Call Me Moby, Episode 2
First Blood
Trigger warning: if you’re sensitive and emotional - skip this Episode.
And the rest of the ‘Call Me Moby’ series.
This is Episode 2 of 10. Episodes 1-3 are free for all. The remaining 7 Episodes will be available only to paid subscribers.
Three days after we first saw it, the wooden thing showed up again.
We are floating at the surface. Our bodies move with the waves as we float. The adolescents are chasing each other through the shallow water, where the sunlight warms the water, and the smaller fish burst in shimmering clouds as we move through their schools. The calves are nursing, lying against their mothers’ sides, their small bodies close together for warmth, even though the top layer of water feels relatively warm and nice after the cold of the deep feeding areas. The matriarch is floating away from the rest of us, pointing her body south. Her singing is steady and slow, providing route confirmations and forecasts about the weather—clear skies ahead, good currents, safe waters between here and the breeding area 30 days south, where we will spend the warm months.
Since the wooden thing showed up on the horizon, maybe an hour ago, a dark shape against the sky that is being pushed by something other than the current or wind, we have been watching it. As it moves through the water, it creates vibrations that travel through the water in every direction for body lengths. The rhythmic thumping we felt three days ago—wood hitting the water, hollow and unnatural—is getting louder as it approaches. The matriarch sends out a query pattern through the pod, asking: Is it a known threat? The responses come back negative. Unidentified. Older females recall wooden shapes from far-off waters and seasons past. However, none of them were moving in this manner, generating unique acoustic signals, and none of them were approaching with this type of deliberate trajectory that indicates intention rather than an accidental drift.
We dive together, descending approximately twenty body lengths below the surface, where the pressure dampens the sound, and we can better perceive the approaching wooden thing’s acoustic signature without the background noise interfering from the surface.
The thumping continues, regularly and insistently, and is now joined by higher frequencies—scraping, creaking, something that resembles vocalizations but is distorted to the point where it sounds unlike any animal we recognize. The wooden thing passes over us and we track it through the vibrations in the water column that represent its size and shape—approximately 40 body lengths long, 10 body lengths wide, and shallow draft that shows it likely floats rather than swims, and that it is hollow inside due to how the sound reflects off of it differently than solid mass, causing echoes upon echoes that cause the entire structure to resonate based on its own motion.
It moves away. The thumping fades. We resurface, blow (refill our lungs with the sharp flavor of ocean air, salt, ozone, and distant landmass chemicals that ride the wind), and resume our movements to the south. The calves surface, breathe, and dive again. Their games resume as normal, because to them, nothing has occurred—just another floating object, another curiosity in an ocean full of unusual shapes and unusual sounds. They are too young to retain threat awareness after the immediate danger has passed.
The matriarch sings the continue pattern. We begin swimming southward again, our bodies slicing through the surface swells in the loose formation we assume during extended migrations when there is no immediate threat and no urgent reason to remain in tight proximity.
The wooden thing reappears later.
This time, it comes at us from the rear, the thumping grows louder and faster, and the trajectory is more direct; we can feel the smaller shapes moving on its surface through the vibrations they create as they move—compacted masses that appear to be jointed and limb-like, weights that transfer their load, creating slight changes in pressure in the water below.
The matriarch sings a warning harmonic, and we dive, quickly plunging into the cold layer where we can disperse if necessary, where the differential pressure makes it difficult for the wooden thing to track us from above. We remain underwater as long as possible (maybe ten breaths’ worth of time), but eventually must resurface. The wooden thing is waiting. It has tracked our general direction somehow, and when we break to blow, it adjusts its course to match ours. Remains positioned above us as we attempt to alter our course. We resurface a quarter mile from our initial dive site, and the wooden thing adjusts its course to compensate, placing the thumping directly above us now, the smaller living shapes clustered at one end of the wooden thing’s surface.
The water explodes.
No warning, no acoustic signature that would have indicated something was going to occur. Only the sudden violence in the pressure surrounding us—a loud crash that radiates through the water like thunder rips unexpectedly through the sky. Immediately followed by impact—something made of metal tearing through the surface and driving deep, trailed by a humming line that is under tension as it spools upward from above.
One of the adolescents screams—the high frequency alarm call that signifies extreme and immediate pain—and we immediately turn to locate him, finding him thrashing at the surface, his body convulsing around the metal rod that protrudes from his side just behind the dorsal fin, the line attached to the rod leading upward to the wooden thing where the small shapes are rapidly moving in organized patterns, producing vibrations that indicate purposeful action and coordination.
