Roger Payne was not hard to spot at the airport on Maui that February day in 1990. He was the only person who looked as if he had just flown out of a war zone. His left eye bore a half-moon bruise below it, a small piece of gouged forehead had been pushed back together, and an angry cut was just starting to heal above his mouth. One evening earlier in the week, he had strolled across the lawn, hands tucked in his pockets, regarding the beauty of the Hawaiian night sky, forgotten about a low rock fence, and tripped squarely onto his face before he could pull his hands out to break the fall. His glasses fell, too, and cracked at the nose bridge. Repaired repeatedly with Krazy Glue, they now sat at several angles on his face, one lens tilted forward, the frame slightly askew. So it was an unlikely apparition holding a red-and-yellow lei of Plumeria blossoms that greeted me in the polyglot hubbub of the airport. But it was also someone I had waited a dozen years to meet, ever since the night in the mid-seventies, at Cornell University’s Bailey Hall, when I attended his lecture on the songs of humpback whales, which he concluded with a duet for cello and whale song. He was clearly an expert and talented cellist, but it was the whale songs themselves—great booming ragas of creaking and moaning and seat-shaking bass—that captivated everyone with their beauty and mystery.
Leaving the overhanging shadows of the terminal, we strolled out into the sunlight and drove to the town of Kihei and an oceanside house owned by Ani and Jerry Moss, two whale enthusiasts. Over the years, Roger had traveled the world, recording and analyzing the songs of humpback whales and studying the habits of other whales. By his definition (derived from Melville), a whale is “a mammal in the sea that has a horizontal tail and spouts,” so it includes both the large animals we usually think of as whales and also the small whales we describe as dolphins or porpoises. Whales have the largest brains on earth, brains every bit as complex as our own. They have culture, and they have language. They sing songs that obey the kinds of rules one finds in classical music. What does a creature with the largest brain on earth use it for? Why does it sing? What do the songs mean? Almost everything about whales is a tantalizing mystery. We ache to know about other forms of equally intelligent life in the universe, and yet here are creatures as unknown as extraterrestrials right among us, moving in a slow-motion ballet under the oceans, hidden from our view. Questions about mind and music had been plaguing me for some time, so although I had never met Roger Payne before, I had met some of his fascinations and questions and considered them old friends.
Turning onto a shore road, we found the Mosses’ home, set among trumpet flowers and bougainvillea, sprawling on a promontory above the sea, with its own small sandy beach and ragged shoreline. Jerry, one of the founders of A & M Records, had just left for Los Angeles, but Ani was still there, along with her sister, Katy. Ani was a tall, thin, beautiful, fey, fawnlike woman of unidentifiable age who had once been a Vogue model (and still looked the part). Her sister, also a thin, pretty blonde, was an accountant from Salt Lake City, who could, as it turned out, tell off-color, working-class jokes with such wide-eyed innocence that they packed a double whammy. The plan was for Roger and me to rent a Zodiac and go out to find some of the singers. Each day, we would rise at 5:00 A.M., phone the National Weather Service’s general- and marine-forecast recordings, and even the pilots’ Flight Service Station, then scan the ocean through binoculars, and see whitecaps too treacherous to risk. A trough had settled over the islands, bringing steady rain and high winds; the seas were eighteen feet, and the storm system was unyielding. So since we were housebound, Roger worked in the water, installing an offshore buoy to which he had attached a hydrophone; an antenna hitched outside the Mosses’ house led to a receiver in their living room, and this would allow them to record whale songs for him continuously in season or tune in whenever they were just in the mood for a concert.
Roger was a tall, slender man with sturdy shoulders, enormous hands on which the nails were neat and trimmed, a long stride, and a slightly rocking gait, probably the result of a knee operation he had had the previous year. When he walked fast, his hips sometimes seemed to be balancing along a spirit level. Parted on the left, thinning a little on top, his slate-gray hair looked slightly windblown even when freshly combed. He had a large forehead on which four evenly spaced lines formed when he was concentrating, hazel eyes that more often looked brown than green, and a small, neat nose. Sometimes, in repose, his face was undisturbable and fifty-something, but when animated it often became that of a rompy, mischievious twenty-year-old. Although he spent many months out of doors, he had the kind of front-only tan that one acquires accidentally. His clothes were freshly laundered and ironed, his gray-green pants had a small constellation of holes on one leg, and both pockets on his blue shirt were frayed. He slipped into a Brooklyn accent from time to time in conversation, just to emphasize the silliness of something or other, but his normal speaking voice was unusually resonant and poised like a singer’s, and indeed he was a madrigal singer. What dialect he spoke would be hard to pin down. In a cosmopolitan vernacular that shifted easily among classes and cultures, his vocabulary was peppered with scientific jargon, sixties lingo, literary allusions, musical terms, poetic images, casual down-and-dirty cursing, plus the verbal dressage needed for courtesy or protocol. A word like groovy or bozo mixed naturally with the down-home expression “right quick,” such British TV sitcom exclamations as “Lord love a duck!”; a heartfelt “Bless you” by way of thanks; or an unexpected leave-taking like “Let’s blow this Popsicle stand.” “Well, that sucks the big one,” he could say unselfconsciously, and the next instant utter a string of well-groomed clichés. In situations that required the delicate handling of people, he glided into a tone of casual high regard that was intense, warm, and smooth as flowing lava. His father, an electrical engineer at Bell Labs in New York City, had been every bit as absentminded as Roger freely confessed to being. His grandfather had been a logger, his mother a violinist and violist, beside whom he often sat when they played string quartets with friends. Before she married, she had taught music at the Mannes Music School in New York.
For days, telephone calls had been crackling back and forth between the house and a ship at sea. Roger, who was director of the Long-Term Research Institute, in Lincoln, Massachusetts (an affiliate of the World Wildlife Fund), had been trying to acquire a boat equipped with directional sonar. But the boat needed expensive and unexpected repairs. Now it seemed a smaller but more workable boat might soon become available. This new forty-six footer was built in Sri Lanka, had directional sonar, a directional hydrophone, ten halogen lamps built into the hull to illuminate the ocean, and other desirable fittings. Roger was also trying to coordinate trips to Japan, the Galápagos, Alaska, and Hawaii, and to review whale research from all over the world. The International Whaling Commission declared a moratorium on commercial whaling in 1982, ten years after the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment called for one. But the IWC moratorium didn’t take effect until 1986, and it left a loophole: Countries could “kill, take and treat whales for purposes of scientific research.” Japan had been especially unscrupulous about taking advantage of the loophole, and Norway was another offender. So much of Roger’s time was also spent trying to save endangered whales. His days brimmed with commotion and he must have felt like he was living in the middle of a Charles Ives symphony. Most of his recent research efforts had focused on the humpback whale’s songs and the family life of the “right whale,” but all whales intrigued him, since scientists still knew so little about them, and nonscientists even less.
If you ask someone to draw a whale, she will probably draw a sperm whale, the bulbous-headed whale made famous in Melville’s Moby Dick, a book that is as much a treatise on whales as it is a piece of fiction. But whales come in many shapes, sizes, and colors. There are two basic groups: the toothed whales (Odontoceti, from the Latin for “tooth” and “whale”) and the baleen whales (Mysticeti, from the Latinized Greek word for “whale”). Toothed whales include the sperm whale, the dolphin, and the orca, or killer whale, and they have a single external blowhole, which in the course of evolution has migrated to the top of the head. They echolocate just as bats do, using sonar to scan their world, find their prey, and map their underwater landscape. And they have teeth, which they use to hold on to such prey as fish, squid, and shrimp. Whales swallow their prey whole, so the teeth are for grasping rather than for chewing.
In contrast, baleen whales don’t have teeth but hundreds of tightly packed, springy baleen plates (made of keratin, the same substance as human fingernails), which grow down from the upper gums. Baleen whales have paired blowholes—nostrils, in fact—which are on the top of the head. Some baleen species graze peacefully as they move through the water, rolling slowly through the surface with their mouths yawning open. Because the baleen has a smooth outside edge and a bristly inside edge, water can flow freely through the whale’s mouth, but krill, plankton, and small schooling fish get caged inside. Other species have pleats on the throat, so that they can stretch their mouths open even wider, like valises, and when they’re feeding they roll on one side, take in a huge amount of water, expand the pleated throat, force water against the roof of the mouth, and press the water out, leaving the meal behind.
Those two large groups, Odontoceti and Mysticeti, include seventy-seven species of whales and dolphins—all that inhabit the earth. In a rather ghoulish twist, one of those species, the right whale, a Mysticete, gets its name because it was “the right whale to kill.” Ignorant about whale species, new whalers would look out, see a whale, and ask if that was the right whale or not; in time, the name stuck. When right whales are killed, instead of sinking as most dead whales do, they float; they don’t struggle much in battle, either, and their baleen was extremely valuable. Now the right whale is one of the rarest whale species, and it has a special distinction in the history of human affairs. Every species of animal that we have brought to extinction has occupied a limited area—an island, an archipelago, a continent. We have never in our tenure on earth brought to extinction a truly cosmopolitan species, one with a worldwide distribution. “The closest we’ve ever come is with the right whale,” Roger explained over dinner, “and we came so vanishingly close. It would have represented a new benchmark, a new low, the lowest, the most careless, the most outrageous thing that humanity had yet done to the planet. The fact that our generation is now making the effort to prevent that extinction is evidence that we’re waking up at last. In that sense, the right whale is an important bellwether of the human condition.”
Another species of Mysticeti, the gray whale, became extinct in the North Atlantic by the end of the seventeen hundreds, at the hands of Basque whalers, the founders of seagoing whaling in the West. It was almost certainly those whalers, and the Vikings, who first discovered America, not Columbus. Roger quipped that what Columbus really discovered was “public relations.” When the gray whale was formally “discovered” in the nineteenth century in the North Pacific, it was called the devilfish. Captain Charles Scammon, a naturalist, found its major breeding areas in the lagoons of Baja California, and furiously hunted it; the grays killed several men and smashed all his boats in very short order. This same species is now noted for what’s called “the friendly-whale phenomenon.” In 1977, a single gray whale in San Ignacio Lagoon, near Scammon’s Lagoon, off Baja California, became “chronically friendly,” as Roger put it, and allowed itself to be patted by passengers of all the whale-watching boats that could find it. During the next several seasons, the number of friendly whales soared, until anyone who wanted to pet a whale could do so. Though no one was keeping count, in the previous winter there had been hundreds of gray whales approaching boats for cosseting and stroking. Now it seems to have become part of their whale culture, something they’ve learned from each other. In the lagoons, where gray whales gather in high numbers in the wintertime, it can grow terribly windy. Tourists in a whale-watching boat near a gray whale may find the wind blowing them along the surface. The whale isn’t borne along by the wind, and it will go through contortions to stay with the boat, presenting its belly to be scratched and rubbed. Many times a day, this will happen, with boatloads of people leaning out to touch a whale. Originally, the friendly gray whales drew tourists, but it soon was the other way around—the presence of the tourists drawing the whales, who actively searched for boats. The whales rush out and will even ram into a boat and then quickly roll over like puppies, belly-up, because they love to be patted and rubbed and scratched. To Roger, they were the classic example of how wrong our conceptions about whales had been: “Imagine, it was the devilfish, the malicious animal that had the gall to kill people who were attempting at that very moment to reach its heart or lungs with a spear so that it would bleed to death internally. Not a very strong sign of aggression, I should say. How could we have been so wrong to name this animal the devilfish when it turns out to be so friendly?”
One genus of whales, Balaenoptera, includes five closely related species—sei, brydes, minke, blue, pygmy right—which are essentially small, medium, and large versions of the same body plan. The minke whale is the smallest baleen whale. The pygmy right whale, a rare creature about which little is known, is so similar to minke whales that it’s hard for scientists to identify in the wild. But the blue whale is easier: It is the largest animal ever to exist on earth. It can grow to as much as a hundred feet long. Its tongue weighs as much as an elephant. To execute the simple maneuver of putting its head down—that is, going from horizontal to vertical in the water—it first has to be in a hundred feet of water. When it does that or stands up on its tail, it experiences a difference in pressure from the tip of its nose to the tip of its tail of three atmospheres. The heart of a blue whale weighs several tons, and on a factory ship it often took six brawny men to drag the heart out with flensing hooks. The aorta leading from its, heart is large enough for a child to crawl through, and the major blood vessels appear to be about the size of a sewer pipe. A salmon could comfortably swim down them.
The blue whale makes loud, low-frequency sounds that can travel enormous distances. The ocean transmits sound in strange and unlikely ways. There is a layer of water, known as the deep sound channel, in which sound waves can be trapped and spread great distances because they bend back into the channel over and over, without losing much energy. Under those circumstances, whale sound can travel as much as five hundred miles before blending into background noise. These days, the oceans are polluted by human sounds. But in the tens of millions of years before the advent of ships (during which about 99.9 percent of the evolution of blue whales took place), whale sounds might have traveled out to distances of several thousand miles, so that two whales could have sat on opposite sides of the same ocean and been in contact with each other. Those wouldn’t have needed to be complex conversations. They would not have been chitchat, either, but simple exchanges of information about where food could be found. If a whale had been hungry, it might have remained quiet; if it had been well fed, it might have spoken. Then, all a hungry whale would have needed to do was swim in the direction of the loudest sound. If a whale had had too much to eat, it would have been to its advantage to share excess food with its kin; next year, its kin might have returned the favor.
