Call Me Moby, Episode 3
The Marked One
Trigger warning: violence, death, ecological horror
The wooden things keep coming.
Forty moons after the adolescent was captured, another one found us. Seventy suns after that, two more. As we migrated through the middle ground between the northern waters where we eat, and the southern waters where we breed, the number of wooden things we saw increased to the point where the frequency felt abnormal compared to the patterns of other pods that migrate through the adjacent waters. We heard about these encounters via long-distance communication, which allows pods to communicate over several hundred body lengths; they report seeing wooden things, avoiding them, and some wooden things approaching them and then leaving when the pod dived deep and remained submerged until the thumping disappeared and turned back into the background noise that indicated safety and distance and allowed them to surface once more without metal piercing their flesh.
However, our interactions with wooden things do not follow the same patterns described in the other pods’ songs.
As we surface, the wooden things change direction. We can see it through changes in their acoustic signature—the thumping, which was heading in one direction, starts to head in our direction, speeds up and travels with an intended path, not coincidentally or randomly through the ocean’s vastness, where thousands of wooden things are moving through waters that are large enough for all of us to live in without constantly crossing paths with each other.
The other pods surface, breathe, and continue migrating, with wooden things either passing them or moving far from them. Wooden things are like storms in the sense that they are dangerous if you encounter them directly. Still, you can avoid confronting them by carefully watching for the currents and wind patterns and the atmospheric pressure that indicate when to dive, when to surface, and when to take an alternate route to get away from the worst of the coming storm.
We don’t have that option anymore.
As soon as the one with the white forehead and hump comes to the surface to breathe—as we all must come to the surface to breathe, the air isn’t an option for us—we are able to feel and hear the thumping adjust and pursue and close in on us with a persistence that uses up energy and time and the peace of mind that we used to enjoy between the waters we hunt and the waters we breed in, when migration was a thing we did together in a loose formation, calves played at the surface. At the same time, the adults watched beneath the surface, and we swam south through the warm waters that signaled safety and abundance and the knowledge that the cycles of seasons would occur just as they always had.
That certainty does not exist anymore.
We are now twelve. When we first saw the wooden object that took the adolescent, we were sixteen. In the time between that event and this one, four more were removed from the water—not all of them by the metal and rope. However, two of them were taken that way, lifted into the air where we could not go after them, where the thumping of the wooden object drowned out whatever sounds they made as they died or were killed or simply stopped sending vibrations indicating life and breathing.
One of the remaining two was hit by metal but broke free, swam away with injuries that bled into the water for days before infection caused his singing to become disorganized and his swimming erratic. Ultimately, he stopped answering the pattern calls asking if he could continue, if he could dive, if he could find food to allow him to maintain strength enough to recover, or at least to reach the breeding waters where the shallow warm waters may provide him with a chance to recover.
He did not recover.
The matriarch now sings a new pattern, one we have been avoiding through three seasons, but can no longer avoid because the evidence is becoming too regular to deny: the wooden things are tracking him specifically, the one with the white markings and the hump that catch the light in a way that makes him visible from a distance that should signal safety but instead signals danger, and when he surfaces, the wooden things adjust their course. And when the rest of us surface, spread out across the water, the wooden things pause or resume their original courses or move towards us momentarily before continuing their courses.
The matriarch sends out a query pattern through the pod: Can we split? Will the one with the white markings attract the wooden things away? In contrast, the calves and the mothers and the others that are not yet targeted continue south to the breeding waters, where they will be safer, or at least have a chance to raise the next generation without metal falling from above every few days.
No one answers right away because the query asks us to break apart our pod structure and violate the patterns that have kept us alive through predators and storms and the lean years when food was scarce and only our collective hunting methods that required every adult to work together to corral prey to the surface where we could feed efficiently and store enough energy to make it through the migrations and the breeding season and the periods between the abundant waters and the poor ones.
The alternative is worse.
Calves can’t survive the constant pursuit. They must surface more often than adults; their bodies are smaller, and their lungs aren’t fully formed to hold their breath for the extended dives that allow us to hide when the wooden things are near. Calves must learn and practice the hunting skills that will help them survive when they grow old enough to hunt for themselves. They can’t do that when they’re fleeing, when they’re diving and surfacing, only when the thumping is far enough away to take the short time needed to surface and get some air and notice what’s coming from the horizon.
