turned into ex-wives exactly 100 percent of the time plus or minus 5 percent factored for post-divorce comfort sex.)Want me to do you? Amy asked, holding out her preferent sunscreen-slathering hand.You just dont go there, thought Nate, not even in a joke. One wild response to a line like that and you could lose your university position, if you had one, which Nate didnt, but still You dont even think about it.No thanks, this shirt has UV protection woven in, he said, intellection about what it would be like to deem Amy do him.Amy looked suspiciously at his faded WE same WHALES CONFERENCE 89 T-shirt and wiped the remaining sunscreen on her leg. Kay, she said.You know, I sure wish I could figure out why these guys sing, Nate said, the hummingbird of his object having tasted all the flowers in the garden to return t o that one plastic daisy that would just not give up the nectar.No kidding? Amy said, deadpan, smiling. But if you figure it out, what would we do tomorrow?Show off, Nate said, grinning.Id be typing all day, analyzing research, matching photographs, register song tapes Bringing us doughnuts, Nate added, trying to assistance.Amy continued, counting down the list on her fingers, - picking up blank tapes, washing down the trucks and the boats, speed to the photo lab Not so fast, Nate interrupted.What, youre button to deprive me the exuberate of running to the photo lab while you bask in scientific glory?No, you can still go to the photo lab, but the Great Compromiser hired a guy to wash the trucks and boats.A delicate hand went to her forehead as she swooned, the southerly belle in hiking shorts, taken with the vapors. If I listless and fall overboard, dont let me drown.You know, Amy, Nate said as he undressed the crossbow, I dont know how it was at Boston doing survey, but in behavior, research assistants are sole(prenominal) supposed to bitch about the humiliating grunt work and lowly status to other research assistants. It was that representation when I was doing it, it was that way going back centuries, it has always been that way. Darwin himself had someone on the Beagle to file dead birds and sort index cards.He did not. Ive neer read anything about that.Of sort you didnt. Nobody spell outs about research assistants. Nate grinned again, celebration for a small victory. He realized he wasnt working up to standards on managing this research assistant. His partner, the Great Compromiser, had hired her almost two weeks ago, and by now he should have had her squeezed. frame of she was working him like a Starbucks froth slave.Ten minutes, Amy said, checking the timer on her watch. You going to shoot him?Unless you require to? Nate notched the arrow into the crossbow. He shut in the windbreaker they used to dress the crossbow under the conso le. It was very politically incorrect to carry a weapon for shooting whales through the crowded Lahaina suck, so they carried it inside the windbreaker, making it appear that they had a jacket on a hanger.Amy shook her head violently. Ill drive the boat.You should learn to do it.Ill drive the boat, Amy said.No one drives the boat. No one but Nate drove the boat. Granted, the Constantly muzzy was only a twenty-three-foot Mako speedboat, and an agile four-year-old could pilot it on a calm day like today. Still, no one else drove the boat. It was a man thing, being inherently uncomfortable with the thought of a woman operating a boat or a television strange control.Up sounds, Nate said. They had a recording of the wide-cut sixteen-minute cycle of the song now all the way through twice, in fact. He stopped the recorder and pulled up the hydrophone, then started the engine.There, Amy said, pointing to the white fins and flukes moving under the water. The whale blew only twenty yar ds off the bow. Nate buried the throttle. Amy was wrenched off her feet and just caught herself on the plain next to the flap console as the boat shot forward. Nate pulled up on the right side of the whale, no more than ten yards away as the whale came up for the second time. He steadied the wheel with his hip, pulled up the crossbow, and fired. The bolt bounced off the whales rubbery back, the hollow surgical firebrand arrowhead winning out a cookie-cutter plug of skin and blubber out the size of a pencil eraser before the wide plastic get wise stopped the penetration.The whale lifted his tail out of the water and snapped it in the air, making a sound like a giant knuckle cracking as the massive tail muscles contracted.Hes pissed, Nate said. Lets go for a measurement. straightway? Amy questioned. Normally they would wait for another dive cycle. Obviously Nate thought that because of their taking the skin model the whale might start traveling. They could lose him before gett ing a measurement.Now. Ill shoot, you work the range conveyer.Nate backed off the throttle a bit, so he would be able to catch the entire tail fluke in the camera frame when the whale dove. Amy grabbed the laser rangefinder, which looked very much like a pair of binoculars made for a cyclops. By taking a distance measurement from the animals tail with the rangefinder and comparing the size of the tail in the frame of the picture, they could measure the relation size of the entire animal. Nate had pick out up with an algorithm that, so