Finally, there is the humpback. Although it has long, paddlelike white flippers and a huge tail with markings unique as fingerprints, its most arresting feature is that it sings—sings complicated, beautiful songs. A bird will sing a song, grow quiet, and then perhaps sing its song again; but a humpback will sing a long, complex, sustained song and then go back and start again without any break, singing continuously. When it dives, it flexes its back sharply and appears to have a hump on its back, hence the name. It is acrobatic when it breaches. Sometimes, it will roll onto one side and wave a long flipper out of the water. At others, it will stick its head out of the water in a “spy hop,” to look around. When a humpback feeds, it swims in a tight circle, spinning a net of bubbles around a school of krill or fish, which become alarmed by the bubbles and clump together, whereupon the humpback swings toward the center, mouth open, and gobbles them up.
Whales are mammals: They breathe air, bear live young, nurse them with milk, and have hair. People don’t think of whales as hairy, but they do have a few whiskers. And though we picture whales wobbling with blubber to keep warm, a whale’s real problem is staying cool. A whale is like a house with a too-large furnace and too few radiators. When a whale exercises in warm equatorial waters, it can die of overheating. If it races hell-for-leather in pursuit of prey, it can become so hot it virtually blows up. After a whale is killed in the Antarctic, it is eviscerated with a long, sharp flensing knife. The entire length of the whale’s body cavity is opened up so that the icy water can wash it thoroughly. Then it’s tied tail first to the bow of the catcher boat and dragged back to the factory ship, where it will be hauled aboard and cut up. If the trip back to the factory ship takes too long or if the whale is left in the water for too long, even though it is lying in icy water, its bones will be charred by the heat of its internal decay. When that happens, it’s referred to as a burnt whale. Imagine an animal generating so much heat that even though lying under icy water with its belly cut wide open, its bones cook.
Sperm whales, most of which live close to the equator, cool off by diving to unimaginable depths. Plunging down to where the water temperature is close to freezing, sperm whales feed on squid or large fish, sometimes swallowing sharks whole. In that strange realm of pressure and near blackness, a sperm whale swims like a spaceship through slowly moving galaxies of luminescent fish—a world difficult for us to imagine. Small wonder that whales seem magical.
As Roger sprawled on the rug, adjusting the receiver, whale songs filled the house with otherworldly music, produced by singers who had been his often invisible companions for nearly thirty years. Although he had a photographic “fluke record” of many humpback whales, and could also identify some singers by their phrasing of the songs, he had most often heard the songs without being able to see the singer or guess who it might be. In that sense, the songs were like those of the troubadours, who wandered through the Middle Ages regaling people with songs anonymous but unforgettable.
Why do whales sing? One theory argues that humpback whales use their songs as other animals use their horns. The whale with the longest and most ingenious song wards off competing males. Another theory has it that the songs are more like peacocks’ tails—the whale with the best song is the one most attractive to females. But that doesn’t explain why whales revise their songs. I wondered if whales changed their songs for the reasons humans do—for sheer variety, or to include new myths or folk wisdom, or out of a kind of mental fidgeting, or as a way to give the group a stronger sense of community, or simply as a form of play, or as a method for generations to set themselves apart, or to pass along new information about their changing environment, or for reasons as whimsical as fashion. They live at such great distances from one another. Maybe singing is their equivalent of shepherds’ whistling or yodeling across valleys with news—or just so they don’t feel quite so alone.
“Could they be changing their songs for the same reasons human beings do, in an intelligent way?” I asked Roger.
He glanced at me over the top of his glasses, then returned to a delicate soldering job and said, “Maurice Ewing, who was head of the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, in Palisades, New York, and is one of those who really synthesized the details and facts that led to plate tectonics, spoke of what he called ‘brutal facts.’ A brutal fact is one that goes against your natural inclinations and beliefs, yet you’re forced to pay attention to it and recognize that it’s telling you something wholly unexpected and very powerful. Well, some brutal facts associated with whales make it very difficult to figure out what the songs are all about. Let me give you a few examples. The songs are incredibly complex. They change every year, and they’re very beautiful. For us, they trigger many ideas and emotions—some people respond to whale songs by weeping. But another brutal fact is that they’re monotonous. They repeat endlessly. It doesn’t sound that way to a casual listener, but if you sit for an entire season listening to whale songs, you can get roundly sick of some of the variations you’re hearing. A song won’t be completely different for several years, so you must keep in mind that whatever it means, its message is bound to be very monotonous.”
A long, trilling bass filled the house with sounds both haunting and subterranean. Creaking doors turned into ricocheted moans. Nothing looked out of the ordinary, but the air felt as if somewhere glasses were thinly rattling. How could this plunging, stuttering, and swooning be monotony? To a trained ear, familiar phrases reveal themselves as predictably as themes in a well-known piece of music. I thought of the variety imprisoned in an Indian raga or in a Bach fugue, which to some ears also sounds monotonous.
“Do you think their monotony makes them less aesthetically pleasing to the whales?”
“Oh no. Not at all. What could be more monotonous than a teenager’s playing the latest heavy-metal tape three hundred times in a row, until it’s worn out or demagnetized? No, if you tune in and are a regular listener to pop music, you’ll hear the Top Ten songs played most of the day on many stations. That doesn’t affect aesthetics. What I’d like to know is: What’s the evolutionary advantage of this monotony? Of course, it’s just as hard to say why people sing. In the case of rock musicians, you can see that it greatly improves their reproductive fitness,” he said, laughing, “but not all of us are rock musicians.” Roger unfolded his long legs slowly, one at a time, with the care of an afghan hound standing up, and ambled over to the electrical closet to test another receiver. There, among fuses, wires, and electronics, sat stacks of New Age music, all published by A & M records. With one hand he twiddled a knob on a control panel, cocked an ear, listened intently, then returned to the spill of wires, boxes, and screws on the rug.
“Suppose human beings evolved two forms of communication,” I said, “one that is direct emotional communication—music—and one that’s analytical and verbal, which we call language.”
“Now you’re exactly on to what I’m suggesting. I like that idea. It would be wonderful to be able to look at someone and make those noises that are deeply evocative of a particular kind of emotion and thus lock the other person to the emotion you’re feeling. And we do do that to some extent. If we see someone weeping, our urge is to weep with him. Or if we see someone yawning, we may yawn as well. Such things help to synchronize the behavior of a group. I’ve done a lot of madrigal singing, and in some of my favorite songs you’re saying fa-la-la-la-la a lot of the time. Tiddly-pum, tiddly-pum. It doesn’t mean anything. But it’s just right. It has tremendous artistic importance and meaning, which people memorize and love. There don’t have to be words in these songs, or any direct meaning, for the songs to be meaningful and selected by evolution. But then there’s that monotony. It would be almost as if you sat each day and told the story of some terrible trauma—or wonderful love or deep disgrace—over and over again, while everyone around you was telling the same story.”
“Birds and other mammals get along perfectly well with songs that don’t change all the time,” I said. “Why is it so important to whales to change their songs?”
“I could make up a sort of half-baked answer. I could say, for instance, that if one male comes up with a song that’s attractive to more females, the other males in the area will soon recognize that Joe is doing a lot better than they are and change their tune to copy Joe, so then Joe loses his advantage. And the others, or Joe, would then try different versions that might give them an advantage over the competition, even if it’s just a momentary one.”
“So we don’t know why they sing. But it’s only the males that sing, right?” I pictured an oceanful of cetacean Pavarottis.
Roger smiled. “There’s some confusion over that. We have thirty-five singers of known sex and they are all males, except one. An adult and a calf were seen by a highly reliable observer, Graeme Ellis. Singing was coming from the adult. Graeme dived to observe them, and as he watched, the calf went down and appeared to nurse, and the adult released what seemed to be milk into the water. A puff of milk should be a pretty good indicator of sex. But the trouble is that even though Graeme is a totally experienced observer—and I completely accept his interpretation of what he saw at face value—I am an experienced observer, too, and I’ve been so badly fooled so many times by what whales were doing around me that I know how badly anyone can be fooled. For example, in Argentina, where you can sit on cliffs and look directly down through the water, I saw a female and a calf underwater with no other whale around for as far as I could see, and suddenly a male was there, underwater, right next to them. He messed around with them for five or ten minutes and then disappeared without blowing. To an observer on the beach or in a boat, as Graeme was for most of this time, he would have been invisible—no one would have seen him approach or leave. The only reason I knew he was there is that I happened to have a high and favorable viewpoint. I think it’s possible that there was a male down underneath the female and calf Graeme saw. But Graeme says that as the female returned to the surface, the sound diminished in intensity, and as the calf approached the surface, the sound level remained about the same. That is an extremely important observation, because if you are listening with a shallow hydrophone to a whale singing, at the moment the whale comes to the surface, most of the energy from the singing is refracted downward by the warmer water near the surface and doesn’t get to your hydrophone. The result is that when the whale is right at the surface, it sounds very feeble, then as it dives, the sound can travel directly to your hydrophone without being refracted away from it and the sound becomes louder. I’m still not sure that there wasn’t a male singer that was out of sight down below or that the female didn’t interpose her body between Graeme and a singing calf each time she happened to come to the surface. On the other hand, he may be absolutely right—maybe females do sing. If you take even a newborn chicken and give it enough testosterone, it will begin crowing like a rooster. You can make the female of many bird species sing a male song by injecting the right male hormones. So that might also be the case with whales. A female with enough male hormone might sing the male’s song. Or another possibility is that it could have been the calf singing; it might have been a male calf.”
No one has any idea how humpback whales make their sounds. Joking about how little we know, William Schevill, a distinguished elder statesman of whale biology, once said, “Perhaps they make their sounds by rubbing their vestigial hind limbs together.” For all we know, they play their ribs like a concertina and their baleen like a pocket comb. I pursued the question with Roger.
“Don’t they have a larynx or windpipe?”
“It used to be thought that whales didn’t even have vocal cords. But now we know that certain Odontoceti have something very much like them.”
“How about air pockets?”
“They have every kind you can name. They have an area of their windpipe that might be in some way involved. They have a plumbing system that’s so fancy it could support any theory you like about how they generate sounds, but at present, any other theory would do, too. We just don’t know where their sounds are coming from. The harmonic series associated with the sounds are certainly the kinds that would be made by a system based on air—closed pipes filled with air.”
For a moment the creaking and moaning gave way to popping sounds and clarinet notes. “How about other passageways working like whistles or flutes?” I suggested. “The Aztecs had a large variety of whistles and flutes that could make many different sounds, depending on the air chambers or the chambers holding water and other fluids.”
“Whistles, yes, but no flutes, because a flute is an open-ended pipe. But whales could be using any number of different sound-producing mechanisms, and some of their sounds are clearly just a train of pulses produced so rapidly that you and I perceive it as a tone. The tone A on the piano is 440 cycles per second, and we normally think of it as the kind of sound that might be produced by a flute, for instance. But you can also get a nice tone of A by taking 440 noisy soundbursts per second and listening to them. What you’re hearing is the rate at which these little bursts of sound are being produced; and that rate is the note A on the piano. If you made it 238 bursts per second, you’d get middle C.” Sweeping aside a row of invisible possibilities with one hand, he said, “One thing I can tell you is that when a whale sings, no air is released.”
“What a mystery.”
“It’s one of the more intriguing little mysteries of our time.”
Roger walked outside to adjust the antenna he had put up near a chunk of fused crystals, embraced by ferns, that sat on a block of lava on the grassy promontory just beyond the back porch. Ani said she had set a crystal down on the house’s private beach out of respect for the wild dolphins, and it drew them. I did not pursue this. Two white rope hammocks hung between palm trees, and flowery terraces led to an open-air shower made of lava and other rocks. Thick white clouds churned fresh smoke above the horizon. One whale singer came on strong, like a yowling tomcat, while we fixed an impromptu dinner of mashed potatoes, broccoli, salad, and ice cream. Ani was wearing a new black sweatshirt with good drawings of a humpback mother and calf. Everywhere you looked in the multilevel, meticulously decorated house, primitive sculptures and paintings mixed with images of whales. There were whale sculptures, whale drawings, whale videos. Katy was wearing a silver ring on which two dolphins were entwined.
Roger took down his long, splayed-fingered antenna and found a better spot for it, at the side of the house, near a tree. It was a line-of-sight antenna, directed toward a buoy about three hundred yards offshore. With the buoy, worth only about $700, Roger was hoping that he could make a unique collection of a week’s continuous recordings. When he returned, taking care to close the screen door snugly to keep out poisonous centipedes that rippled through the grass and could bite, we sat down to eat, serenaded by a concert both eerie and familiar.
