Song of the
Water People
We are born into song, to our great mother singing. All our lives we hear her song, and sing it with her.
Now she sings the song of her death. Her mind is open to the Great Below, her heart is open to the Great Below. We cradle her aged body in the water, that she not leave us before her song is finished. That nothing of the song be lost.
We sing the song back to her, my sister and I. We sing to her our names. We will be great mothers when she is gone. We will live. By the song, and by all that she has taught us we will live. This we promise.
We swim to either side of her, so each of her eyes looks on one of us. Her great body, dark above, pale beneath, suspended in the water between the bright air and the Great Below. Around us swim our sisters and brothers and cousins, our daughters and sons, our granddaughters and grandsons, all singing. There are far fewer of us than once there were. But we are together, we are home, and she dies hearing the song.
Her voice falls silent from our chorus. Her eyes meet ours. Her body gathers itself. We hold ready to bear her upward for one last breach, one last breath. It will take us all: she is no calf, to be borne aloft on an auntie’s rostrum.
Instead, she exhales. She breathes in water, and begins to sink.
We take up her death-song. The pale gray patch behind her dorsal fin, as unique and distinctive as her name, is the last we see of her. Then it disappears into the dark water. We follow her with sonar, sending our signals into the darkness where she vanished until they do not return an echo. She is gone.
My sister and I back away from one another, still singing the song of her death. A pod cannot have two great mothers, and ours is too large for our hunting to sustain us all in this time of dying water and failing salmon. And so we part: two pods, that once were one. Our siblings and children and grandchildren and cousins move back and forth between us, sorting themselves out, until we face each other in two long lines. Each new pod has within it one near-mother: one who will birth a calf before the season’s turn.
We sing a new song: of death, of parting, of recognition. Each pod turns from the place of our great mother’s dying. Then, still singing, we go our separate ways.
*
The water is empty of salmon.
Our sonar returns the shapes of distant shorelines, the smaller bodies of our distant cousins, even a trio of silent ones who avoid crossing our route. Other fish. But no salmon.
My kin sing their worry. I answer with reassurance, as the great mother before me would have done. There are no salmon here: we will hunt until we find them. We know their routes, the patterns of their lives, how they come from and return to the sweet water and the open sea. That is in the song, too.
And so we follow the route laid out in song and in memory, and in a sureness of direction that pulls us forward. When we find salmon, they are few, and small. In more plentiful seasons we would not have bothered with them; but now we are hungry, and have already traveled a long way to find them. Our youngest snatch them in a blur of blood and scales, and present them first to the near-mother, then to me. Then with all the sisters and daughters. Last of all our sons and brothers feed themselves.
The People Above the Water come upon us as we feed. This is not unusual. Since the Takings ended, we do not mind. Some of them are in the water, wearing second skins, and long flippers to propel themselves. Their own appendages are dexterous, but cannot shape and push the water as ours can, and they do not swim fast. Others skim the water’s surface, and these are faster. The structures they use are smooth and hard like shells, and make a hollow sound if we bump into them. Some buzz through the water with noisy, spinning flukes that hurt us if they touch us. They maintain their distance, but watch us as we feed and play. We do not forget that they are there. We do not forget that they were not always so considerate, that once they hunted us and Took our calves and our kin. There is peace between us in this season, but the kinship our songs say we once had is long gone.
My nephew launches himself above the surface, white belly turning and shining in the brightness above the water, and falls back with a mighty splash. The People Above the Water respond with sounds we have learned to associate with pleasure.
The rest of us depart for quieter waters, even though we are exhausted.
*
Our journey brings us to a narrow place. The tide draws steady as a current. The channel closes in to either side, jagged slopes thrusting above the surface, forming steep shorelines that cast shadows across the water, and funneling the wind through the air above our passage. Some of us remember the nets of the Taking, the way they drove us through narrow places into shallow bays, and we swim faster.
The People Above the Water follow us as they did then, but they do not pursue, only watch. They make their delighted sounds when they see us breaching into the bright air. But they do not Take us, and calves born since that bad time have only the sung memories of its terror and grief.