far, gave them the space of a whale with 98 percent accuracy. Just a a couple of(prenominal) years ago they wouldve had to have been in an aircraft to measure the length of a whale.Ready, Amy said.The whale blew and arched its back into a high hump as he readied for the dive (the reason whalers had named them humpbacks in the first place). Amy fixed the rangefinder on the whales back Nate trained the cameras telephoto on the same spot, and the au tofocus motors made tiny adjustments with the movement of the boat.The whale fluked, raising its tail high in the air, and there, instead of the distinct pattern of black-and-white markings by which all humpbacks were identified, were spelled out in foot-high black letters across the white the words burn up MENate hit the shutter button. Shocked, he fell into the captains chair, pulling back the throttle as he slumped. He let the Nikon sag in his lap. consecrate shit Nate said. Did you see that?See what? I got seventy-three feet, Amy said, pulling down the rangefinder. Probably seventy-six from where you are. What were your frame numbers? She was reaching for the notebook as she looked back at Nate. Are you okay?Fine. Frame twenty-six, but I missed it, he lied. His mind was shuffling though a huge stack of index cards, searching a mil social lion article abstracts he had read to find some explanation for what hed just seen. It couldnt possibly have been real. The film would show it. You didnt see any unusual markings when you did the ID photo?No, did you? No, never mind.Dont sweat it, Nate. Well get it next time he condescends up, Amy said.Lets go in.You dont want to try again for a measurement? To make the data sample complete, they needed an ID photo, a recording of at least a wide cycle of the song, a skin sample for DNA and toxin figures, and a measurement. The morning was wasted without the measurement.Lets go back to Lahaina, Nate said, staring down at the camera in his lap. You drive.CHAPTER TWOMaui No Ka Oi(Maui Is the Best)At first it was that old rig Maui who take up his fishing line from his canoe and pulled the islands up from the bottom of the sea. When he was done fishing, he looked at those islands he had pulled up, and smack in the set of the chain was one that was made up of two big volcanoes, posing there together like the friendly, lopsided bosoms of the sea. Between them was a deep valley that Maui thought looked very much like cleavage, which he very much liked. And so, to that bumpy-bits island Maui gave his name, and its nickname became The Cleavage Island, which it baffleed until some missionaries came along and renamed it The Valley Island (because if theres anything missionaries do well, its seek out and destroy fun). Then Maui arrive his canoe at a calm little beach on the west bound of his new island and said to himself, I could do with a a some(prenominal) cocktails and some nookie. I shall go into Lahaina and get some.Well, time passed and some whalers came to the island, bringing stigma tools and syphilis and other wonders from the West, and before anyone knew what was happening, they, too, were thinking that they wouldnt mind a few cocktails and a measure of nookie. So rather than sail back around the Horn to Nantucket to hoist noggins of grog and the skirts of the odd Hester, Millicent, or Prudence (so fast the sound woman would think shed fallen down a chimney and landed on a zucchini ), they pulled into Lahaina, drawn by the drunken sex antic of old Maui. They didnt come to Maui for the whales, they came for the party.And so Lahaina became a whaling town. The irony of it was that even though the humpbacks had starting coming to birth their calves and sing their songs only a few years earlier, and in those days the Hawaiian channels were teeming with the big-winged singers, it was not for the humpbacks that the whalers came. Humpbacks, like their other rorqual brothers the streamlined blue, fin, sei, minke, and Brydes whales were just too fast to catch in sailing ships and man-powered whaling boats. No, the whalers came to Lahaina to rest and recreate along their way to Japanese waters where they hunted the great sperm whale, who would literally float there like a big, dumb log while you rowed up to it and stuck a harpoon in its head. It would take the advent of steamships and the decimation of the big, floaty-fat right whales (so named because they did fl oat when dead and therefore were the right whales to kill) before the hunters would turn their harpoons on the humpbacks. quest the whalers came the missionaries, the sugar farmers, the Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and Portuguese who all worked the sugar plantations, and Mark match. Mark Twain went home. Everyone else stayed. In the meantime, King Kamehameha I united the islands through the clever exercise of firearms against wooden spears and moved Hawaiis capital to Lahaina. Sometime after that Amy came cruising into the Lahaina harbor at the wheel of a twenty-three-foot Mako speedboat with a tall, stunned-looking Ph.D. sprawled across the bow seat.The tuner chirped. Amy picked it up and keyed the mike. Go ahead, Clay.Something wrong? Clay Demodocus was straightforwardly in the harbor and could see them coming in. It wasnt even eight in the morning. He was probably still