When the Whales Leave Read online

  On that day, as always, Nau awoke with the sun. Its rays were bright as ever, but no longer did they hold the melting warmth of before. As they fell across her closed eyelids, she sensed a warning, an echo of impending storms.

  She came fully awake then and broke her fast with a handful of cloudberries. Her keen ears pricked at the familiar murmuring of the surf, the piercing bird cries over the brook, the rustling grass.

  She rose and went to the seashore.

  The dew was strangely cold. Nau broke into a run, to warm herself and to shake off the last shreds of sleep. Gophers whistled after her and startled quails shot out from under her feet, but she ran on, driven by some anxious but joyful premonition. Usually she would pause at the last line of shingle by the water’s edge and collect plaits of seaweed to add to her meagre breakfast, yet this time she didn’t even slow.

  Already she could hear the dear and familiar toot of the spouting whale cutting through the noisy surf. The gleam of sun on water blinded her, making it hard to see the shore. Then she saw something strange …

  At first she thought it a trick of the light. The spout was there, sparkling in the sun, and so was the whale, hugging the shore. But as Nau peered at the giant of the sea, he seemed to be growing more insubstantial, as though dissolving into the cloud of water drops he had made. Nau blinked a few times, trying to clear her vision. She peered again at the whale.

  There was no whale.

  No spout made gleaming rainbows in the air.

  Instead she saw a person standing in the foaming surf and looking back at her.

  His eyes were a deep black, like a seal’s. Nau looked again to the sea. There was no sign of a departing whale, only the wader birds bobbing up and down in the surf, heads twitching this way and that. Farther out, great flocks of migrating birds skimmed low over the water.

  Nau stood barefoot on the icy shingle, the air around her cold. She shuddered. The man took a step toward her, and for a moment she caught a glimpse of a rainbow at his back. But now his face was changing: his eyes narrowed, his lips drew halfopen, and he seemed to Nau to radiate a strange heat, a tender warmth she could feel at a distance, reaching out to her, calling her, enveloping her in a soft, balmy cloud.

  She yearned to step into the stranger’s embrace and warm herself there. She moved to meet him, and he took Nau by the hand.

  Light and quick was his stride over the earth—stepping over puddles, leaping over streams—like the flight of a great bird. Nau followed him, her black hair streaming behind her like wings.

  Now the morning’s chill had vanished and the soles of Nau’s feet burned as though the hot, sandy banks of tundra rivers, sun-baked in summer, carried her, and not the cool shoreline grass.

  The sun chased them, lighting up the mirrorlike surface of the lagoon, skipping down the running streams and rivulets, dancing across the profusion of puddles and ponds.

  But what was this?

  It was joy—unfathomable and vast as the sun itself. It was a lightness of being, and a sweet, longing trepidation, a warm weight that lay upon her breast at the thought of him, the one walking beside her. The one who was all the wondrous new things of this summer—the whale giant, and the mysterious all-encompassing warmth, and the extraordinary new idea that she was different from the birds and the beasts, a thing apart from the grasses and the waves, from the sky and the earth …

  What was happening to her?

  Now they were high in the tundra hills, walking through soft, yellowing grass and on the thick layer of pale blue lichen—Arctic moss—that protected the plant roots from the harmful effects of deep permafrost. Here at the top they could see the distant sea, the pound ing of the surf reduced to a whisper.

  The man paused. Nau’s hand still lay in his. He turned to face the sea, and the young woman followed his gaze over the endless blue.

  A whale pod frolicked just beyond the white froth of the surf. Closer and closer they came, spouting seawater into rainbows and chasing away the flocks of waders.

  Once more his face shone with ardor, and a warm yellow light seemed to kindle in his great black eyes.