One morning, though the seas were galloping and high, we stood on the promontory in back of the house, binoculars pressed to our eyes, searching the horizon for whales. Actually, all we were looking for was a “blow,” the misty spout a whale leaves when it surfaces to breathe. This was not the only sighting cue we could use. Whale watchers have learned to look for a rolling animal and for a whitecap splash of flukes or flippers. A sperm whale throws its flukes very high into the air and their trailing edge has a big notch on it; humpbacks have multicolored flukes; a right whale has broad, lip-shaped flukes with a shallow notch. Whale scientists look for changing color under the water—say, the pale blue of humpback flukes near the surface. They look for “footprints” in the water, rings that look like slick footsteps, caused by animals swimming just below the surface. They look for a dorsal fin. The killer whale has a very tall, erect dorsal fin, whereas the southern right whale has no dorsal fin at all. But the most common guide is the blow, because it varies so much among whales and can be seen at such a distance. In the dry Antarctic air, the blue whale shoots up a thin column that can rise a hundred feet and stay visible for thirty seconds. The sperm whale has a forward-canted, left-sided blow, easy to identify. Right whales and bowheads make a misty, V-shaped blow from their twin blowholes.
“There’s a whale!” Roger said, pointing to a wedge of ocean just off the southern end of Molokini, a crescent-shaped island across the bay from the Mosses’ home. “It’s moving north along the island.”
A moment later I saw a low, bushy balloon of vapor, the signature of the humpback. Early mariners used to think that the exhalations of whales were poisonous, a caustic mixture of brimstone and sulfur that could strip the flesh from any man who chanced too close. Perhaps the blood entering the lungs of wounded whales sometimes tainted their last breaths, giving them a fetid odor. But scientists who have been drenched by the breath of healthy whales say that it feels like a delicate mist; some report a faint odor of musk.
The clouds had begun to swarm again, and to keep ourselves dry and warm, we put on many layers of clothing over our swimsuits, then took green plastic trash bags and cut arm- and head-holes. No one else was crazy enough to be at the marina when the sky was like clotted milk and a blue veil of rain hung on the horizon. Roger steered the Zodiac out to where the waves were heaving, toward Molokini, where we knew that at least one whale would be singing. And what a song it would be! It was said that the shape of the island created lovely echoes when the whale and his listener were in just the right position. The farther we got from shore, the higher the waves became. High enough that Roger paused suddenly to teach me how to restart the engine if it should fail; he gave me the throttle and rudder, making sure I could steer straight and in circles. He was not planning on being washed over the side, but the wind could get right underneath a Zodiac and flip it, and the current could carry one some distance. Then we continued at speed. Over my shoulder, I watched a faint blue drape of storm approach the north end of Maui. The winds had begun to pick up again, the lunging waves shook froth from their mouths like runaway horses, and after each crest we skidded down into the bottom of a bowl, the sides of which grew steeper. Roger cut across them obliquely, like a surfer riding the inside of a wave, angling smartly from one crest to another. Although I had been in Zodiacs in rough seas in South Georgia and the Antarctic, I had never been in one handled more expertly than this; we skidded across the sides of tall, muddy-blue waves to weave among the convulsive valleys where rising and falling waves met. Then water spumed over the bow, spumed a second time, and Roger turned sharply at a ninety-degree angle and headed straight back for shore. There was no use going on: It would be unsafe. If we hugged the coastline, the waters would be a little calmer. The suddenness of his decision to turn back surprised me, but then I realized that this small boat was one of the main tools of his trade and he had learned its limits and eccentricities, just as he had learned to read the many moods of the ocean. He could judge the difference between potential discomfort and potential danger. It is like that for me when I fly airplanes. On final approach, in a savage crosswind, you can reach a point where it is no longer possible to land safely, because you’ve used up the full travel of the stick and rudder. The oceanic sky has overpowered you, the limits of your craft have been reached, and there is no use going on. All you can do is search for an airport somewhere else.
“A whale scientist’s work isn’t always as balmy as I’d imagined,” I said as we began the bouncy return to the marina, with the wind now against us.
“This is normal. You’re always at the mercy of the weather, and storms seem to follow me.” Roger had tied a panama hat on with a string under his chin, but the brim fluttered in the squall, and spray had thrown rivulets down his glasses. Running across the choppy waves, the boat bounced hard, and the ride jarred our kidneys and bones. But the ocean was a wild, beautiful tumult. I could understand why the painter J. M. W. Turner would have himself lashed to the mainmast of a ship and go out into the middle of a raging storm just to behold its color and fury. Below us somewhere in the gelatinous phantasmagoria of churning blue, the whales wouldn’t be much aware of the storm. Their world, which has as much geography and real estate as ours, is distinctive. There are mountain ranges in their world, great gorges and rift valleys and sprawling prairies, and even hot springs and volcanoes. We forget that the ocean floor includes some of the tallest mountain ranges on earth—we just don’t see them. And there are the magnetic features, about which we know so little. Because we don’t steer along the magnetic web of the planet, we forget that other animals do. In some underwater valleys, the magnetic signals are polarized in one direction; in some harbors the signals are bound to be stronger or weaker, or perhaps even jangled by power plants and motorboats. Whales navigate through a rich, complicated landscape at a stately pace, slow as zeppelins, majestic and alert.
When we were at last back at the marina, cold, tired, and wet, we loaded the Zodiac onto a waiting trailer and headed for a nearby fast-food restaurant to get a hot breakfast. Roger ordered scrambled eggs and a rasher of bacon. Both arrived in nearly the same dull resiny color. The coffee was strong enough to trot a mouse across.
“What was it like the first time you heard whales singing?”
“I was in Bermuda, as a guest of the late Frank Watlington, an engineer who worked for the Lamont Geophysical Field Station. He used to go out towing hydrophones when the Navy was firing off explosives and record the sounds far away. But when he did this during humpback season, he often heard the songs of whales, which fascinated him. One April day, he played them to me in the engine room of a wooden minesweeper just like Cousteau’s boat, the Calypso. And although the boat was very noisy and loud, out of his tinny speaker came incredible sounds. I had never heard anything like them. They riveted my attention as nothing ever had before. These were superb recordings he had made on bottom-mounted hydrophones that the Navy was using for purposes of listening to enemy submarines and that sort of thing. Later, he gave part of his tape collection to me. It’s some of those sounds that the world has heard since on the record Songs of the Humpback Whales.”
“Why do the songs move you so?”
“Why is spending the afternoon standing on your feet and tiring out your calves in a museum to see great art worth it? Why do you spend thirty dollars in an evening to go hear music? I don’t know. To me it’s a marvelously evocative performance that comes from the most unexpected quarter. It would be the same as walking by your cat and having it start humming a tune to you. Humpbacks have been singing longer than human beings have existed.”
“What is the most beautiful encounter with singing whales you can remember?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” he said, stretching his long legs out into the aisle and settling against the booth wall, a mug of coffee in his hands. Looking somewhere in the middle distance, he shed the present easily, as if it were nothing more than a light sweater. “Lying in the cockpit of a boat at night off Bermuda,” he said, “with a faint gentle breeze and the mast sweeping across and clouds of stars above you, listening to the sounds of whales, which are sort of flooding up out of the ocean through the earphones you’re wearing as you become part of the same rhythm that the songs dance to. The songs are set by the rhythm of swells in the oceans. If you listen to whales when you are being borne on the sea, you can feel that the rate at which they’re producing a given phrase is about the same as the rate between the swells that are coming by. What an extraordinary, compelling experience that is! You never tire of it. The ocean is the greatest of all echo chambers—there’s nothing like it on land. And when you listen over a pair of headphones to whales under perfect recording conditions in deep ocean, it’s really as though you were listening from within the Horsehead Nebula, or some galactic space that is otherworldly, not part of anything you know, where the boat itself is floating. Once, for example, on an early fall night, I was coming back from the Arctic, where I had been working on bowhead whales in a boat at sea. As we flew down across the Canadian Arctic, we were beneath an arc of northern lights, which were pure green and bell-shaped. We and the plane were the clapper of this bell, with the green light over us. And for the first time in my life I felt that I was in the position of the whale that is singing to you when you’re in the boat and just listening to it. That’s the kind of space that is somehow illuminated, depicted, made sensible by the hydrophones. It gives you a special impression of the sea. We all love the ocean’s beautiful sparkle blue, but beneath it, down deeper, whales are moving with slow, drifting currents, whales that are great, gentle cloudlike beings, not just some meaty animal. Everything the whales do is so slow, so deliberate, outside the normal time sense of the human world. When you watch whales for an entire afternoon, you don’t realize what they’re doing. You see things that look very slow and graceful. Only later, when you’ve looked at your day’s notes, might you put it together and say, Oh my God, this animal was playing. That’s what I was seeing, but I was seeing it at a speed much slower than I’m used to.’ Whales teach us a new sense of time.”
In a nearby booth, a young man wearing an electric-blue T-shirt on which the letters M-A-U-I were arranged in the rough shape of the island, was reading a local newspaper. The headline and a drawing announced yet another occasion on which a whale had saved the life of a human being: in this instance by reportedly driving off sharks that were heading for a fallen surfer. Do whales have emotions like ours? I wondered. How intelligent are they? Do they have minds of the sort that would be familiar to us?
After all, mind is such an odd predicament for matter to get into. I often marvel how something like hydrogen, the simplest atom, forged in some early chaos of the universe, could lead to us and the gorgeous fever we call consciousness. If a mind is just a few pounds of blood, dream, and electric, how does it manage to contemplate itself, worry about its soul, do time-and-motion studies, admire the shy hooves of a goat, know that it will die, enjoy all the grand and lesser mayhems of the heart? What is mind, that one can be out of one’s? How can a neuron feel compassion? What is a self? Why did automatic, hand-me-down mammals like our ancestors somehow evolve brains with the ability to consider, imagine, project, compare, abstract, think of the future? If our experience of mind is really just the simmering of an easily alterable chemical stew, then what does it mean to know something, to want something, to be? How do you begin with hydrogen and end up with prom dresses, jealousy, chamber music? What is music that it can satisfy such a mind, and even perhaps function as language?
“Remember those ‘brutal facts’ you were talking about?” I said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the mind of whales. How self-conscious do you think whales are?”
Roger turned his fork over and nudged his slices of bacon into a kelplike dune, cut off a section, and chewed it thoughtfully. “There are reasons to suspect that the brains of whales—and I’m including dolphins—are equal to or of even greater complexity than the brains of human beings. These complexities must serve some important role in the lives of the whales and dolphins. But nobody has a clue as to what that role is, not the slightest idea, not even a persuasive theory. I will go out on a limb and say that the most interesting question in biology today is what dolphins are using their complex brains for; I can’t think of anything that would be more interesting to know. You can say, ‘Well, maybe they just have a large brain; why not?’ Well, I can tell you why not: It’s because brains are extremely expensive to maintain and operate. For example, during the first few weeks of life in a human being, whose brain-to-body ratio is not very unlike that of a newborn dolphin, the brain requires about a third of the metabolism of the whole body just to run it. It’s a very costly thing to have. So you don’t just kind of end up having a fancy brain. You have a fancy brain because there’s a very important reason why you need one. It is selected for, and as soon as the advantage that is conferred by having it is gone, you’ll lose it and lose it fast. What this means is that there must be something that dolphins and whales are doing with their brains that’s fundamental to their lives.
“Here’s one of the standard unsupported guesses: They’re using them for fancy acoustic functions—by making a few clicks, they can not only hear how far it is to the bottom in many directions but they can also figure out its structure and how soft it is and how many fish are hovering above it and which others are buried in the mud and so on. Yes, those are all very important functions. But equally complex tasks are done by bats with brains that are probably a thousandth the mass of the brains of dolphins. And I can’t believe that dolphins’ brains are so inefficient that they have to be so much more complicated just to equal what can be done in a brain the size of a pea or much smaller. So I don’t think that’s going to solve the question. No, there’s something they’re using their large brains for that, I suspect, is completely different from what we use ours for. Ours, basically, serve and interact with two things: one, our opposable thumbs and grasping simian fingers, which, with our brain, make possible eye-hand coordination; and two, language and all that language does for us. Do whales have a language? Well, as I said, if there is a language to the songs of humpback whales, it’s very monotonous. They’re repeating themselves endlessly, saying the same, perhaps very complex, thing over and over, for months at a time. So it won’t do to say that they have a language that is in any sense equivalent to or similar to our language, if they use all of its complexity and structure to say just a very few things. You could say that the song is analogous to a carrier frequency in a radio and that basically it is the minor modifications in the song that carry the message. I somehow think that’s unlikely, because whales tend to be alone when they’re singing, not in social groups, not in contact with other whales. When a whale comes near a singer, the singer instantly shuts up, and often a fight will ensue. That suggests that the song is a simpler thing, either a challenge or a wooing call. But it doesn’t explain the big brains. I think the brains of whales are being used for things we have no intuitive understanding of whatsoever, yet what they’re used for is critically important to the life of the whales. It must deeply affect their reproductive fitness. It must be crucial to their survival. But we don’t know what it is.”
