Killer

Fourteen days ago, the blue had been making his leisurely way up through the east Pacific Ocean. He was north of the Murray seascarp, some five hundred miles west of San Francisco, swimming along at three to four knots, diving sometimes to two thousand feet, leaping sometimes completely out of the water, content and at peace. When he heard the screams, songs and clicks which were the voices of other whales, he answered sometimes, and sometimes he did not. Ten years ago he would have been searching for a mate, if he did not already have one; but he was old now, and content to follow his annual odyssey from the arctic to the equator, searching out the krill which he swallowed, a ton in every mouthful.

Then, that day, the day which men called the eighth of June, he heard them: the killers. He identified their cries, twenty-four of them; five close behind, six between him and the shore, and thirteen in an arc to the west closing off the way to the deeps of the central Pacific. At first he was content to raise his speed to a little over ten knots; and by the dawn of the next day he was over the Medocino seascarp, more than two hundred miles north of his original position, and it was there and then he realised that the killers were hunting him.

And they had hunted him ever since.

On the eighteenth of June he had driven his great body into the island-filled shallows of the Aleutian Chain. All that day he worked his way east, playing a deadly game of hide-and-seek with them, but their pattern of gutturals and clicks was well able to distinguish his huge body even among the islands.

Here they had nearly caught him, and in his escape he had seen them for the first time. The leader was huge, longer by a head than any other killer the blue had ever seen; he had two scars on his face: one at the tip of his nose, and the other from his upper lip, along behind his right eye. The second scar pulled the right lip up so that the leader could never properly close his mouth, and the white interlocking teeth were always on display.

He had come upon the group of killers three months earlier as they hunted the reef just south of Midway Island. Come in, wary as a shark out of the black depths to challenge the old bull who had led the pack, and drive him off, trailing blood, to the mercy of the deep. He had selected from among the docile cows one mate, the thirty foot female who was at present at his side, and he had led them east by north towards the American coast.

The pickings were good and they moved slowly, decimating the schools of dolphin along the shipping lanes; hunting seal around Pacific islands and even on the mainland coast; and when there were no large animals, there were always the schools of tuna, and even of mackerel.

During those three months, the killer’s mind settled. He returned with ease to his natural lifestyle. He led the pack surely and with confidence, and grew to know the comfort his gentle consort brought. And then, late in the evening of the eighth of June, some fifteen hundred miles west of San Francisco, the leader had picked up a new echo. He had made a short sound which alerted the others to his new, purposeful course, and he had moved off.

During the night they had formed the pattern which held them close to the big blue, and they had begun to follow him properly. They did not move in to the attack for they all knew the power of the great whales, and the first object was to tire it out. So they followed, harried, frightened the blue, making it exert itself to the limit of its abilities during the next ten days as the hunt progressed up the coast of the United States, across the Pacific and among the Aleutian Islands to that first, ill-timed, unsuccessful attack.

Every now and then, when the pack was hungry, one of two hunters went off after seal, sea lion and walrus, always returning with enough for all. But although they were never starving during this time, the pack were never as full and content as they had been on the sea lanes of the Pacific. And now, five days later they had driven the blue up through the Bering Sea past St. Laurence Island, through the Bering Straits, into the Chukchi Sea and the Arctic Ocean.

Since mid-afternoon the blue had been still, lying at the edge of the ice, apparently asleep. The leader guided the pack silently closer and closer. He too sensed the aeroplane’s crash, ignored it. The water was so thick with krill that visibility was down to a few feet, but the leader did not want to use his sonar, for fear of arousing their monstrous prey. He left the pack, therefore, and moved forward in the red fog to explore for himself. Inch by inch he moved silently through the living soup, back breaking water occasionally for a quiet breath. Then, unexpectedly, an abrupt current swirled the curtains of krill aside, and there, less than one hundred feet away, was the head of the sleeping giant. The killer paused, and then went back to the pack. Now it was time for the kill.