preparing his boat to go out.Im not sure. Nate just inflexible to call it a day. Ill ask him why. To Nate she said, Clay wants to know why. mistaken data, Nate said.Anomalous data, Amy repeated into the radio.There was a pause. Then Clay said, Uh, right, understood. That stuff gets into everything.The harbor at Lahaina is not large. Only a hundred or so vessels can chase after behind her breakwater. Most are sizable, fifty- to seventy-foot cruisers and catamarans, boats full of sunscreen-basted tourists out on the water for anything from dinner cruises to sport fishing to snorkeling at the half-sunken crater of Molokini to, of course, whale watching. Jet-skiing, parasailing, and waterskiing were all banned from December until April, while the humpbacks were in these waters, so many of the smaller boats that would normally be used to terrorize marine life in the name of recreation were leased by whale researchers for the season. On any given winter morning down at the harbor at Lahaina, you couldnt throw a coconut without conking a Ph.D. in cetacean biology (and you stood a good chance of winging two Masters of Science working on dissertations with the rebound).Clay Demodocus was engaged in a bit of research liars poker with a Ph.D. and a marine officer when Amy backed the Mako into the slip they shared with three adoring zodiacs from sailing yachts anchored outside the breakwater, a thirty-two-foot motor-sailor, and the Maui Whale investigate Foundations other boat (Clays boat), the Always muzzy, a brand-new twenty-two-foot Grady White Fisherman, center console. (Slips were hard to come by in Lahaina, and circumstances this season had dictated that the Maui Whale Research Foundation Nate and Clay perform a nautical dog fortune with six other small craft every day. You do what you have to do if you want to poke whales.)Shame, Clay said as Amy threw him the stern line. prissy calm day, too.We got everything but a measurement on one singer, Amy said.The scientist and the naval officer on the dock behind Clay nodded as if they understood completely. Clif ford Hyland, a grizzled, gray-haired whale researcher from Iowa stood next to the young, razor-creased, snowy-white-uniformed maitre d L. J. Tarwater, who was there to see that Hyland spent the navy blue blues money appropriately. Hyland looked a little abashed at the whole thing and wouldnt make eye contact with Amy or Nate. Money was money, and a researcher took it where he could get it, but navy money, it was so so nasty.Morning Amy, said Tarwater, dazzling a abruptly even, stainlessly white smile. He was lean and dark and frighteningly efficient-looking. Next to him, Clay and the scientists looked as if theyd been run through the dryer with a alkali of lava rock.Good morning, Captain. Morning Cliff.Hey, Amy, Cliff Hyland said. Hey, Nate.Nathan Quinn shook off his confusion like a retriever who had just heard his name uttered in scope with food. What? What? Oh, hi, Cliff. What?Hyland and Quinn had both been part of a group of thirteen scientists who had first come to Laha ina in the seventies (The Killer Elite, Clay still called them, as they had all gone on to distinguish themselves as leaders in their fields). Actually, the pilot burner intention hadnt been for them to be a group, but they nevertheless became one advance(prenominal) on when they all realized that the only way they could devote to stay on the island was if they pooled their resources and lived together. So for years thirteen of them and sometimes more if they could afford assistants, wives, or girlfriends lived every season in a two-bedroom house they rented in Lahaina. Hyland understood Quinns tendency to submerge himself in his research to the point of oblivion, so he wasnt surprised that once again the rangy researcher had dislocated out.Anomalous data, huh? Cliff asked, figuring that was what had sent Nate into the ozone.Uh, nothing I can be sure of. I mean, actually, the recorder isnt working right. Something dragging. Probably just needs to be cleaned.And everyone, i ncluding Amy, looked at Quinn for a moment as if to say, Well, you lying satchel of walrus spit, that is the weakest story Ive ever heard, and youre not fooling anyone.Shame, Clay said. Nice day to miss out on the water. Maybe you can get back with the other recorder and get out again before the wind comes up. Clay knew something was up with Nate, but he also certain(p) his judgment enough not to press it. Nate would tell him when he thought he should know.Speaking of that, Hyland said, wed better get going. He headed down the dock toward his own boat. Tarwater stared at Nate just long enough to convey gross out before turning on his heel and marching after Hyland.When they were gone, Amy said, Tarwater is a creep.Hes all right. Hes got a job to do is all, Clay said. Whats with the recorder?The recorder is fine, Nate said.Then what gives? Its a perfect day. Clay liked to state the obvious when it was positive. It was sunny, calm, with no wind, and the underwater visibility was two hundred feet. It was a perfect day to research whales.Nate started handing waterproof cases of equipment to Clay. I dont know. I may have seen something out there, Clay. I have to think about it and see the pictures. Im going to drop some film off at the lab, then