Turning sideways, he leaned back against the outer wall of the booth and propped one sneakered foot up on the bench seat. “You could ask, Why do human beings have such huge brains? There are lots of theories, but to me the one that’s most appealing is that human beings dwell in long-lived societies in which they have contact for years with the same individuals and family groups, and these groups are constantly exchanging favors, with the idea that if you give a favor you will get one in return, then you have to wait around and collect on the debt. This process is sometimes referred to as ‘reciprocal altruism,’ and although nobody has found a means by which just plain true altruism could be selected for, reciprocal altruism could very well be accepted and selected for. A classic example of reciprocal altruism is that you are drowning and I reach down and grab a stick and hold it out and you grab it and I pull you to shore. I’ve done you the most important favor of your entire life, and you owe me a big one. All I had to do is bend over, pick up a stick, and extend my arm. And now, oh my gosh, what can I expect from you?”
A pink-and-white-uniformed waitress with a bouffant hairdo appeared suddenly with a heavy pot of coffee and poured something like crude oil into Roger’s mug. He thanked her and continued: “Why, tremendous things, for a tiny investment on my part. But I might have to wait a long time for you to come up with a reward large enough to express the depths of your gratitude. You can get a social system going based on reciprocal altruism, but it will only work in groups in which associations last for a very long time. It doesn’t work in groups in which you have a total despot at the head who will just beat you senseless if you don’t pay up. It works in groups more like human groups, and may in fact be like whale and dolphin groups. The smarter you get the smarter you have to be, because eventually that kind of system invites cheating. So let’s say, for example, that I discover a beautiful bush of blueberries as we are walking along together. And at the moment, I owe you. I say to you, ‘Ah, Diane, look at this marvelous bush of blueberries. Because of what you did for me last week, these are yours, all yours. I’m not going to take any of them.’ You begin eating them, with gratitude, and you’re glad to have them all to yourself. But the reason I’ve really done that is that I’ve noticed another one in the distance that is better than this bush, and I want to keep you away from it. So I wander off until I’m out of sight and then quickly devour it, while you’re left with the lesser meal. You have to be able to detect in me little signs that tell you I’m lying. And that requires some very sophisticated analysis of what my true motives may be. If reciprocal altruism invites cheating, then you must become a deft detector of cheating, and if you get good at detecting cheating, then I have to get better at cheating in more subtle ways. What you end up with is a brain racing in its evolution toward greater and greater complexity and sophistication to be able to detect and to employ cheating. You’ll quickly end up with animals that have fancy brains. That could be true for dolphins. They certainly exist in long-lived social groups in which they have opportunity to repay reciprocal debts.
“But they may need their brains for reasons much more complex than that. Think of how important myths are in our cultures. Think of all the similarities that myths have, think how memorable those elements are, and how they control the lives of the people who hear them. There may be some kind of need for myth in the vertebrate brain, whether it’s located in the head of a whale or of a person. Nobody really knows.”
After breakfast, before returning to Kihei, we paid a visit to Spear Venus at his shop, Venus Electronics, where Roger ordered a special tape recorder with features he needed for recording whales. A whale enthusiast, Spear had worked with Roger in the past, observing and filming whales. His brother owned a local television station. Drifting into an alcove at the back of the shop, which was a small gallery of signed Salvador Dali prints, Roger discussed with Spear the possibility of a donor buying an FM radio station so that he could make ultra-high-quality stereo recordings from a bottom microphone in deep water, then broadcast the songs. People all over the world would be able to tune in to Whale Hawaii and hear nonstop singing.
“What would a station cost to buy?” he asked.
Spear adjusted one corner of a Dali print. “Oh, I would think around a hundred thousand dollars.”
“You could sell it by subscription,” Roger explained, “and scramble the signal. People could have it as background music in their house. Every now and then, a whale would come by and sit right on the mike and sing and blow everybody’s mind. Look, I want to make long-term recordings of humpbacks,” Roger explained. “But if you want to get into it commercially, I can’t think of anyone better.”
Spear stroked his mustache. It was an idea that appealed to him both environmentally and commercially, but he was getting ready to retire and hoping to travel the world with his wife and two small children. But he agreed to think about it and lend a hand setting it up, if the money became available. Whale Hawaii: a steady pour of whale songs streaming around the world above water, so that human beings could hear them, like neighbors picking up on a party line.
At last, we returned to the Mosses’ house, where Roger continued work on the buoy. The winds were growing loud and unruly, but surely the next day the squalls would have moved on like a flock of migratory birds.
The following morning, when the winds ebbed a little, we went out in a Zodiac piloted by Colin, a young, fair-skinned Englishman with heavily freckled ears and sunburned neck, chest, and arms. At regular intervals, explosions came from the nearby island of Kahoolawe, where the U.S. Navy was practicing bombing. According to Hawaiian legend, the island looks like a humpback, which is why the whales keep returning. At Molokini, Roger dropped a white hydrophone into the water on a long black line and put on a headset. Smiling, he handed the headset to me. Painfully loud whale songs surged through both earphones. Three whales were singing the same song somewhere beneath us, their voices blending and mixing. A storm began prowling Maui. The ocean was cobalt blue, like an Oriental glaze, with gray clouds reflected in it. At times it was the color and texture of whale skin.
“I think he’s starting back up,” Roger said.
“How can you tell?”
“From where the singer is in the song-—at rattle, rattle, rattle,” he said. “I think it’s the coming-up section, but I don’t know this year’s song very well yet.”
The apparently silent ocean filled with white curds as it reflected the plunging storm clouds. The hydrophone drifted below the boat on its long lead like an electrode in a heart. Molokini’s structure created a natural amphitheater, which concentrated the sounds. A slow hooting began, like that of a barn owl. It seemed to come from every direction and reminded me that Roger’s doctoral work, at Cornell, was on how owls locate their prey, which was as much through sound as vision, he discovered.
“What is that strange hooting?”
Roger smiled. “A singer. It’s very close by.”
“But in which direction? It seems to be coming from all over.”
“The boat transmits the sound to you from all its interior surfaces. It’s as if you were sitting in the center of a loudspeaker.”
Now I can understand how Greek sailors of the ancient Mediterranean, bewitched by eerie singing, thought it came from Sirens. Although there are no humpbacks reported in the Mediterranean today, an intriguing possibility is that humpbacks once thrived there, among other whales, and were indeed the Sirens of Greek myth. At night, far from land, under a mantle of stars, lonely sailors could have heard the plaintive songs of the humpbacks but would not have been able to tell where the music was coming from as it swirled around inside the wooden hull of their boat, wrapping them in a cocoon of lamentation and desire. Whale songs can continue for many hours, even days, so the becalmed sailors could have grown unnerved and then drowsy, as the singing both bedeviled and enchanted them, and could have fallen asleep with Siren voices tugging at their dreams. Whales may well have been the mythic unicorns, too. Narwhals, which live in Arctic regions, grow long, tapered, spiraling tusks that exactly fit the description of unicorn horns.
Not only have whales generated two of our most beguiling Western myths, they frequent the myths of far-flung cultures, from the aborigines of Australia to the Quechua of Peru. The Inuit consider themselves the “people of the whale,” an idea that figures in their creation myths and religious life. In Whales, Jacques Cousteau reports that “the Koryak people of Siberia … hold astonishing meetings during which they confess to whales any sins they have committed, any taboos they have broken, any evil thoughts they may have had.” Throughout history, Leviathan, as the whale has often been called, embodied the monstrous grandeur of the unknown, nature at its most primeval and unplumbable, the rampaging beauty of the oceans, the magical realm where the ordinary and the sacred meet. When Melville describes a whale breaking the surface, a figment of fused grace and power, bursting from its cryptic world into the world of humans, he writes with unashamed worship: “Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths, the Sperm Whale thus booms his entire bulk into the pure element of air…. In those moments, the torn, enraged waves he shakes off, seem his mane.” Whales live enigmatic lives, in that realm impenetrable to our gaze. Small wonder they’ve seemed magical and strange. Until recently, we couldn’t even enter their world long enough to see them completely. And scientists still aren’t able to travel with them sufficiently to learn of their wanderings and relationships. Almost everything we know about whales we have had to learn from dead animals or from the occasional stranding of confused or sick ones. In rare, privileged moments, we enter their world, and then only briefly and shallowly, to watch through the murk or to eavesdrop.
Colin leaned over the side of the Zodiac and put his head underwater, holding his nose, then came up dripping, his short blond hair swept into a punk style. Momentarily disturbed, the water surface went back to being slick as whale skin and mottled by reflected clouds.
“Sounds close,” he said.
But close might have been a mile or more away. Turning a slow circle, I scanned the horizon. Somewhere a whale was singing, and would surface to breathe, but I saw no sign of it. “How do they arrange their bodies when they’re singing?”
“Most of the time they’re head-downward,” Roger explained as he untangled the hydrophone wire. “But when they’re at the surface, breathing, they’re horizontal, and they don’t interrupt the performance of the song to breathe. They pace themselves the same way a human singer does, catching their breath between phrases. A whale normally breathes at the same point in the song. But sometimes one will breathe at an inappropriate moment—catch a breath in the wrong place. When that happens they don’t stop the performance, and so songs with and without breathing in inappropriate places will sound the same. I don’t sing, for example, ‘Glory, glory [breath, breath] hallelujah.’ I manage to breathe while producing the song, so as not to interrupt it. Whales do the same thing, and to me that suggests their singing is a conscious performance. They’re good singers who don’t mess up a song with awkward breaths. When they reach the surface, they often make a surface ratchet sound, sort of like a slowly opening creaking door; and I suspect that most of the time they start singing right after the surface ratchet, when they throw their tail into the air—‘peak their flukes,’ as it’s called—and make the first phrase as they dive. Sometimes singing can last for periods of several hours, or even for more than a day. Once, off Hawaii, in a place where one seldom encounters whales, my former wife, Katharine, and I found a singer who was already singing when we began recording, and when we quit, deep into darkness eleven hours later, it was still going nonstop. Here, around Maui, where the whales are always interacting—getting into fights, chasing each other—a song rarely lasts for more than two hours, because another whale comes along and cuts it. A song stops when the singer is interrupted by another whale, a boat, a swimmer—any kind of stimulus that is curious or threatening and needs the singer’s attention.”
Roger was covered in bruises and Band-Aids. One fingertip was still shining from a patch of spilled Krazy Glue. As he recorded a song, he closed his eyes and his mouth fell open, as if he were asleep. A straw hat with an Hawaiian-print band kept the sun from his eyes. His unbuttoned shirt revealed a freckled chest; his legs were lightly freckled, too, and he was wearing maroon shorts. A pair of reading glasses dangled from a cord around his neck. A speedboat cruised by, playing loud rock music, its partying crew unaware of the concert in full swing below them. After it had passed, we moved to the windward side of Molokini, where its coral-covered wall drops six hundred feet.
I put on a snorkeling mask and fins and slipped over the side, into a school of fifty Moorish idols—a black-yellow-and-white fish with a small puckered mouth and a long spear trailing from the top of the head—and swam toward the wall, where brain coral ribboned like disembodied minds and parrotfish flashed blue-green spangles. Taking a gulp of air and diving a few feet, I heard the moaning of whales again, but this time louder and accompanied by gurglings and creaks. Then a trumpeting sound—half elephant, half monkey—surged into a two-stage grunt that started low and swung high, followed by a stuttering lawn mower that changed to a finger being dragged across a taut balloon, then a suite of basso groans and a badly oiled garden gate creaking open. Turning a slow circle, I looked for the singer, whose voice was everywhere, but saw only raccoon butterfly fish (bright yellow, with black masks) and a blooming garden of coral. I felt as if I’d fallen into the middle of a millefiore paperweight. This singer, warbling with such panache, was most likely a male. I could not see him, but his eerie song sent shivers down my back and made my ribs gently chime as it filled the waves with waves of music. Linda Guinee, of Roger’s lab, and Katharine Payne, now a researcher at Cornell, had recently discovered an astonishing new fact about humpbacks: They use rhyme to help them remember their long songs. Floating in what might be a whale’s epic poem, I marveled at its strange embroidery. Each time I dove a few feet under the surface, I heard and felt the radiant booming again, and wished I could hold my breath for hours, stay down and listen with the whole ocean cupped to my ear like a single hand.
But at last, too tired to keep diving, I climbed into the boat, and we cruised back to Maui. Rainbows formed in the spray at either side of the Zodiac. The siren song followed us for some distance, then vanished among shore sounds as we approached the marina. Thrilled to have felt the singing wash over me, I yearned to be near a whale in its own element, to watch its habits closely. Though that would be difficult with the shy humpbacks wintering at Maui, would it be possible elsewhere?