  The man reached out for her other hand and drew her closer. The heat grew unbearable, aching and inviting all at once. Light-headed, Nau thought of the hours she had spent watching the churn of the water, the rising and falling waves, from atop the tall sea cliffs. After a while her head would spin just so, the plunging drop and endless vastness calling her, washing over her on a crest of fear and pleasure …

  Yet this feeling was different, only a faint echo of that call from the deep. And again, this warmth—tender and soft, like the downy lining of an eider duck’s nest, protection against the ever-cold cliffs it perched on, cliffs that stood ceaselessly buffeted by winds and doused in sea spray.

  Up close, his face was changeable, like the light playing over the tundra and the sea, clouds drifting to reveal the sun or conceal it. He smelled of seaweed and the sea breeze. It was he and no other: he, so right and familiar, so open to her gaze, so strong and gentle. The strange unsettled mornings, the yearning dismay she’d felt watching the sun vanish over the horizon, and the delight of watching the whale nearing the beach—all these things had been premonitions of this meeting, harbingers of joy.

  Sinking onto the grass, the man pulled her gently down beside him. She felt like she was unmoored inside a rainbow mist, her limbs caressed by warm jets of water, stroking her, embracing her. She was flying high over the earth, and soft, bright clouds drew her forward on a breeze, and then on, on—on a rising tide of desire to be one with him, to melt into him, desire close to agony, a pressure that filled her body and sought escape. Nau tried to hold back a cry that would not be denied, not knowing yet that this was the cry of a woman’s greatest, most terrible joy, which gives birth to song, to tenderness, and to new human life.

  She heard the boom of a whale spout, rending the air above the waves … Rrrr-hhheu!

  “Reu, Reu, Reu,” she whispered. And opened her eyes.

  His face was so close that his great black eyes seemed to be drinking her in, and she felt that she was drowning in their hot, flickering depths.

  Nau was not frightened anymore, nor alarmed. She was certain now that this was what she had waited for, that this was what she had lacked. Only she couldn’t have known it would come to her in the form of a man who had once been a whale.

  A burning pain like a sun’s ray streaked through her, and she wondered how pain and joy could be as one. And answer came that there was a pain like deepest joy, a pain that made one cry out and shed bright tears of happiness. The burning ray roamed her body, igniting unseen fires, and as she drifted off, Nau found she wished it to go on endlessly.

  When she came to, her first panicked thought was that it had all been a dream—but there was Reu, sitting beside her, hands full of her gleaming hair. He was smiling, and the smile filled his face with light.

  He peered at Nau, touching the tip of his nose to hers, and this touch roused once more the fire that had been kindled in their hearts.

  “How can such pain also be such happiness?”

  “The greatest joy comes through the greatest pain,” Reu answered her.

  He spoke, and there again were the familiar scents from the sea—salt spray, seaweed, wet shingle, and the shattered pink starfish that dusted the beach.

  At sunset, Reu rose from the grass and strode back toward the sea. Nau walked beside him. As the pounding surf grew louder in her ears, so did her dismay. This would be the first time she had approached the sea in sadness.

  Here was the surf line, and the waders. Reu stopped.

  The sun was falling into the water. Only a small arched sliver remained above the sea, sending a crisp, bright ribbon of light to bridge the horizon and the shingled beach. Reu stepped onto the shining path. Where a man had stood, there now rose the flicker of a whale spout.

  Nau threw herself into the water, but some powerful, commanding force thrust her back onto the bea
ch. She watched the whale go farther and farther out. His spouting jet gleamed in the very last flash of the setting sun, then vanished.

  2

  When the sun was high over the lagoon, Nau would go to the shore and watch for the distant rainbow that signaled the whale’s approach. The sight of him, the sound of his excited, whooshing breaths, filled her with joy.

  Each time, Reu would turn into a man. Hand in hand, they would walk up to where the tundra grass was soft beneath them.

  They didn’t speak much. A great deal of what they had to say simply flowed between them, in the way they looked at each other, in the way they touched, even in their long silences.

  Days went by, their souls in invisible, inaudible flight. And then one day Nau saw that the faraway mountains were capped with snow.

  “What is that?”

  “That is the thing which bids me and my kin to other seas,” Reu told her.