We do not comprehend. The metal is inserted too deeply into the adolescent to be removed by our mouths or flippers, and when the adolescent dives, the line tightens and pulls him back toward the surface, resisting his desperate efforts to escape into the deep water, where he may find safety in the pressure and darkness. His mother surfaces beside him and tries to place herself between him and the wooden thing, acting as a barrier. However, there is nothing to defend him from, because the threat has already struck, and is already inside him.
The line continues to pull him closer to the wooden thing, where the small shapes are organized and are making sounds we cannot decipher.
The matriarch sings the “chaos” patterns—scatter widely, group at depth, protect the calves. We dive; however, we do not scatter because we cannot abandon a pod member while he still draws breath, while he still emits his distress call into the water. His mother remains at the surface with him, her body pressed against his. Her songs are now high-pitched and frenzied, with harmonics we have no vocabulary for, no acoustic patterns to describe what she is attempting to convey, because this has never occurred prior to this; there is no song for this in our collective memory.
The line continues to pull; the adolescent struggles. His tail beats the water into froth, but he moves backward regardless, drawn to the wooden thing by forces greater than his strength, greater than his will, greater than the sum total of everything his body was designed to withstand. We can detect his breathing changing, the way it becomes erratic and desperate, and the precise instant his body begins to fail, as the acoustic signature of his distress call shifts in frequency and falls into ranges that signal failing biological processes—blood entering areas that should contain only air.
Additional metal objects fall from the wooden thing, each trailing its own line, and these ones strike the water in rapid succession—thunk-thunk-thunk—each strike generates a shockwave we can feel body-lengths away. Some miss. Some hit. We lose count. The adolescent ceases to sing. His mother continues to sing in the same flat, repetitive tone that indicates some form of damage—some aspect of her is malfunctioning in ways unrelated to physical harm.
No one provides analysis. This is beyond our understanding, beyond comprehension. We kill to eat—understand that exchange even as we flee from it. Sharks take the weak, the sick, the separated—that also fits within the logic of survival. But this? Metal is inserted into tissue. A line is dragging prey from the water into the air. An organism is completely removed from the ocean. Small shapes working cooperatively on a wooden thing that floats yet does not swim, that tracks but is not alive.
The matriarch sends out pattern recognition queries. Has any pod member encountered this previously? Within the accumulated songs, the teaching harmonics that have been passed down through generations, there is knowledge that would explain what the wooden thing is, what the small shapes want, and why the adolescent was taken.
The second-oldest female (aside from the matriarch) responds with incomplete information. From distant waters, from distant seasons. Wooden things similar to this one. Generally smaller. Yes, this same sequence of events—pursue, attack with metal, remove from water. She was young at the time, possibly the age of an adolescent today, and she watched from great depths as her uncle was taken the same way. His body was not recovered. The wooden thing had taken him away, and she had never detected his acoustic signature again, never found his skeleton on any ocean floor in any of the waters she had traveled since.
We wait. The wooden thing remains stationary on the surface; the thumping has ceased, and the small shapes continue to move across its surface, but at a slower rate, indicating exertion rather than urgency. We cannot see what the small shapes are doing—our vision tells us only that the wooden thing is black against the bright blue sky, and that shapes move on its surface in ways we cannot comprehend—but we can feel the vibrations of activity, of something being done to the body that was taken from the water.
The adolescent’s acoustic signature fades. First, the slight pressure fluctuations indicate breathing. Next, the deeper resonance indicates a heartbeat. Lastly, the harmonic frequencies indicate muscle tension and consciousness. Ultimately, there is only the vibration of the wooden thing, the sounds of the small shapes moving across its surface, and the complete lack of any signal that would indicate the adolescent still exists as anything other than mass.
Her mother floats beneath the wooden thing for three complete breathing cycles before the matriarch’s song pulls her away. A query pattern, rather than a command, asking: Can you continue? Can you swim and dive?
She answers by diving. We follow her downward into the cold, where the pressure increases, the light diminishes, and the wooden thing’s vibrations fade into background noise. We reassemble at a hundred body lengths depth, the pod gathering close enough that we can feel each other’s presence through the minor disturbances our bodies produce in the water, through the common acoustic space we share when we assemble in this manner.
The matriarch sends out assessment patterns. We are 15 now, not 16. One adolescent is missing. Her mother is injured in ways that have nothing to do with physical trauma. Her songs continue to run in the flat, repetitive tone that indicates something is damaged—something is not functioning correctly.