Half of Roger’s whale study revolved around humpbacks and their songs. Studying them in Hawaii, hemmed in by the constant jangle of tourists, speedboats, and hotel chains, made relentless demands. The other half of his whale study took place on the coast of Patagonia—at an outpost far from noise and society. There, mother right whales raised their babies, eager males came courting, and it was possible to observe whale families going about their daily routine. When I said goodbye to Roger in Hawaii, I knew that we would meet again—first at the Long-Term Research Institute, and then in one of the wildest and most remote places on Earth.
In the tony suburbs of Boston near Walden Pond, cedar-shake houses displayed their vintage on a chimney or gate and the pious fiction we call history could be read on markers and mileposts and in street names. Stone walls edged most yards, where peonies, poppies, and tea roses spilled from groomed flower beds. Orange daylilies grew wild in the culverts. At noon, shadows marched like militiamen along the thickly wooded roads.
On one lane, a driveway led to a white farmhouse and two large red barns. There were only wildflowers on this property, and a great press of wild and unruly trees, brush that had begun creeping close to the buildings and thickets barely held back by stone walls. The sense of sheer green abundance was overpowering. Nature may once have allowed this small human clearing in its midst, but it had obviously begun to reconsider.
The first red building, which housed the Long-Term Research Institute, looked typically barnlike from outside. But inside, it resembled a ship, with arched ceilings and exposed beams and other timbers. Three fans spun like propellers overhead. An open-backed flight of stairs with a white dowel-railing along one side led to a widow’s walk with a porthole window in one alcove. Two offices were off that narrow landing, and another small staircase wound its way up to the attic rooms where Roger lived. On the first floor, a black cast-iron stove stood in a bricked corner of the otherwise wooden-walled room. Windows looked out onto the woods. On one window-sill a long heft of baleen lay like a tusk. Just below the window, a small draftsman’s cabinet held twelve shallow drawers full of calipers, course converters, and other seafaring instruments. In photographs, two humpback whales patrolled the walls. Below them, on top of a long, low bookcase, whales done in bronze, brass, or soap-stone were caught in mid-swim. A vibrantly colored globe of the world, on a dusty black stand, shone in the sunlight. A rind of Lucite, stretching down one side of the globe, helped to measure distances. At the moment, the Lucite rind was over the Atlantic coast. On the floor next to the bookcase sat a white whale vertebra that looked and felt like pumice. In the center of the room, a large wooden table and four screen-backed chairs invited the visitors to sit down. A basket held three Granny Smith apples, whose light fragrance wafted through the room. A viewing table for slides stood against one wall, and a reel-to-reel tape recorder, for the playing of whale songs, leaned against another. A dinner fork had been bent in half and attached to one tip of a twelve-foot-long gray plastic tube with rope and glue. Roger used it to reach the ceiling fans, catching their chainlike pulls between the fork’s tines and yanking down to change the fan’s speeds.
One had the overall sense of being able to see through every wall and partition into what lay behind it. You could see between the steps and through the white railings of the staircase to the rooms beyond. The balcony rails were set low and far enough apart so that they seemed to measure the space, not cage it. Windows at ceiling height revealed the sky and the treetops. Windows at waist height framed the red barn next door and the stone wall, the woodpile, and a monarch butterfly that was hovering in a chokecherry bush.
The lab was not yet finished; pipes, light bulbs, and switches dangled from the walls. In one room, a white electrical wire that would ordinarily have been looped up had been twisted into the shape of a treble clef. A tiny, galley-size kitchen, a bathroom, and a receptionist’s desk sat out in the hallway. The letter trays were jammed with unopened mail, a heap of notes about phone calls to answer, Federal Express envelopes that had been left to sit for days after their arrival. Down the hall were the four small offices where Roger and his crew worked. In one of them, on a desk, was a scrapbook, photographs of markings on the heads of right whales. The Institute knew them as individuals. On another desk sat a stack of shiny black vinyl records. For a small membership fee, subscribers received the Institute’s newsletter and a recording of humpback-whale songs. I picked up a record and carried it to the turntable in the other room. How could something as small, manageable, fragile, even, as that one record contain the huge voices of whales? But when I turned the player on, beautiful whale songs filled the dimly lit room with magic.
After a while, I returned to Roger’s office, where overflowing bookcases reflected the many facets of his curiosity. Poetry books were lined up beside books on whales, music, Kipling’s Just So Stories. Holding a mug of Morning Thunder tea, he stood at his desk, poring over a terminal moraine of papers—letters, schedules, journals, reminders. His diary and phone book were thick palimpsests of changing lives. Even he wasn’t sure which numbers to use for which people or which appointments were definite. That was undoubtedly why he preferred to write only in pencil. In pencil, on a white lined tablet, were notes for a brochure that would explain the workings and goals of the institute to potential donors, when they visited the Institute’s new ship that would be sailing up the Atlantic coast and docking at various ports along the way.
When Roger had purchased the ship, it was already named Morning Watch, but he was happy about the accidental felicity of that name. “It’s everyone’s duty to take the morning watch,” he explained as he sat down on a low couch beside a potted Plumeria he had brought back from his recent trip to Maui. “Of course, it’s much easier to sleep through life. But then you’ll miss an incredible spectacle that’s waiting for you. In the morning, dew lies heavily on the decks, you sometimes find flying fish that have leaped aboard by mistake in the night, their scales still shuddering with color, and the ocean is full of so many fascinating things, including whales.”
“Did the Save the Whales campaign of past years help?”
“The Save the Whales campaign was a big victory for stopping a lot of the renegade whaling that was going on. But whales have survived into a time of high technology, and because of it, they are dying in numbers that make the days of all-out whaling seem trivial. More whales are killed every year from drift nets than by whaling ships. But even that is minor compared to how many die from the poisons being poured into the seas. We need to save the whales in their own right, because they are peaceful, intelligent creatures who have been our companions on this planet for thirty million years. But they are also guardians of our conscience, which remind us that the oceans themselves are endangered.
“We may be the biggest flop that ever came on earth,” Roger said. “People often wonder just how intelligent whales are. But I could argue that there is no intelligent life on earth, that all we do with our brains is commit a series of the greatest mistakes … that the human brain is the most unsuccessful adaptation ever to appear in the history of life on earth. Neanderthal man only lasted for maybe seventy-five thousand years. We have lasted about a fifth of that time; what are the chances that we’ll last another fifty thousand years? Whales have an important lesson to teach us. Whales have a large and complex brain but show no signs of threatening their own destruction. They haven’t reproduced themselves into oblivion, they haven’t destroyed the resources upon which they depend, they haven’t generated giant holes in the ozone, or increased the earth’s temperature so that we might end up with the greenhouse effect. The lesson whales teach us is that you can have a brain of great complexity that doesn’t result in the death of the planet. And also that we shouldn’t necessarily admire intelligence for its own sake. Most of what we will have to use our clever brain for in the next few hundred or thousand years, if we live that long, is undoing the effects of what we used our brains for in the last few hundred or thousand years—cleaning up the environment, for instance. One insult to the brain of a whale is to call it intelligent in the same way ours is. Intelligence may not be something we would wish to foist off on some other species like a whale. What we call intelligence may be only a kind of vandalism, just mischief on a grand scale. It might not be the only form mind can take, and it might have little to do with real wisdom.”
A phone call interrupted him. The Voyager spacecraft was getting ready to leave the solar system on its journey to other stars, and a caller wanted to know about the whale greetings it carried. There were sixty-two different human languages and also singing whales. Now that human beings were able to leave the gravitational jacket of their own star and send an emissary out to spend the rest of its mechanical-electronic life wandering through space, how mature of us to devote a little bit of room on board to the culture of another species.
Roger gave the caller the references he needed, then returned to his seat by the window. The idea of whale songs traveling through the galaxy clearly thrilled him, too. “Some other extraterrestrial, space-faring civilization,” he said, “will be able to realize that we talked in one way, and this other species that’s also on the record talked another way. In some sense, we have begun to put the house of our own species in order. Now we have to recognize that other species have rights, that other mammals—like whales—are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. This is a truth that may not be self-evident to all of us yet, but think what a revelation that same truth was to our forefathers in 1776. Pretty soon we’ll realize that it’s not just mammals that have rights—birds have rights, and so do amphibians, and so do lizards, and so do insects, and so do plants and planktons, and so on all the way down, until finally we become at peace with the rest of life on earth and recognize that we are just one species among many. That’s a wonderful thing to be….”
As evening deepened, a whippoorwill threw the boomerang of its voice across the summer woods. Roger smiled. He said that it reminded him of his childhood, and of his first inquiries into the sounds that animals make, long before he knew he would spend his life traveling the oceans with the steady companionship of whales. I had to leave, but I knew that the next time we met, it would be in an unworldly landscape, where one didn’t expect to find anything so robust as a whale.
In mid-October 1990, I flew to meet Roger Payne again, this time on the wind-scoured slice of Argentina known as Patagonia, a land renowned for its blustery deserts, unusual wildlife, and rugged, self-reliant people. From the airport at Trelew (named after one of the many Welshmen who settled the region), we drove three hours northeast, to the Valdés Peninsula, a bludgeon-shaped piece of land separating two bays. Because both bays have a small mouth, their waters are much calmer than those of the galloping Atlantic, and migrating right whales stop there every year to raise their babies and engage in courtship, before continuing on south to the krill-rich feeding grounds of Antarctica. Twenty years before, when Roger had realized that the highly endangered right whales were pausing in the bays, he established a study site on the inside curve of the northern bay—on a somewhat hilly, scimitar-shaped beach below two cliffs—and the New York Zoological Society built a field station there. Technically, its address is Lot 39. But Campamento Ballenas is what most people call it, pronouncing the double l as a “zh,” as Patagonians do, filling even their language with the sounds of the wind.
A drive north through flat scrub desert on a road dusty as a mineshaft led us past a shrine of Coca-Cola bottles. Many years earlier, a woman had died of thirst in this desert, but her infant miraculously survived. Legend had it that the Virgin Mary appeared at the spot where the baby was found. Now Argentinians stopped to leave a tribute of old bottles. Finally, we reached a gate in a wire fence. Roger opened it by fiddling with a lever system made of pipes and wires, and we proceeded down a bumpy, wind-gutted, water-eroded road. On a rise overlooking the camp, we paused a moment. Below us, dwarfed by ancient, fossil-peppered cliffs on the rim of the ocean, surrounded by thorn bushes and ice plants, sat a small, one-story house of white stucco, plus two Quonset huts and an assortment of tents. On the two cliffs—one right behind the main house, the other about a mile away—were small corrugated-metal huts. Night was falling fast, and the ocean had begun to darken, but here and there a small burst of white floated over the water, as if shot from an atomizer, where a whale was surfacing to breathe.
Continuing down to camp, we pulled up to the house. On its cement porch, tripods, cameras, and telescopes were roped to the roof beams to keep them from hitting the ground when they blew over, as they inevitably did. A whale’s large weathered jawbone, attached to the wall by chains, made a cozy bench. A wooden swing, hanging from one rafter, rocked gently back and forth as if occupied by a ghost. A handmade birdhouse tucked up against the porch roof held a brown wren-sized bird, a nesting plain-mantled tit spine-tail. Lying next to the front door, part of a whale’s skull—four feet across and about three feet wide—served as a table, on which someone had left a windbreaker. The house’s windows were made to open and tilt down, to balance binoculars.
Inside the house there were four bedrooms, a kitchen, a sitting room, a photographic darkroom, and a main equipment room. The house was divided into two self-enclosed suites, and one had to go out onto the porch to get from one suite to the other. However, a crawl-through door, just big enough for a child, led from a bedroom wall to a second bedroom; Roger had designed it for his children when they were small. In the equipment room, a thick hodgepodge tumbled from shelves or lay across beams or was stored under tables or hung on the walls. So many people had come and gone over the years—bringing their equipment, supplies, and personal items—that no one knew what could safely be thrown out. There were many pairs of wading boots in an open closet. Orange exposure suits, yellow fishermens’ suits, rain slickers of several colors, and red-and-white peaked hats marked EVERREADY hung around the room. On a high shelf, a wooden crate said: “Next Trip to Town Box.” Roger’s cauliflower-shaped straw helmet (with a gold cord he tied under the chin) was suspended from a nail; his head was so large that it was the only sun hat he’d found that fit. Propane lamps sat on a tall table, beside which tripods nested together in a wooden corral. Scattered on shelves were bottles and cans of everything from auto polish to Sno-seal, along with bobbins of wire, half a dozen tape recorders, old blue cans full of nails and screws, a collection of saws and other tools, and an extra toilet seat. An alcove, with a window looking out onto the porch and the sea, served as Roger’s study; behind his desk and chair, shelves lining the walls held skulls of animals found in the area, preserved specimens in jars, field notebooks, and other paraphernalia.