  “So you are to leave me?”

  Reu fell silent.

  As the days grew short, so did their time together. The sun hurried to sink into the water, cutting short its journey through the sky. White snowflakes danced in the air. When the snowflakes fell onto the ground and into puddles, they turned to cold water.

  The earth was growing inhospitable.

  Flocks of birds set off south. The emptying tundra rang with their sad cries. Bright birdsong stilled over the once burbling spring, and its clear water went dark and dull with frequent rains.

  Nau wandered the tundra looking for mouse holes to plunder, digging out the sweet roots the mice had stored away. Some days she couldn’t get near the shore at all, for giant waves crashed against the crags and threw themselves at the shingled beach, as if to grab at the lonely young woman standing on a mound of pebbles and looking out to sea.

  These were the days when Nau feared Reu wouldn’t come again, but he always did. Still, there was a new impatience and unease in his caresses.

  “Why won’t you stay with me until morning?”

  “Because if I don’t come back to the water before the last ray of the sun is gone, I will have to stay on land forever,” Reu answered her.

  “But don’t you want that?”

  “I don’t know,” said Reu.

  It wasn’t long ago that he had frolicked, young and strong, in the spring sea, so sure that he could never trade the freedom of the water for a life on land. But now … how could he have known that there was a power that could turn a whale into a man, hold him to the shore, and make him forget the great danger of staying human forever?

  His brothers had warned him. His father showed him the white stripe of ice along the horizon, approaching with each passing day. Soon that cold white stripe would imprison the seawater and cut off the life-giving air. Already the orcas, the whales’ mortal enemies, were gone, and so were the walruses and the seals. The once teeming shallows were empty; even the smallest sea creatures had followed the larger beasts south. The shores of the northern sea grew emptier and ever more silent.

  There came a day when the ice belt could be glimpsed beyond the stone promontory, radiating cold, sharp air. This time, Reu was not alone, though at first the other whales stayed back, by the edge of the ice, blowing gusts of water into the frosty fog. They were so many that even the cormorants took off in fright.

  Reu approached the shore. Accompanied now by several brothers, he appeared almost to be borne aloft by them, not touching the shingle. But he fought through the foamy surf and walked out of the sea.

  His chest rose and fell with each labored breath.

  “Nau,” he said, “I have come to you.”

  “Forever?”

  “Forever.” And as if in rejoinder, dozens of whale spouts thundered up into the sky, shattering the sunlight and drowning out all other sounds.

  Reu took Nau by the hand and led her into the tundra, away from his furious kin. He walked quickly, for fear of changing his mind, of going with his whale brethren to the warm southern seas, away from the encroaching ice.

  Skirting the lagoon’s green shore, they walked up into the hills, where the grass was no longer so soft as before, and the earth spoke of the coming of an ancient, timeless frost—never really gone, but only hiding from the summer sun beneath a thick layer of moss and old grasses.

  They settled on a knoll and sat together for a long time, silent. Sadness clouded Reu’s face like an autumn fog, and Nau touched a finger to his cheek. He startled, then sighed.

  “What will we do?” asked Nau.

  “We will live,” he told her curtly. “A new kind of life. A human life.”

  Hard they were, those first days of winter. Reu dug out an earthen shelter, propping its walls up with tree branches scavenged from the shore and roofing it over with a layer of sod and dried grass. He made a pike from a broken walrus bone and killed a wild deer, and Reu and Nau laid the deerskin atop their bed, to stave off the ancient cold of the earth.

  Their carefree summer days now seemed to her a bright dream, unreal. Sometimes, looking at the endless white desert of the sea, riven with gigantic ice hummocks and shards, shining with a cold glow, Nau couldn’t believe that Reu had ever been a whale at all. The wind riffled through the piles of upended ice floes, then clambered onto the shore, shrouding everything along its path in snow. It raged above the low earthen cave, trying to level it with the snow-covered plain. And it raged and howled all the more when each morning it discovered a freshly melted black opening steaming with human, living breath.