The matriarch decides for us.
Most of the pod will continue south along a course that takes us to the eastern side of our regular migration route, further from the shallow coastal waters where the wooden things are most concentrated, and we will swim quickly and surface sporadically, making it hard for any one wooden object to track the whole group. Nine of us will swim this route—the matriarch, the calves, the mothers, the adults, whose attention the wooden things have not yet identified. One of the adults, the one with the white markings, will swim west with two willing adults who will leave the larger group and stay with the one with the white markings because they won’t abandon a fellow pod member who is still living and swimming and singing, even if the logic suggests that the larger group’s survival is more important than the continued existence of any one individual.
Two older males stepped forward to stay with the one with the white markings in the way that whales step forward—that is, they changed their position in the water and sent the low-frequency tones that indicate agreement, commitment, and acceptance of whatever comes next.
We don’t say goodbye, because we do not have farewells with rituals or performative expressions of grief that mark the end of something. Instead, we acknowledge the separation through song—the matriarch transmits new coordinates where we can possibly meet again if the wooden things lose interest in the one with the white markings, if the waters become safe again, if the one with the white markings lives long enough to make meeting again possible. The mother of the adolescent who was taken by a wooden object in the first encounter repeats the damaged, broken, repeating tone that she sang in that moment, still searching for the reason that will never arrive. The calves send high-frequency calls that ask why the pod structure is breaking down, why some adults are swimming in a different direction from the others, and why the familiar pattern that has existed since birth is breaking apart, causing the adults to swim through different waters to various locations.
The adults don’t respond because there is no song to explain to the young why sometimes survival means separating, why sometimes the ocean separates us based on criteria we have no control over, and why sometimes being visible means being hunted and being hunted means putting everyone else in the pod at risk.
The pod breaks apart.
Nine swim south and east—the matriarch, the calves, the mothers, the adults whose bodies have not acquired the markings that cause the wooden things to pursue them. Together they dive, and we watch their acoustic signatures fade into the distance and become fainter as they increase their distance from us, until finally the ocean’s ambient noise swallows their presence. We are left: the three of us, now swimming west through waters that feel cooler than they should considering the sun is warming the surface layers, listening for the rhythmic pulses of the wooden things that we know will come, that have always come, and that show no indication of slowing as long as we continue to surface and breathe and exist in the waters that the wooden things claim through persistence and metal and the confident expectation that eventually every whale must surface.
The three of us swim for six days without incident, which is long enough to start thinking that the separation worked, that the wooden things were following the larger group and not specifically tracking the one with the white markings whose forehead and hump remain as conspicuous as they have always been, catching the light every time he surfaces to blow and providing the contrast that makes him identifiable from distances that should indicate invisibility but clearly do not.
On the seventh day, the thumping returns.
We are resting at the surface, our bodies bobbing up and down with the waves that are traveling through this area where the currents intersect and create turbulence that complicates navigation but reduces the accuracy of detection by the wooden things from above, the surface commotion concealing the slight disturbance created by our breathing, or so we assumed or at least hoped during the six days of quiet that led us to think we had finally escaped the range of the wooden things.
The thumping is coming from the north and traveling faster than typical drifting speed, which indicates a wooden object is simply moving through the water and not targeting anything. It is traveling with the intentional speed, which means they have detected something and are closing in on a target rather than drifting aimlessly through the ocean’s vastness, where thousands of wooden things are moving through waters that are large enough for all of us to coexist without constantly colliding with one another.
We dive immediately, descending through the warm surface layer into the cold zone, where the pressure rises, and the light fades. The wooden object’s vibrations are dampened by the density that causes sound to propagate through the water differently, which causes everything to seem farther away than it really is. However, we can still detect the thumping and track it as it adjusts its course as we swim downward. When we level out at sixty body lengths and swim northwest to put distance between ourselves and the incoming rhythm, the thumping adjusts its course to pursue us, even though we are invisible from above, even though the water column between us and the surface should eliminate the possibility of the wooden object detecting our location with any degree of accuracy.
They can.