There had been an attempt to make a yard in front of the house by edging an arbitrary area of blowing dirt and debris with fossil shells, but the wind had all but blasted it away. One shell hanging on a wire on a bush in front of the house was a reminder, perhaps, of some Christmas past. The cracked earth looked like pudding cooked dry in a pot. Despite the harsh conditions, flowers bloomed. Ice plants sent up bright pink-cupped flowers with yellow centers. Another low, sprawly succulent was covered with hundreds of daisy-like flowers. Tiny pinks nestled among tufts of tawny grass. All the plants of the region, either thorns or succulents, had evolved to preserve water. Sheep fences wove in and out around the camp, and low “snake fences” ran downhill to the beach. Graham Harris, a New York Zoological Society naturalist who lived in the nearby town of Puerto Madryn and had virtually reared his two children at camp, built the snake fences to keep out local pit vipers—a poisonous, rattleless rattlesnake—but the fences had been buried in places by wind-driven sand, and in hot weather the vipers got into camp anyway. In front of the house, across the dirt yard and beyond the sheep fence, was the boathouse—a corrugated-metal Quonset hut that held the Zodiacs and a pungent whale skeleton. To the left of the house was a Quonset-hut dining hall, and beyond that the outhouse. Made from slats of now-gray wood, the outhouse had a plank to prop the door closed. Attached to the plank, a flagpole whose flag had long since blown away signaled when the outhouse was occupied. If the pole was up, someone was inside. If it was down, pointing like a dousing rod, then the outhouse was empty. A plaque on the door identified the building as THE TEHUELCHES’ REVENGE, which referred to the Indians who had originally settled the region and were brought to extinction by the Spaniards, leaving their myths and arrowheads behind. Inside, someone had scrawled on the wall: “Darwin’s rhea was here.”
Tents were tucked in among the thorn bushes, either near the ocean or on a rise near the main house. Mine was a khaki tent billowing at the edge of the beach. After I zipped the tent closed, horizontally and vertically, I crawled into my down sleeping bag and tried to sleep. The wind, swiveling smartly through the thorn bushes and gulleys, sounded like wet sheets blowing on a line. A snuffling, gargling noise seemed to be right outside the tent. Then a loud snort startled me, and I unzipped the flaps and looked out. There was no wild animal lurking beside my tent or on the beach. A huge moon floated low in the sky. The night was drenched with stars. It was like looking up at a planetarium. Two large cottony blurs hovered overhead, and to my delight I realized they were the Magellanic Clouds—neighboring galaxies of countless stars visible only from the Southern Hemisphere—which I had never seen before. In the moonlight, the ocean poured its black satin, and then a small white cloud appeared, like a corsage just above the water. A loud snuffle followed, and I realized: I have been listening to the night sounds of whales.
In the morning, I woke to loud soughings and raspings, and I looked out and saw four whales lolling close to shore. Rolling and blowing, they waved their flippers in the air, turned lazily, peaked their flukes. I could see, farther out, three more whales blow as they surfaced. Farther still, a lone whale breached, hurling itself high into the air, shattering the water when it hit, sending up great columns of spray; then it breached seven times more. The bay was full of whales. It is as wonderful as discovering dinosaurs in your garden. Petrels, sooty shearwaters, and black-browed albatrosses soared along the beach. Oystercatchers triple-chimed like a doorbell as they patrolled the waves. The air was cold and damp, and I dressed quickly and walked down to the dining hall, just in time to see a hairy armadillo (which Argentinians call a peludo) scurrying away from the front door with a crust of bread in its mouth, PELUDO PALACE, a plaque said at the front door. In front of the building, a wooden bench was held up by two perforated cans used to ship snakes. All the antivenin for the local species of pit viper came from snakes captured in camp. Next to the bench, the vertebra of a right whale lay in the sun beside several old anchors.
Laughter seeped from inside the dining hall, and when I opened the door, I found a long table with benches and chairs around it, at which eight people were sitting and drinking coffee from metal mugs, or maté from a small gourd with a fluted silver-colored straw sticking out of it. The “chicos”—Roger’s affectionate name for the university students Juan, Gustavo, Minolo, Gaby, and Anita—were spending the summer in camp to do whale research. Gustavo, who had lived at Roger’s lab in Massachusetts for four months the previous year, doing research and perfecting his English, was built like a soccer player; his friends sometimes called him Nono (“grandfather” in Italian) because of his balding head. His fiancée, Gaby, was slender and dark-haired, with a buoyant, rompy sense of humor. Tall and bearded, Minolo looked a bit French; he and his girlfriend, Anita, were college students at the University of La Mar de la Plata, along with Gustavo and Gaby. Juan, a tall, brawny student from the University of Buenos Aires, slept on a bed in one corner of the dining room, which meant that he did not go to sleep until the last person left after dinner, and he woke whenever the first person stumbled in for breakfast. Kate O’Connell, a petite, short-haired woman of thirty, a conservationist and an expert translator, was also at the table, speaking Spanish with animation and verve. Beside her, Tom Ford, a dentist from Massachusetts, began doing an impression of Sylvester Stallone as Rambo that needed no translation and sent everyone into howls. Tom was studying the bacteria in the exhalation of whales. This meant attaching a petri dish to a fishing pole and dangling it over a whale’s blowhole just as it was exhaling. Thus far, he’d had good luck. In his checked jacket and two-week-old beard, Dr. Tom looked like a lumberjack. Judy Perkins, a blond woman in her forties, also a member of the lab, was in camp to collect skin samples from whales so that she could map their genealogy. In her work, she used a small crossbow to fire an arrow tipped with a biopsy dart, specially designed to collect small pieces of skin. Then, when she returned to the States, she would study the whales’ DNA, to seek answers to questions about sex, lineage, and family groups.
Gustavo passed around cereal-crackers and cheese; Kate opened a cardboard carton of orange juice; Tom got out the French bread and butter. Marmalade and the local delicacy—a caramel-like dulce de leche—were already on the table. Gaby held the brown gourd full of maté in one hand as if it were a leather purse filled with gold. She offered me some, and my face twisted as I drank.
“Te gusta?” Gaby asked, laughing.
It tasted like strong, bitter spinach. With elaborate thanks, I handed the gourd back to her. She poured hot water into it, then passed it to Gustavo. When the liquid was gone, he handed the gourd again to Gaby, who refilled it with water and handed it to Anita. In this way, the maté always returned to one person to fill, according to custom, and then it gradually made the rounds of everyone at the table. It was not yet ten in the morning, but the day’s bilingual slang lessons had already begun. This aspect of camp life had a practical side. It prepared everyone for the serious dramas of whale research, which could be dished out by unexpected weather, currents, or animals.
“How do you say it when someone is like this?” Gustavo asked, pushing his nose up in the air. Judy offered him the words snooty and stuck-up.
“What does it mean exactly when someone says ecco?” Roger said, stretching out and emphasizing the first syllable of the word. Minolo explained that it was the rough equivalent of saying “I see” or “I understand.”
When Gaby referred to la tormenta of yesterday, I asked her what the word meant, and learned that la tormenta was a thunderstorm.
“Can a person also be tormented?”
“Oh yes,” she said, “pouring hot water from a thermos into the gourd and passing it to Minolo. “Someone can be attormentado. How did you say? …”
“Tormented.”
“Tormented,” she said firmly. “They feel so bad all the time, like they have a thunderstorm inside of them.”
Juan heated a cup of milk and dissolved squares of chocolate in it. A scuttling in the dirt outside caught our attention, and through the open door we saw a small, strange, guinea-pig-like animal run toward the beach, followed by three babies.
“What on earth was that?” I asked.
“Cuis,” Juan said, a word pronounced as “quees.”
“Do the locals eat them?”
“Oh sure,” Tom said. “They make cuis lorraine.”
Pulling the large round of red-rind-covered cheese toward me, I cut a few chunks out of it, leaving it crumbly and untidy. “Sorry about chavelling the cheese,” I said.
“Chavelling?” Gustavo asked. “What means chavelling?”
“Beats me,” Roger said. “I’ve never heard it before.” Judy and Tom shook their heads.
“It’s a British word,” I explained, “for cutting something—like a piece of bread, cake, cheese, or pie—in a sloppy way.” Roger translated into Spanish, with a pantomime of someone cutting a messy slice of pie. I gouged another wedge of cheese loose.
“Stop chavelling that cheese!” Gustavo demanded melodramatically.
“Have you heard about the chavelling salesman?” Roger asked.
“Yes indeed,” I said. “Hide your young cakes.”
As the day brightened, filtered light poured through a skylight overhead. The rest of the curved ceiling was covered with long white Styrofoam squares. A sink, refrigerator, and gas hot-plate were at the far side of the hut, next to open crates filled with fresh tangerines, apples, cabbages, potatoes, and onions. A net bag held carrots, cucumbers, and squash. Sausages hung from a string. Finishing his coffee, Tom took two cutting boards from the sink and handed them to Minolo and Juan, along with half a dozen sausages for them to skin with paring knives. It was Tom’s turn to cook, and he was planning a kale-and-sausage soup, which was to simmer all day.
After breakfast, we packed sandwiches for lunch, put on exposure suits and fishermans’ oilskins, and climbed into the Zodiacs. There were many experiments to conduct, and the blustery day was just calm enough to launch the boats. My Zodiac included Tom, Juan, Kate, and Roger, who was at the helm. When we saw whale tails and a lot of spray and movement in the distance, we headed straight for them, slowing down after fifteen minutes as we spiraled close. A confusion of flippers and tails slid across the surface of the water, where a number of whales were rolling. One whale in the middle of the group suddenly rolled upside-down.
“How many whales are we looking at?” I asked.
“That female,” Roger said, outlining her body in the air, “is belly-up at the surface, trying to avoid mating. There’s a male on the near side of her”—he pointed out a long; dark shape—“and also one on the far side of her.” Now I saw the two males surfacing and blowing. “But if you look down, you’ll see that there’s a third male holding his breath underneath her, waiting for her to turn from the belly-up position, in which her blowhole is underwater and she can’t breathe, to a belly-down position. She has to roll in order to breathe. Sooner or later, she’s got to roll toward one of the two males flanking her. But when she’s on enough of an even keel to be breathing air, she’s accessible to the male who’s underneath her. A mating group often includes this many males. If one of them leaves the group after he’s mated with the female, then she can easily avoid the other two, and that means they won’t get a chance to mate with her. If there are four males, though, and if two mate with her and leave, the other two won’t necessarily get a chance to. So you get into very complicated situations, in which some males have no opportunity to mate with a particular female.”
“This doesn’t sound very cheery from the female’s point of view,” I said. Rolling over to breathe, the female whale gave out an aggressive growl as a male put a flipper across her back. With a twist, she pulled a few yards away and the three males followed her. She rolled onto her back again.
“Okay. Let’s look at it from her point of view,” Roger said. “If you are a female coming into this area, you don’t have any means of choosing a mate, and chances are you’re going to be raped repeatedly by males in a group. But there is one way you can favor a particular male. You can wait until you’re mated with by the male you wish to be mated with and then just leave the area. You get the hell out as fast as you can. I think that’s what’s happening here.”
As we watched the melee of mating, it was tough to tell which parts belonged to which whale. A shadow climbed the female’s belly, and she flailed and swerved. Being upside-down did not protect her from mating, because a male whale’s erect penis, which is tapered, can be as much as nine feet long. And it is controllable. A human male cannot voluntarily move his penis by more than a few millimeters, but a right whale can move his all around like a long finger. It’s stored inside the whale, and when he’s swimming around, it is invisible. He also has internal testes. Human males have external testes, because the testes must stay cool or the male won’t be fertile. Nobody really understands how whales can have their testes inside, for streamlining, and not have their fertility affected. When a whale dies, the penis is extruded. All European woodcuts depicting dead sperm whales on a beach show a whale with an extended penis. Every sperm whale north of forty degrees north latitude is male; so every sperm whale stranded in Europe was a male.
Half a mile away, a whale’s tail hovered in the air, splashed down, then hovered again, this time for quite a while. He was only indulging in a favorite whale pastime; they entertain themselves by balancing their tails in the air. It is like someone holding a stick on the tip of his finger.
Hours had quickly passed, and Kate broke out a sack of ham-and-cheese sandwiches and small, sweet Argentine tangerines and passed them around. Roger unwrapped a camera with a telephoto lens, stood up, and photographed the fine display of mating and balancing whales. Then he carefully wrapped the camera and stowed it in a watertight trunk.
“In right whales, you have a very curious thing,” he said, sitting down. “The testes of a male blue whale, the largest whale in the world, weigh about seventy kilos—a hundred and fifty-four pounds—combined. You might ask: ‘What do the testes of a male right whale weigh, since it’s a much smaller animal?’ The answer is one metric ton—twenty-two hundred pounds! These are the largest testes ever recorded in any animal.”
“Why should there be such a difference?”
“For a very interesting reason, which has been most clearly demonstrated among the primates,” Roger said. “Thirty-three species of primates have been studied in which something is known about both the weight of the testes in the male and their techniques of mating—whether a given female mates with one male or with several males. If you plot a graph of testes weight versus body size, you discover that those primate species in which several males mate with the same female have testes that are much larger than those in which only one male mates with a female. The classic example is the difference between a chimpanzee and a gorilla. The chimp, a species that has multiple matings, has testes much larger than a human being’s, and they’re very visible. Now consider the great, big, brutish gorilla male, which has total dominion over a group of females. Someone may eventually challenge him for his position, but until then when he mates with a female, he has no doubt that he is the father of her offspring. He therefore has to produce only enough sperm to fertilize an egg in each of his females. The result is that he has such small testes that when you dissect a male gorilla, you can hardly find them. The reason a chimpanzee has such large testes is that when he mates with a female, she has probably just mated with another male, and if he is to have any hope of success, he must produce enough sperm to wash out the contribution of sperm from the previous male and replace it with his own.”