  Each nightfall found the first people of the narrow spit between the lagoon and the sea nearly toppling with exhaustion—but they were happy. The immense, unbreakable bond that had first joined Nau and Reu still flamed between them with all the steady power of the long summer sun.

  Reu had much luck with hunting, and soon they had enough deerskin to gird themselves against the cold.

  Nau fashioned thread from dried deer tendons, and, with an orca-bone needle, sewed the cured skins together. Spreading the skins fur side down on the floor of their cramped earthen hut, she used her strong, rough heels to pound them into softness, so that Reu might be more comfortable wearing them close to his body.

  The darkness came closer and more impenetrable each day. All they saw of the sun was a narrow red ribbon. But the fire from their stone lamp burned like a little sun, a visitor to their heavily snow-dowsed home. And both Reu and Nau believed that each new day would be beautiful—as beautiful as each of them was to the other, each morning they woke to each other.

  For them, it was as though the past did not exist. The most important things—the life-giving warmth of their home, the light of the lamp—were in the here and now. These things were real. Tomorrow depended on today.

  Storms blew often. Walls of wet, compacted snow and strong wind could funnel up into the air and knock them off their feet, press them into the ground.

  Once, listening to the clanging snow on the roof, Nau felt a sudden kick—from the inside.

  “What is in there?” She pressed her hand to her belly, alarmed.

  Reu laid his hand on the warm, swarthy skin just above his wife’s belly button. He felt life stir within.

  “It is new life!” Reu’s voice rang with joy. “It is another bright morning of our lives. The reason we are together!”

  “A new life,” Nau said softly, listening to her body.

  When the snowstorm passed, Nau and Reu stepped out from their home and saw the sun peeking above the far-off mountains. “It’s come back! The source of all warmth!” they cried out in delight, gazing happily at each other.

  The sun was low yet, and its rays colored the snow crimson all the way to the barely discernible horizon.

  Reu busied himself making tools. Watching him, the way the hair fell on his face, Nau had a vague memory of something extraordinary, some strange and magical thing that had happened to her long ago. Had it been a dream? Could Reu really have been a whale?

  Every day, at dawn, Reu would set off for the
pack ice. Nau waited for him, anxiously scanning the shore. Sometimes she thought she could see open water far out to sea, green waves alight with faraway rainbows. What were they? Her heart would race, and flushed with a rising heat, she’d have to push back her deerskin hood.

  But upon Reu’s return, Nau forgot all about her strange thoughts and imaginings, too busy with butchering the kill and preparing their meal.

  The sun broke away from the top of the Far-off Crags and sailed across the sky. Reu, peering at the south face of a large ice hummock, could see a stubble of tiny icicles.

  One morning, Nau was awakened by familiar birdsong, so close that she wondered at first whether the bird was indoors with her. Nau peered outside. It was a little gray snow bunting, hopping about on thin, shivery legs and twittering brightly as she pecked at crumbs of food. As she sang, she kept her sly black eye on Nau, as if congratulating her on the return of the Great Light.

  As the shallows became warmer, the fat seals returned to shore. They clambered out to bask in the sun, and the hunter was ready for them. Some days he brought home several seals and was then able to spend the next few days fixing up their wind-battered home, instead of going to hunt.

  The first people would stand on the sunny side of the lagoon, where the snow had already melted, talking of the future. Nau had grown round and heavy. She struggled to carry her big belly around.

  “Time will pass,” Reu would say to her thoughtfully, “and there will be other homes, next to ours, and the people of the family we have started will spread out across the seashore. There is plenty of space, plenty of beasts in the sea and herds of deer in the tundra—everything needful for life and the promise of the future …”

  “I like thinking about the future,” Nau would reply. “Looking ahead you get a dizzy sort of feeling, like looking down from a great height.”

  Snow was melting all around the lagoon, its frozen surface now pocked and pitted like a moldy deerskin.