When we surface two hours later, having swum approximately ten thousand body lengths from the point where we dove, the wooden object is waiting for us. Not directly above us—possibly a half-day’s swim to the east—but close enough that the acoustic signature of the wooden object is unmistakable, close enough that when we exhale and refill our lungs and prepare to dive again, we can feel the change in the wooden object’s rhythm that tells us it has detected us, that it is turning, that the pursuit is starting again.
The wooden thing is following him, tracking him, adjusting its course when he surfaces, and ignoring the others when they surface somewhere else. There is no solution to this that doesn’t result in his death.
For three more days, we swam together, diving and resurfacing in patterns that should make it difficult for the wooden thing to track us and that should create enough uncertainty about our location to cause the wooden thing to either pick which target to pursue or to give up altogether. However, the thumping never faded completely; it never moved far enough away from us to indicate safety; it always returned to us within a few hours of his surfacing; and it always closed the distance.
On the fourth day after the wooden thing first appeared, it got close enough to strike. We were very near the surface when this happened, having just completed a dive that lasted much longer than we like to spend submerged, one that had forced us to push beyond what our bodies could endure without air, making our lungs hurt, and our blood feel thick. Our movements slow due to the oxygen depletion that occurs when you remain submerged for too long in order to avoid being detected at the surface, where you must breathe.
He surfaced first and took a big breath, filling his lungs with the salty taste of ocean air and the distant chemical markers of land carried on the wind that comes from the west. Before he could dive again, the metal fell from above and struck him.
The impact was wrong in every way. It was metal tearing through his flesh and blubber and muscle with a force that created a shock wave that we felt thirty body lengths away, followed immediately by the high frequency scream that indicates extreme pain, the kind that overrides every other signal, that causes the body to convulse and thrash and send out distress signals at volumes that carry for hundreds of body lengths through water that carries sound well enough that every predator within range will know that something is injured, something is vulnerable, something is bleeding.
The metal was attached to a line that went taut immediately, and began to pull towards the surface of the wooden thing with a tension that indicated weight and resistance and the start of the process we saw earlier, when the adolescent was removed from the water -- the hauling, the removal from water, the disappearance into the air, where we cannot follow.
However, the one with the white markings is not an adolescent. His body is massive, his strength is considerable, even with the metal embedded in his dorsal ridge, where the muscles are dense and powerful. When he dove, the line stretched and groaned with the strain, creating drag that slowed his descent, but did not stop it. And we could hear the wooden thing’s structure creaking under the strain as the massive body beneath the surface exerted a force it wasn’t designed to bear.
He thrashed violently, rolling and twisting in the water, using his weight and momentum against the line’s resistance. We heard the unmistakable crack that signaled failure—not bones breaking, but rope fibers snapping under an impossible load, the line parting somewhere between the metal lodged in his flesh and the wooden thing above, the tension released instantly as the connection broke. He was freed, still bleeding, still bearing the embedded metal, but no longer tied to the surface.
He breached.
It was the explosive launch that occurs when rage or pain or panic supersedes the deliberate energy management which usually governs how we move through the water, when the body acts before thought, when the imperative to survive dictates “up and out and away”, although breaching wastes a great deal of energy and produces a tremendous amount of splash and makes us visible from distances that would normally ensure our safety. It was much more powerful than the controlled rise we make when we surface to breathe.
He dove fast, descending to maybe twenty body lengths, then reversed direction and shot upward, building momentum through the water column, bursting through the surface with enough force to lift half his body into the air—and at the peak of the breach, maybe ten body lengths above the waterline, when gravity begins to reclaim him and the massive weight starts its fall back toward the water, he twisted, angled his descent, aimed his body not toward empty ocean but toward the wooden thing that sat approximately fifty body lengths away at the surface, the source of the metal still embedded in his flesh, still broadcasting pain with every movement.
The impact was devastating.
His head collided with the wooden thing with the full force of his fall, moving through 30 body lengths of water and 10 of air. His weight far exceeded what the slender wooden structure could handle, and the resulting sound was not a smooth thunderous crash or a whale’s low rumble, but the splintering noise of something breaking under forces it was never meant to endure. The wood shattered, the structure fractured, and parts broke off and sank. The sudden stop of surface vibrations marked that the floating object was now sinking, broken, and scattering into pieces that no longer held together.