“And in the case of human beings?” I asked.
Roger laughed. “Yes, that’s the tantalizing question. If you look at the chart, everything with outsized testes is several males mating with a female, and everything with small testes is a monogamous species in which females and males are faithful to each other. Human beings lie right on the borderline, and it’s hard to predict which side they’re going to fall toward. That may partly explain our marital ambiguities and the problems we cause ourselves socially. Consider whales and their mating systems. Right whales are the supreme example of incredible sperm competition. A male who is going to mate with a female is competing with a whole series of males. When you watch the mating groups here, for instance, you see that a single female mates with several males in the course of an afternoon. If you are a male, probably your best strategy for any given mating session is to be the last, not the first. The male that mates last is the one that has the most sperm of his left in the female. He is presumably producing colossal quantities of sperm and flooding it into the female’s reproductive tract, trying to fill it as much as possible with his sperm and, again, trying to wash out the sperm of the previous males.”
“Ballenas!” Juan called, pointing a few hundred yards behind us, to where three whales were swimming in tandem. A mother and baby were being followed at a short distance by an adolescent whale.
“That’s probably her calf from the previous year,” Roger said, and went on: “One of the things I’ve noticed over the years is often when several males are trying to mate with a female, one of the males will try to push the female under the water so that he can mate with her, and it’s always a failure. And I thought, what a bozo this whale is, until I finally realized that I was the one who was a bozo. What I was watching was one male pushing a female under for the purpose of letting another male mate with her. That’s not a bad strategy if what you want to do in a few hours’ session is be the last to mate. But it’s the kind of strategy that would also invite cheating. The best way to get around cheating would be to be in a group of males that included male relatives of yours. Then even if it’s another male who gets in the successful last mating—the mating that will result in fertilization of the egg—the sperm that won would at least have most of your genes in it. But now you’ve got a problem. You can’t identify your father, nor can he identify you. You haven’t got a clue who he is. So you can’t go join your father’s mating group. But there is a male relative that you can identify, and that’s your brother. You know who your mother is—you lived with her for a year or fourteen months before you were weaned—and if she comes back with a young calf and if it’s a male, it’s your brother and you know that.
“Well, here’s where a truly fascinating thing comes up. The females with calves in Argentina are spread out along the same section of coast. They move together as a group, but their interactions at very close range are fairly infrequent. For the most part, they’re strung out like beads on a string. They seem to be aware of where the others are, and they avoid one another in some ways but stick together very strongly. A female with one calf might swim up to another female with a calf, and everything is fine until the calves begin to play. The second the calves begin to play, the mothers break it up, working hard if necessary. They will swim assiduously between the two calves until each one gets her calf to swim off with her. Why? Because at this time of the year, the mother is starving. She has swum up from the feeding grounds, which are maybe a couple thousand miles away, without eating; she has given birth to a calf without eating, and has pumped a blubber coat onto it and increased its size enormously without eating; and she must return to the feeding grounds without eating. So she has been starving for several months. Every single motion that her calf makes she pays for, so what she does is lead it away from any kind of play—except the one kind she tolerates—she appears to tolerate play with an adolescent.
“Now, here comes our big frustration. We can identify whales best when we’re looking directly down on top of them from a plane, because of their callosities [the bumps on their heads], whose pattern, placement, size, and form are different on every whale—we can easily tell them apart. But to follow the whales that way means paying two hundred dollars an hour to fly, and that’s ruinously expensive. We can’t afford to hang around long enough to watch much behavior, so we really don’t know who these adolescents are that the females allow to play with their young. My suspicion is that they are older brothers and that what the mothers are doing is allowing brothers to get to know each other, so that later on they can become a more effective mating group, which in turn will ensure that her genes have a better chance of being passed on. We have one example of a mating group that stayed together for almost six weeks and traveled together for 185 miles. That means that there would be a chance for reciprocal altruism to go into effect. One male could help another today, and the other returns the favor tomorrow.”
The adolescent whale drifted away from the mother and calf and began swimming slowly toward us, curious, no doubt, about a black rubber fish with many moving animals inside it. Then, blowing and tossing its tail, it dove directly under the boat. A long shadow, spotted with white at one end where the head’s callosities glowed, floated underneath us for what seemed like minutes. It surfaced with a blow, rolled onto one side, and curved back toward us. Its tail had a slightly ragged line of notches, probably orca bites.
“Watch the tail,” Roger warned. “If you ever see the tail coming down on you, leap fast into the water. Don’t even think about it. Just jump. You don’t want to get crushed between the boat and the tail.” But the whale dove back underneath the boat, rolling onto one side, apparently so it could look at us, then surfaced on the other side and blew a fine mist, which poured over us, smelling sweet, like wet fur. The whale circled back again and this time swam right alongside the boat. Its huge head, floating on the surface, came so close I could look into the blowholes, opening and closing like two hands held palms-together and pressing wide apart like a bellows at fingers and thumbs. A few hairs sprouted around the blowholes. Still quite young, the whale was only about thirty-five feet long. It had thick callosities, with whale lice clinging all over them, and the black skin was streaked with fine lines of the sort one sees on a window after rain. Males tend to have more callosities, as well as scrapes along their backs from fighting; and we thought this was a male. It brought its mouth toward the boat and nudged it. Stretching over the gunwale, I touched its head delicately with one finger. Its whole body flinched. How can it be so sensitive that it can feel a human’s slightest touch? I wondered. And it’s skin was startlingly soft, like oiled chamois.
The sound of light artillery in the distance drew our gaze to two breaching whales, hurling themselves into the air, half-twisting, like a top running out of momentum, and splashing onto their sides in thick geysers of spume. By then, the adolescent had returned to the other side of the boat and was languidly rubbing one whole flank along the gunwale, as a cat might twine between someone’s legs. After several passes, it swam away, leaving “footprints” behind it—large pools of smooth, calm, glassy water. The afternoon had already dwindled into the short hours of twilight. The falling sun had lost a lot of its heat, and we were all starting to feel chilly, so we headed back to camp. Near shore, we watched a whale roll over and over; there were many shells and pebbles in the shallows, and it could have been scratching the way a dog enjoys rolling in the dirt. It waved a flipper in the air, followed with the semaphore of its flukes. At last we landed on the beach and dragged the Zodiac into the boathouse.
At sunset, an orange fur lay along the horizon and the sea grew blue-gray. Areas of wet sand, exposed by the withdrawing tide, shone like an array of hand mirrors. Venus appeared overhead, bright as a whistle blow, with the small pinprick light of Mercury at its side. As night fell, the shallows shimmered like ice and the frantic winds began to sound like freight trains. The wind has a large vocabulary in Patagonia. It shushes through the thorn bushes, it rattles the corrugated-metal walls; it flutes through the arroyos; it makes the cliffs sound as if they are being scoured by a wire whisk. A night heron cried owow. A whale sneezing loudly sounded as if an iron patio chair were being dragged across a cement floor. In the distance, three whales blew bushes of mist. Over the apricot horizon, the sky billowed upward, pale green to thick teal to a translucent wafer of azure blue.
Dinner began late by American standards. Around 10:00 P.M. the camp gathered in the Peludo Palace, where a gas lamp at one end of the table coated the room in a dusty glow. The wind howled now like a banshee, and everyone joked heartily in Spanish, English, and pantomime. Tom, a born comedian, told us some of his April-first escapades. One year, dressed as Darth Vader, he went door to door in Concord, Massachusetts, pretending to sell roofing. Another time, he dressed as Captain Hook, his wife dressed as Peter Pan, and his children dragged an Exxon Valdez oil spill (brown plastic garbage bags) as part of a family skit. While Tom ladled up the camp’s favorite dinner—his kale soup, with garbanzo beans, kidney beans, onions, carrots, spices, and two kinds of sausage—he did a small cavalcade of impressions, ending with his forte, an exaggeratedly Germanic entity known as the Angstmeister. Each time Tom said Angstmeister, his eyebrows twitched and he went into pure Dr. Strangelove. The kale soup was so good we decided it deserved a formal name, but in the end we couldn’t decide between Sopa Perdido and Angstmeister Stew. Gustavo pulled a plastic bag filled with dozens of baguettes from behind the refrigerator and began breaking off hunks. Tom leapt to his feet and became Bruce Lee attacked by six savage loaves of French bread. His shadows, leaping around the Quonset hut, mixed with those of diners animated by laughter. The propane lamp flickered. The winds caterwauled and whistled. We could as easily have been sitting in an Antarctic station, pegged out against the elements, or in a Neanderthal cave, drawn to the spectral glow of a fire. Minolo poured wine, beer, and Coca-Cola. Anita passed a salad of raw vegetables dressed with mayonnaise. Talk turned to sports. Judy, learning that I had once taught in Pittsburgh for three years, asked if the town was sports-minded. And I explained that the town was so besotted with football that when I left, I suggested to one of the deans that the signs on bathrooms in the university be changed from Men and Women to Tight Ends and Wide Receivers. The English speakers tried to translate this conversation into Spanish and only managed it when Tom jumped to his feet and did a Knute Rockne play-by-play explanation on the side of the refrigerator. Minolo told a joke about a man who encountered a friend of his whose job was at a sawmill, and Kate translated it phrase by phrase: The friend has many large scars across his face. “What happened to you?” the man asks. “Oh, we were betting on who could get closest to the saw,” the friend answers. “I presume you won,” the man says. “No, actually,” his friend replies. “I came in fifth.”
When at last we finished a dessert of dulce de leche poured over bananas, it was nearly midnight. We all piled plates into the sink. There was no running water, so the next day we’d wash them in the ocean. With a flashlight, I hunted my way back to the tent, behind a sheep fence and among a clutch of thorn bushes, on the ledge of the beach; zipped my tent shut; and crawled into my sleeping bag.
Fifteen minutes later, I heard footsteps outside. “Asleep yet?” Kate said. “I think there’s an orca calling. Come on down to the beach.”
At the shoreline, Tom was holding a tape recorder attached to a hydrophone line running out into the bay. Over the years, Roger had produced a library of right-whale recordings. Right whales make many different sounds: funny, serious, strange, underwater, in the air. Probably, they mean a variety of things; it’s more mystery that remains to be solved. Despite the full moon, the sea and sky blurred in a creamy fog both eerie and radiant. Small green bioluminescent creatures flashed from the shallows. Whales glittered as they surfaced, and the moon seemed only their reflection. Close to shore, a right whale blew loudly. Another whale sneezed. The hydrophone picked up a stretched meow. No orcas were calling, but many right whales sighed and bleated through the pallid fog under the brilliant moon. Shivering, we decided to call it a night and returned to our tents and huts for a chilly sleep.
Over the next few days, camp life continued on its routine of hard work by day and antic bilingual meals at night. The ocean was too cold to bathe in, and people took turns driving an old pickup truck into Puerto Madryn to fill up the drinking-water jugs and buy fresh food. Inflation had skyrocketed in Argentina, and a truck bought for $2,000 ten years before was now worth several times that. But no one could afford to sell his truck, since new ones were much more expensive, whereas repairs were relatively cheap. All machinery—cars, generators, pumps—was in a perpetual state of mended dereliction. The camp’s generator wasn’t working, and the water tanks behind the house were also broken. Sometimes, dead rats were found floating in them, and we joked about passing out drinking water conrata or sin rata, as if they were just hairy ice cubes. Luckily, a workman was putting things back in order.
Although a core group of researchers remained in the camp, dozens of new people arrived and others departed. Doug Allen, an underwater photographer, who had curly red hair, a sunburn, and a thick Scottish accent, dropped by regularly and charmed us with his stark independence and gentle gregariousness, a combination very Patagonian. We adopted his word suss, which means to spy out something. One day, he casually reported that when he was in the water that morning, filming, he got too close to a calf and was walloped on the back of the head hard enough “to see stars.” He believed that it was an accident, but he was clearly shaken; nevertheless, he would go out filming close to whales again the next day. A British filmmaker, John Waters, and his wife and their six-week-old baby, who had been born in a nearby town, came to live in camp for a while. A Japanese film crew stopped by for two days of filming. Whale researchers from Puerto Madryn came and went, as well as two game wardens. The New York Zoological Society, which ran and supported the camp, in part, had arranged for members on a guided tour of Patagonia to drop in for an hour or so. Another, similar group, we were delighted to discover, included John Emlen, the now-retired field biologist who had inspired Roger, George Schaller, and many other scientists to go out and study the ways of animals in the wild.