go back to Papa Lani and write up some research until the films ready.Clay flinched, just a tad. It was Amys job to drop off film and write up research. Okay. How bout you, kiddo? Clay said to Amy. My new guy doesnt look like hes going to show, and I need someone topside while Im under.Amy looked to Nate for some kind of approval, but when he simply kept unloading cases without a reaction, she just shrugged. Sure, Id love to.Clay suddenly became self-conscious and shuffled in his flip-flops, looking for a second more like a five-year-old kid than a barrel-chested, fifty-year-old man. By calling you kiddo I didnt mean to dimmish you by age or anything, you know.I know, Amy said.And I wasnt making any sort of comment on your cleverness either.I understand, Clay.Clay cleared his throat unnecessarily. Okay, he said.Okay, Amy said. She grabbed two Pelican cases full of equipment, stepped up onto the dock, and started schlepping the stuff to the parking area so it could be make full into Nates pickup. Over her shoulder she said, You guys both so need to get laid.I think thats reverse harassment, Clay said to Nate.I may be having hallucinations, said Nate.No, she really said that, Clay said.After Quinn had left, Amy climbed into the Always mazed and began untying the stern line. She glanced over her shoulder to look at the forty-foot confine cruiser where Captain Tarwater posed on the bow looking like an advertisement for a particularly rigid laundry detergent Bumstick Go-Be-Bright, perhaps.Clay, you ever heard of a uniformed naval officer accompanying a researcher into the field before?Clay looked up from doing a electric battery check on the GPS. Not unless the researcher was working from a navy ve ssel. Once I was along on a destroyer for a study on the effects of high explosives on resident populations of southern sea lions in the Falkland Islands. They wanted to see what would happen if you set off a ten-thousand-pound charge in proximity to a sea lion colony. There was a uniformed officer in charge of that.Amy cast the line back to the dock and turned to face Clay. What was the effect?Well, it blew them the stern up, didnt it? I mean, thats a lot of explosives.They let you film that for National Science?Just stills, Clay said. I dont think they anticipated it going the way it did. I got some great shots of it raining seal meat. Clay started the engine.Yuck. Amy unlace the bumpers and pulled them into the boat. But youve never seen a uniformed officer working here? Before now, I mean.Nowhere else, Clay said. He pulled down the gear lever. There was a thump, and the boat began to creep forward.Amy pushed them away from the surrounding boats with a padded boat hook. What d o you think theyre doing?I was trying to find out this morning when you guys came in. They loaded an awfully big case before you got here. I asked what it was, and Tarwater got all sketchy. Cliff said it was some acoustics stuff.Directional depart? Amy asked. Researchers sometimes towed large arrays of hydrophones that could, unlike a single hydrophone, detect the explosive charge from which sound was traveling.Could be, Clay said. Except they dont have a winch on their boat.A wench? What are you trying to say, Clay? Amy feigned being offended. Are you calling me a wench?Clay grinned at her. Amy, I am old and have a girlfriend, and therefore I am immune to your hotness. Please cease your useless attempts to make me uncomfortable.Lets follow them.Theyve been working on the lee side of Lanai. I dont want to take the Confused past the wind line.So you were trying to find out what theyre up to?I fished. No bites. Cliffs not going to say anything with Tarwater standing there.So lets fo llow them.We actually may get some work done today. Its a good day, after all, and we might not get a dozen windless days all season here. We cant afford to lose a day, Amy. Which reminds me, whats up with Nate? Not like him to blow off a good field day.You know, hes nuts, Amy said, as if it were understood. Too much time thinking about whales.Oh, right. I forgot. As they motored out of the harbor, Clay waved to a group of researchers who had gathered at the fuel station to buy coffee. xx universities and a dozen foundations were represented in that group. Clay was single-handedly creditworthy for making the scientists who worked out of Lahaina into a social community. He knew them all, and he couldnt help it he liked people who worked with whales and he just liked it when people got along.Hed started weekly meetings and presentations of papers at the Pacific Whale Sanctuary edifice in Kihei, which brought all the scientists together to socialize, trade information, and, for some, to try to weasel some profitable data out of someone without the burden of field research.Amy waved to the group, too, as she take into one of the orange Pelican waterproof cases. Come on, Clay, lets follow Tarwater and see what hes up to. She pulled a huge pair of twenty-power binoculars out of the case and showed them to Clay. We can watch from a distance.You might want to go up in the bow and look for whales, Amy.Whales? Theyre big and wet. What else do you need to know?You scientists never cease to amaze me, Clay said. Come hold the wheel while I get a pencil to write that down.Lets follow Tarwater.