We watched from the depths of the water as the smaller creatures fell from the broken wooden thing, as they entered the water with the irregular splashing that signaled panic and uncoordinated motion, as some sank immediately trailing the chemical signature of blood, while others thrashed at the surface generating pressure waves that broadcast their location and vulnerability to predators that could detect those vibrations over hundreds of body lengths of water.
A second wooden thing was approaching from the east, rapidly, but was still too far away to matter yet.
The sharks arrived first.
We recognized their signatures immediately: sleek bodies racing in a unique pattern that signaled hunting rather than just cruising, attracted by the blood, thrashing, and chaos that indicate easy prey. They dove down to the bodies that had ceased moving, drifting through the water column where feeding is easy, safe, and carries minimal risk of injury from resisting prey.
They ate the easy—already sinking—prey first, ripped flesh from the lifeless shapes, produced additional blood, and drew additional sharks from distances that would have allowed hours to pass but resulted in minutes due to the strength of the chemical bloom that carried the scent trail and triggered feeding behavior in every shark within the range of it.
More of them arrived. The bodies that were drifting down were consumed or scattered. The sharks redirected to the surface, where shapes continued to move, thrash, generate the irregular vibrations that signify injured prey, that signify the thing at the surface cannot escape, that signify feeding will be easier than chasing healthy prey through open water, where escape is always possible.
We observed the sharks circling, striking, and eating. One by one, the shapes at the surface ceased to move, ceased to produce pressure waves, and ceased to exist as sentient beings that could pose a threat or provide resistance. The sharks continued circling, but they eventually lost interest, became satiated, and dispersed throughout the surrounding waters, returning to their normal hunting grounds, their maintained territories, and their baseline behaviors that occur between the intense feeding episodes that blood in the water facilitates.
As the sharks finished feeding and dispersed, which took about thirty breath cycles, the second wooden object moved closer to the debris field, and its thumping sound became louder and clearer with each glide through the waves.
The three of us remained at approximately 40 body lengths below the surface of the water, at a safe distance, watching to determine if the threat had ended or merely paused. The one with the white markings was injured, we could tell by the unusual swimming pattern that signified pain, the slight drag the embedded metal caused, and the chemical signature of his blood mixing with the salt and the remnants of the wooden thing and the sharks’ feeding that had filled this region with death-signals that we had no desire to investigate closely.
The one with the white markings began to ascend from the depths of the water, rising slowly, approaching the debris field with the caution that signified curiosity mixed with uncertainty, determining if the shape on the floating wood was still a potential threat, if the destruction of the wooden thing meant that the threat had finally ceased, and if it was safe to surface there or if the same pattern would play out with new metal, new lines, and new hauling into the air where death awaits.
He rose to approximately 20 body lengths below the surface, close enough to sense details, close enough to determine that the shape on the debris was no longer thrashing, no longer producing the violent movements that signified aggression, and no longer carrying the aggressive intentions that typically accompany encounters with wooden things. He hovered in place at that depth, observing, and did not approach any closer until he was satisfied that the threat had ended. The single shape floating on the debris was still alive. Exhausted from the shark attack and having lost one of its limbs, the shape emitted a weak pulse, which we could still sense.
The other wooden thing arrived at the debris field, its thumping changed from approaching to stationary as it reached the wreckage, and the small shapes on its surface began to move in coordinated fashion that suggested organizational behavior rather than panic, and something descended from the wooden thing toward the floating debris where the shape waited for the rescue.
The one with the white markings registered the new arrival and began to turn, began to descend back toward the safety of deep water, began to dive away from the surface where the new wooden thing had positioned itself, and where new metal might fall, and where the same pattern that had just occurred might happen again.
The metal fell from above, sped through the water, trailed the line behind it, covered the distance between the surface of the wooden object and his body in the time it took for one breath, one heartbeat, one fleeting moment of recognition that turned into impact.
The second harpoon struck near the first.
The free Episodes 1-3 showed you how the hunt began.
What comes next is decades of relentless pursuit, the revenge voyage, the final three days, and the truth about what really happened that day. This is where the distance disappears.
Such a fascinating story! I’m curious about the kind of research you did to bring this to life! It feels both natural and scientific!
The restraint in showing extinction unfolding through policy, physics, and probability makes the violence far more disturbing than if it were emotionally inflated. This series has made me attuned to writing where catastrophe is shown through structure rather than through sentiment, and this is something rare, Ellis! Wow.