No one offers an explanation. We have no logical construct for this. Orcas kill to eat—we understand that exchange even as we flee from it. Sharks take the weak, the sick, the separated—that also fits into the logic of survival. But this? Metal thrust into flesh. Line dragging prey from the water into the air. Organism removed entirely from the ocean. Small shapes moving in concert on a wooden thing that floats yet does not swim, that pursues yet is not alive.
More females add additional fragments to the matriarch’s call. One of the older females, the grandmother, who died last season, called about the wooden things in the frigid waters of the ice shelves. One of the males who temporarily joined the pod to find a mate and begin his family brought songs of southern waters, where wooden things were abundant, where many entire pods had been reduced to scattered individuals. As with previous instances, the behavior is consistent: the wooden things approach, strike, remove the bodies from the water, and the bodies are never seen again.
We may possibly be beginning to understand why these behaviors occur. Possibly, we will soon understand the reasons behind them. However, the behavior itself is clearly identifiable: the wooden things hunt. The small objects located upon the wooden things hunt. Instead of using their teeth to capture prey, they use metal; instead of biting off pieces of their prey as they capture it, they use lines to pull the entire prey from the water. However, as far as we can see, the basic transactions remain similar—the wooden things are predators, we are prey, the ocean is unsafe while they are present.
The matriarch begins to sing new instructions. Surface = dangerous. If the wooden things are visible, we go to extreme depths and stay at those depths until they have passed us. If the wooden things approach, we disperse and meet up again at a distance. If the wooden things pursue us, we do not surface in regular patterns; we do not continue on our normal courses. We do not allow the metal to reach us. The calves are always placed in a position between the adult whales at all times. The adolescents no longer engage in playing chase games on the surface where they can be detected from above.
These instructions become a song. The matriarch teaches them to the pod in the long harmonics that the pod will remember and pass on to the next generations, and that will become part of the accumulated knowledge that we travel with to both the northern feeding areas and the southern breeding areas, and along the enormous migrations that characterize our existence.
However, there is one question the songs cannot answer, and one pattern that does not make sense regardless of how we try to fit it into our understanding of how the ocean operates: the wooden thing took the body but did not eat it. We remained submerged for three hours, during which the mother continued singing her flat, repeating song tones until she finally reversed direction and swam back to where the adolescent had been removed. The matriarch attempted to call her back, but she refused, would not cease, and so we followed, for we never abandon pod members when their songs are fractured in this manner. We surfaced at the location where the wooden thing had drifted. It was gone. There was no blood, no flesh, no remaining parts that indicated feeding existed in the water—just the faint chemical signature of something unnatural—something that does not belong in fresh ocean water—a pungent artificial taste that lingers in the water where the wooden thing floated, that disperses very gradually through the current. None of this has any relevance to us since we have no reference for the burning acrid taste of rendered fat, the sharp bite of oxidizing metal, or the salty chemical leak of fear from the small shapes.
The adolescent is gone; the mother’s songs are fractured. The pod travels south with new information, stored in our collective memory like a burden that will not dissipate.
The surface is no longer safe.
We have always known orcas. We have always known sharks. We have always known storms, ice, and the many ways the ocean can claim life. We have also always known the wooden things. We have always known the small shapes that move on the surfaces of the wooden things. We have now learned that some predators remove the entire body of their prey and leave nothing behind. We have now learned that some killings serve no purpose that we can comprehend. We have now learned that the ocean contains predators that operate without any rules we can identify.
There are approximately thirty days until we arrive at the breeding waters. We now swim in tighter formations. We now surface less frequently. We instruct the calves to dive deeper and faster and to remain below the thermal layer, where the wooden things cannot detect us as readily. The mother now swims at the edge of the pod formation. Her songs are still sung in the flat, repeating tones, still searching for an explanation that will never be provided.
Somewhere in the waters we have previously traversed, the wooden thing continues its hunting. The ocean is large enough that we will likely not encounter it again during this season, probably not next season, and perhaps never. However, the knowledge is now forever etched in our minds. The knowledge is now part of the songs. The knowledge will be remembered by the pod.
And whenever we hear that rhythmic pounding, that hollow, invasive noise of wood against the water, we will know what it represents.
We will dive deep.
And we will not resurface until the silence returns.
The horror of being intelligible but never understood, or of being understood and still unseen, or perhaps just the feeling of it. The trauma hits hard.
Damn. This was so moving Ellis!