Still I feel the need for haste. Near-mother’s time is almost here, the calf within her stirring as if with impatience. A smaller shell zips across our path of travel, with a spinning fluke that makes an angry churning buzz. Nothing else in the water sounds like that. I flinch, but our younger ones do not react. They have known that sound all their lives, and ascribe no danger to it.
The channel is darker and noisier than when we last came this way. More crowded with floating shells, and with an acrid taste to the water. Far ahead, something rumbles with a deep and all-pervading sound.
We speed up as we leave the channel behind. The pull of the tide lessens. We emerge into a wider bay like breaching to take a breath.
The rumbling is louder here. It comes from an enormous shell, crawling across the surface of the bay. The noise is like a great shaking from the Great Below, distorting our echolocation.
We forge across the open water. Our path and that of the massive shell will intersect. These biggest of the shells of the People Above the Water do not slow or change course, not for us. Perhaps they do not perceive us.
We could go faster still, cut ahead of it, but the near-mother is at the limit of her strength already. No.
Instead, we pass into its wake. Its noise surrounds us, overwhelms our directional sense and our collective echolocation’s ability to help us navigate. We are lost in a tumult of sound. Silent ones, whales, fish, even smaller shells disappear.
But we use the noise itself to orient, its passage slow and predictable, until it drops away to our rear and other sounds and surfaces re-emerge from the chaos. Then at last the shell is behind us, receding, making its own inevitable way toward its destination. As though we were not here at all.
*
We reach the place of still water. The air’s brightness fades. Once, a journey such as we have just made was easy. Now we are weary, and hunger gnaws at us, and there is no more time to hunt. Near-mother has begun her song of birthing, and we join our voices to hers. She has calved once before. That calf died, and she sings her anxiety to us, that this one not be lost.
We sing in response as the calf moves within her. Our song forms an image, our collective perceptions shaping a body beyond sight and sound. We are singing the calf into being.
Two of us who have borne calves stay close by, one to each side, so she can see us as well as hear us. Her body heaves in great thrashing undulations, like waves pushed before a storm. And then the calf slips free, shoved forward into the water, through a cloud of blood from the mother’s last push.
The calf sinks. An auntie descends, dives beneath the calf, noses beneath her—her! Yes—and bears her upward. The little calf wriggles, almost sliding free, but her auntie bears her up and up on her rostrum, until she breaches the surface. A second birthing, a second crossing. She takes her very first breath.
The sound she makes upon exhalation is not a song, but it is a sound. Song will come.
Auntie lets her slide beneath the water again. Her mother watches, resting, her blowhole above the surface, her body still. One eye rolls toward the calf as she makes her first attempt at swimming in a far larger ocean than the one that cradled her before birth. Auntie helps her surface to breathe again, and again, then draws back to let her swim on her own. The calf angles this way and that, clicking, seeking, using her echolocation outside her mother’s body for the very first time, taking in the vastness of the world. She finds her mother and nuzzles close to nurse.
We surround them in a protective circle. We sing to our newest daughter a song of welcome.
*
We dream.
We course through the water, all together. The floating shells buzz close behind. One flies above the water; we see it when we rise to breathe, and it chops at the air with great blows that drum against our skins. I am young, my first birthing recent enough that my calf is still by my side. I feel his movement in the water as though it were my own.
They have followed us like this before, the People Above the Water. Pushed us into places we could not escape, prisoned us with nets we cannot perceive but cannot cross. And then Took some of our number away beyond our calling. So now we flee, down the channels and waterways we know so well. But they know the waters now as well as we, and always we find them ahead of us as well as behind. Always leaving us only one way out.
We are being driven.
We come to one of the many shallower bays that we know, flooded by sweet waters that flush salmon into the sea. We have known it as a place of sweetness and quiet.
They drive us into it and raise a barrier behind us. The barrier does not seem to extend above the water—but beneath, it is impenetrable, and all but imperceptible even to our sonar. We cannot trust what we sense or see. The buzzing of their shells disorients us. We cannot navigate.
The great mother cries in distress. The shells have come in among us, buzzing and zipping about too close and fast for us to track. They cast a net over her calf, so young he has yet to pass a season in the open sea, and pull him away from her.
I move to be at her side, but they separate my own calf from me. His cries pierce the water as they haul him away. And more, daughters and sons who are not yet full size. They drag them from the water, up into the bright air and into their floating shells.
We try to follow them, calling, hearing the sounds of their suffering. But there is the barrier. And the buzz of the shells, churning the water, moving away. They are gone.
*
The newborn snugs close to her mother’s side, discerning our disturbance without knowing the reason for it. She has not yet learned the song. But she has been born with an understanding of grief.
Silence covers us like water. As if by silence we can defy memory. We move with slow caution, as though the nets are ready to close about us, though there have been no Takings for a long time now. We surface in sequence and take deep breaths. New-mother and calf should rest more. But we will not stay here.
As the season turns, we hope to find salmon in the open sea. There, another calf will be born. And there, there are no Takings.
*
The water warms, the brightness grows. The season turns again. We return from the open sea, chasing the salmon back to their rivers. A second calf swims with us, born in the open water. He is hardy, but small. The salmon are still too few, and his mother grows thin as her milk nourishes him.
Through the water we hear the song of the other pod, my sister their great mother. They too went to the open sea, chasing the salmon; they too have returned. Our songs differ now, as our journeys have diverged, and it is our youngest who sing of our journeying. They tell their memories, bringing us from the moment we separated to now.
As we come into one another’s sight we spread out side by side, in two long lines. We sing our greetings back and forth, a medley different for each of us, depending on proximity and position. This chorus is the song in its entirety.
We sing our memory of our great mother, and our enduring grief. We sing her memory, and the calves, who never knew her, acquire that memory through our song. We sing of the calves, our new little ones, and receive the other pod’s answering echoes of joy, undercut with sadness: they have borne one calf since our parting, who died within an hour of her birthing.
Like us, they have traveled far. Like us, they have seen a dearth of salmon, and a great noise of shells, and other noises whose origins and purpose they do not know. Like us, they are weary and always hungry, but glad in this moment.
Our lines break into a gathering of bodies, each shape a specific echo we know as well as we know our own hearts. We are so, so glad to be with one another again. I greet my sister, a new knowing in both our gazes. We are great mothers now in truth, who have led our pods past a season’s turn. We have survived this long. We face each other as our kin swim around us, the water swirling against our skins in their wake, and find in one another a kind of peace. The newest calf stays close beside his mother, but our daughter born before the season’s turn joins her kin in their play as they course through the water and breach the surface to leap into the air. Those who will soon be ready for mating pair off with older, distant cousins who teach them something of what to expect. The water fills with song.
And still my sister and I regard one another, our song winding below and above and through the singing of our families. When we were young, we would come to reunions like this with another pod from which we had separated before she and I were born. We would hear their songs, and sing them ours in turn. By this we learned our story. Now we are the ones to say: we are here. We endure. And that my pod has two new calves and hers has none matters less then: there are calves, and we are still here.
The surface around us fills with floating shells as the People Above the Water gather to witness our reunion. When we breach the surface we hear their excited calls and the rhythmic slapping of their limbs. Our young ones slap the surface with their tails in response, and breach and dive with great splashes. Sometimes they draw near to these visitors, who live above the water but not in it, and look them in the eye. This always raises great excitement.
The People Above the Water hunt us no longer. We did not look for such a change in our lifetimes.
The salmon have been decreasing for a long time. We do not look for that to change, either.
*
An expanse of water, full of noise and acrid tastes and floating shells, but few salmon. So few.
What we do find goes to our newest mother. Her calf is still nursing, even as her own body thins. When this happens, the mother’s milk is not as good. How could it be, when she is starving?
Her calf sickens, too. I lead us onward. I do not know what else to do.
*
The new-mother’s cry reverberates through the water. I know that sound. It was the sound I made, when my son was Taken. We stop and turn back to her, to them.
The calf, her calf, is sinking, all but lost to sight. She pursues him, a darker shadow against the darkening water. Only the pale patch behind her dorsal fin is visible. And then even that fades. The echoes of mother and calf’s descending bodies take longer and longer to return, until I wonder whether they will rise again.
Then they meet, and begin to rise, mother bearing the calf on her rostrum. They reappear and then rise past us, breaching the surface of the water. She takes a breath, and the calf does too. Good.
But when she lets him slide free, he sinks again, his body laboring to no avail. She dives beneath him, two of us to either side shaping the water to help bear him up. We sing the song we sang when he came into the world, calling him, calling him back to life. A second time she bears him above the surface, and once again he breathes, a deep and ragged inhalation. Our sonar discerns the irregular thumping of his heart, the labor of strength that is every indrawn breath.
Again, he slides free, and sinks. Again, his mother lifts him. This time his indrawn breath is a gasp, his heart pattering like the rain that falls from above the water.
That heartbeat stutters and slows, and falls silent.
The silence spreads until it encompasses us all. Into that silence come distant sounds, the buzzing of the shells of the People Above the Water, the calls of kin too far away for our distress. The other calf, the daughter, snugs in close to her mother and makes a small sound of confusion. The rest of us make no sound. We do not even exhale, as though by retaining our own breath we could will his to return.
For a long time, we are still. Another one gone. Another of so many, born only to die before they are old enough to sing. Last season’s daughter was the first to survive in so long. A son coming so soon after brought us so much hope. And now he is gone. It is a Taking of another kind.
I should sing him to the Great Below. Instead, I wait for his mother to release him.
She does not. She moves forward, bearing him with her.
She carries him as we travel, bearing him up as though he might still breathe. She refuses food and her body grows even thinner. We sing to her to let him go. Losing the calf is a tragedy. To lose both would be disaster.
*
It feels as though the world is emptying out, except for the People Above the Water, who follow us in our grieving. We wonder if they know that we are grieving. We wonder if they know why.
We would ask them, if we could. But we do not know their song.
*
The mother stops swimming. We are alone, as if we were all that is left in the world. Even the People Above the Water have stopped following us.
She looks at us, the calf’s body still balanced atop her rostrum as though even now he might breathe. We know he will not. She knows he will not.
With a sigh akin to life’s final exhalation, she dips her head and lets him go.
He sinks, the pale patch behind the dorsal fin the last part of him to pass from sight. Our song follows his descent until his little body no longer returns an echo. He is gone.
We sing our grief, for the little one who never sang. It is the song of all the calves we have lost, who died upon their birthing, or soon afterward, or were Taken. I sing of my own son, who, if he lived, would be grown now, a son of great size and strength.
Perhaps he lives. Perhaps all the Taken ones live, somewhere. We do not know.
*
We hear a sound. A song. Unfamiliar, yet on the brink of comprehension. As though if we were closer to the singers, or could hear them more clearly, we would understand.
It is the song of the silent ones. They sing only after they have fed. They do not eat salmon.
In our songs, we say that they and we were once one pod. Perhaps their songs say the same. Perhaps that is what they sing now.
We pass three of them in the dark water, and are silent.
*
A great shoal of salmon from the sea, dark and heavy-bodied. At last, at last. They are returning to the sweet water, weary from long traveling. When our time comes, we go to the Great Below; they go to their river homes, and come not forth again.
We shape the water into a vortex, herding them in so we can feed at leisure. The youngsters are exuberant, breaching with fish in their jaws, leaping into the bright air and then plunging back into the water with their catch. The water glitters with scales torn loose and clouds with the blood of the salmon. There are more than we can eat. When we are sated, we let the rest pass unmolested.
Many floating shells cluster near. The People Above the Water lean over the edges to watch us. There is even a school of smaller shells, wielding long fins that dip in and out of the water. One of us surfaces right beside them and blows a huge spray of water and air. The air resounds with calls and snatches of song. Even the new-mother feeds, though her song is muted. We stay with her, bearing her up. Do not sink, we say. Do not breathe in water and go to the Great Below. Not yet.
The People Above the Water crowd closer. Not chasing, and they wield no nets. This is not another Taking. We end our play, and take our leave. They do not follow.
*
The bright air darkens. When we breach the surface, the lights of the People Above the Water glitter in the darkness. Our mother who grieves and our daughter who thrives swim at the heart of our pod, to remind them that they are always home. And within the body of one of my daughters, another calf has begun to grow. The journey of calves to their birthing is a long one, and we too must see that journey through.
A song rises among us, until all of us are singing. It is a song of memory; it is our memory. It is a song of loss and a song of grief, for some of the voices that should have sung it are gone. But we are here, and we live. So long as we live, the song lives.