What drew researchers, film crews, and tourists alike was not just the abundance of whales in the bays but the continuity of Roger’s work. Just as the callosities on right whales’ heads made individuals easy to identify, so did the markings on the tails of humpbacks. But humpbacks are difficult to study. They have never been observed mating, for example. At the whale camp, researchers could live and work very close to right whales and watch their social behavior and record their sounds. Roger felt lucky to have found a species of whale that could be conveniently observed from shore. The camp was conducting the world’s longest whale study based on known individuals. Each year researchers flew over in a plane, took photographs, and compared them to a file of known individuals. As of the most recent count, 960 whales had been identified. There were some right whales near South Africa, some off Australia, but only a total of about 3,500 left in the world. In the bays we explored, there were said to be about 1,200. Roger studied humpbacks in many areas, but right whales only in Patagonia, from this remarkable site.
One day, after the Japanese film crew packed up their gear and disappeared down the road in a tornado of dust, Roger and I sat on the porch steps and talked about Japanese whaling. If Roger had been especially generous with the film crew, who were making a two-hour documentary to be shown on Japanese television, it was because Japan desperately needs to change its attitude toward whales.
“The world has whales that appear to be intelligent, that can sing songs, change those songs, and use rhyme and human laws of composition,” Roger said. “They form bubble nets of great intricacy and complexity and cooperatively feed together in clever ways. This is not the sort of animal you should turn into fat and oil and lipstick and margarine and cat food and corset stays. Whaling isn’t something that has ever improved people very much. I’m going to Japan later in the year to talk with the Japanese people about whales. Once the people learn about this animal, their indifference, which is always based on ignorance, will be replaced by fascination, which is based on knowledge. I haven’t the slightest doubt that their feelings about whales will change, and of course, they’ll decry whaling, just as other peoples of the world have.”
“The Japanese people have been good at protecting cranes, albatrosses, and other endangered animals,” I mentioned.
“I have no quarrel with the Japanese people, only with their whalers—ruthless hunters who have no future,” Roger said. “I had a grandfather, a lumberman, who cut nothing but walnut trees, sometimes for whole years at a time, and that excess on his part, and on the part of his contemporaries, ensured that I would never have walnut except as the most exotic of woods. He was shortsighted. Was anyone warning him? I bet there was. Going on with the destruction of a species until it’s brought to the point of extinction is madness—not just a little mad or slightly mad. It’s authentic madness.”
A sudden wave of laughter poured across a slope near the house, where six people were holding what appeared to be golf clubs. Some of them were wearing sunglasses and golf hats. Nine small numbered orange flags marked holes, and each person carried a bright-orange ball. Roger and I shook our heads in disbelief at the sight.
Unlikely as it may sound, the whale camp was home to the toughest—and most remote—miniature-golf course in the world. Patagonia’s only miniature-golf course, in fact. Tom built it for Graham Harris’s children and brought the clubs all the way from Boston. As another burst of laughter came from the fairways, we left the porch and moseyed over to the tournament.
“Yes,” Tom said, chewing a big cigar, his green sunglasses flipped up at a right angle to his prescription glasses, “Golfito San José welcomes you.” He handed me a putter and an orange ball. All around us, nestled side by side among the bushes and gouges in the earth, were the nine almost invisible holes of golf. The edges of the holes were lined with fossil oyster shells and miscellaneous bric-a-brac, including a whale tail vertebra, the keratin part of a horse’s hoof, and chert (gemlike pebbles that cover most of the peninsula). Prickly quilimby bushes were everywhere. The holes themselves were rusty cans dressed with beach sand. The hazards were the arroyos, as well as live lizards, which sometimes darted into the open, guanaco droppings, seal bones, tufts of grass, splintered shells, dried ice-plant roots, and blowing dust. On the second hole there was also a “tarantula hazard”—the burrow of a trap-door spider that sometimes scrambled out to see what all the commotion was about. The fairways, also lined with fossil shells, made dog-legs and ran along cracks in the earth. One hole included a ski-jump rail from a salt train that used to provide one of Patagonia’s few exports. Another hole required shooting down a spout made of an old stovepipe. Rather than a rusty can, the final hole was a deserted hairy armadillo den. The flagpoles were made from rods that once held up the snake fence. The flags themselves were ragged scraps of orange fabric, flown at one time as aerial guideposts. The “clubhouse” was an old gray wooden packing crate. Nothing was ever wasted in Patagonia.
Gustavo putted, missed the hole by inches, swore in Spanish, “Oh, the whore that gave birth to me!” and lifted up his ball, marking its final resting place with three sheep droppings. Gaby had her hair tied back with an orange bandanna. She stepped up to her ball, which was resting on an upside-down beer-bottle cap, swung her hips in an exaggerated golfing move, and chipped her ball past an eroded guanaco vertebra and close to the hole. Anita, in a blue surfing T-shirt, got ready to putt.
Tom put his hand out and said, “Nope. One of the laws of this game is: When a burying beetle crosses the fairway, you don’t shoot. It’s a beetle hazard.” We watched a glossy black beetle run across the dirt and disappear under a bush.
“Ah yes. Silly me, I forgot,” Anita said. Then she took her shot, sending the ball over a bird skeleton and down a drop into the center of a thorn bush.
Suddenly, a whale breached about half a mile offshore and we stood, clubs hanging idle, and watched in wonder as it breached again and again. What power it must have taken to lift fifty tons of solid animal out of the water and twirl it around in the air. Still, the motion looked balletic—floating, graceful, and controlled. A few hundred yards south, another whale got in the mood like an evangelist at a tent meeting, leapt into an aisle of air, and started breaching, too.
In the evening I shifted my gear to the corrugated-metal hut on top of the hill behind the house, from which I’d have a panoramic view of the bay. This meant climbing a steep, skiddy winding path for three hundred feet whenever I needed something. But the hut rattled wonderfully in a dozen registers of metal and wood, and became an instrument played by the Patagonian winds. The walls gyrated like a rocket during lift-off. The wind slaloming through the dunes made an hallucination of footsteps outside. Quite often, the roof banged so hard at opposite corners that it sounded as if a hand were ripping it straight off. Inside, a narrow bed attached to one wall had a small window beside the pillow, cut there at the request of a young woman who wanted to see the moon rising as she fell asleep. On another wall, a window looked out over camp and the sea. A third wall was a bookcase with peeling shelves. The fourth had nails as clothes hooks, with a warped table beneath. The entire hut was only about six feet by eight feet, and perhaps seven feet high. A candle sat in a wobbly three-legged holder, and poured wax down its shoulders as it guttered in the draft. Although the hut got hot during the day, it was not wise to leave the door open, because sheep or guanacos or pit vipers might wander in.
At sunset, Roger and I sat on the jawbone bench on the porch of the main house and watched the horizon’s simmering cauldron of red. Enthralled by Doug’s account of swimming close to whales, I was puzzled by how few of the people in camp had been tempted to do the same.
“It’s those last ten feet,” Roger said, leaning against the wall that had grown warm from the late-afternoon sun. “That’s where most people find their nerve breaks down.”
“But that’s what life’s all about,” I said. “That’s where you find all the intimate details. How awful it would feel, at the end of your life, to look back and know that if you had just stayed in there a few more feet, you would have witnessed something truly astonishing.”
Roger nodded. He had spent his life walking the narrow corridor between the whale’s world and the human’s world. “I think you can know people quite well by the distance at which they drop back. Think how many miles all the people here had to fly, how many hardships they had to endure, how many hours they had to wait, how many people they had to deal with, just to get down here. It’s like that every year. Some people drop out before they ever leave the States. Some are fine doing research on the shore. Some can even tough it out in the boats, but they panic at the thought of being in the water with whales. Some can get into the water and watch at a distance—but the last ten feet horrify them. Despite all the rigors and turmoil they’ve gone through to get here, despite their fascination with whales, which they spend their lives studying, they just can’t face those last few feet. I don’t think this is limited to whales. It has to do with the way a person needs to know life.”
At the south end of the bay, a whale lifted its tail into the air and held it there, drifting downwind for five minutes. Then it swam back upwind, turned around and put its tail in the air, and drifted downwind again. Roger slapped his knee in delight. The whale was “sailing,” using its broad tail in place of canvas and catching a stiff breeze to blow it across the bay. Right whales sometimes practice sailing for half an hour at a time; it appears to be one of their favorite sports. You’d think many animals would sail, since it saves energy and is probably fun. But the only other animals that do it are three species of jellyfish. When you get into the upper latitudes—the roaring 40s, the frantic 50s, and the screaming 60s, as scientists refer to them—you have perfect conditions for sailing. Why waste all that time and energy wiggling your tail violently back and forth to swim if you can just put it up in the air and sail?
As evening deepened, we sat quietly, watching the upside-down whale, the wind behind its broad tail, still sailing merrily across the bay. Close in, the ocean seemed to be moving fast from right to left. But on the horizon, it didn’t seem to be moving at all.
“The whole thing is a giant wheel,” Roger said, holding an open hand up and tilting it slowly, “turning just as the planet is turning.” Three oystercatchers flew low across the sand in front of us, scolding a petrel until it flew out of their territory.
“No time to dawdle,” Tom said as he and the chicos bustled in and out of the house, busily constructing things out of cardboard, coat hangers, duct tape, and scraps. That night was Halloween, and everyone had been invited to the fiesta, but they had to come in costume—a challenge to those of us living in camp with limited resources. Soon whale researchers from Puerto Madryn began to arrive with their families, bringing food and costumes, and everyone was eager to see old friends and talk shop with colleagues they hadn’t seen for many months. A brass bell summoned us at last to the Peludo Palace. Our normal squadron of twelve had swollen to twenty-five, with children dressed as ballerinas, clowns, and pirates racing about, fake daggers drawn.
At last, the costume parade began. Juan had built himself a large guanaco head out of cardboard. John, disguised as a mosquito, wore a pair of welders’ goggles on his head and a boat propeller lashed to his back. Rubén, a visiting airplane pilot, stomped in as Rambo, complete with fake muscles and fake bombs. His wife, Yvonne, shuffled along as an armadillo, covered in corrugated roofing. I arrived dressed as a weather system, la tormenta, wearing silver asbestos flame-proof boots, a fake-leopard-skin jumpsuit, and a silver collar, with my long, thick hair attached to a trellis of coat hangers. I carried a lightning bolt cut out of cardboard and covered with silver-foil liners from chocolate bars. Tom and three of the chicos paraded in last, dressed as a long, sprawling right whale, made from black plastic garbage bags stretched over a skeleton of wire, baleen made from long grasses, a cardboard tail, and cut-up plastic-foam cups pasted on the head as callosities. With a tank of compressed air, Tom made the regular sound of blows, and the four-man-whale lurched around the room like a Chinese dragon, to the squealing delight of the children. Later, as we ate our dinner of cold cuts, hot dogs, and cake, a loud racket of artillery fire began. This time it was not breaching whales we heard but genuine artillery. Outside the hut, I saw red rockets flash along the horizon, followed by explosions of white. The Argentine Navy had begun target practice over the ocean, no doubt to the terror of the whales.
After dinner, I sussed my way up the hill with the aid of a flashlight, closed the door with a clang, and climbed into my sleeping bag on the cot. Orion was just starting to rise and I could see it through the window beside my head. Up north, Orion tossed one leg over the horizon as it rose, but it appeared to rise upside-down, feet first, its sword stars gleaming. Of course, it was not Orion but I who had changed position. Still, it was strange to find the sun rising and setting in unfamiliar directions, and the constellations leaping skewed out of the blackness. Venus, la lucera, rose early and stayed late; steady as a pinhole, it shone hard and white, with the small bed-light of the planet Mercury beside it. I had brought along a Whitney’s star-finder and a “pop-up sky,” and when I held them overhead, I spotted Cetus, the whale, slithering out of the north, and Delphinus, the dolphin, arcing directly overhead. According to Greek myth, the sea god Poseidon was lonely without a wife and sent a dolphin messenger to court Amphitrite, one of the sea nymphs. The dolphin was so persuasive that she agreed to mary Poseidon, who in gratitude set the dolphin to swim forever among the stars. In another story, Ovid claims that Delphinus is the dolphin that saved the life of the seventh-century poet and musician Arion. According to this tale, Arion was returning home to Greece from a tour of Sicily when some of the sailors plotted to rob and kill him. Outnumbered and apparently doomed, he asked to be allowed to sing a final song. So hypnotic was the music that it attracted a group of dolphins. Seeing them, he dove into the water, and one of them carried him home safely to Greece. In this story, it is Apollo who adds a dolphin to the constellations, along with the lyre of Arion.
Throughout history, dolphins have been credited with acts of intelligence and generosity of spirit. Indeed, many cultures have stories of dolphins saving people’s lives. Karen Pryor, a longtime researcher, was once asked about dolphins pushing people to shore, and she said: “Well, you never hear from the drowning people dolphins pushed away from the shore.” For all we know, there may be some truth in that. But dolphins do seem to enjoy playing with humans, and they do so in many bays around the world. One of the strangest dolphin stories emerged in 1989, when the Iranian government accused the United States of using “kamikaze” dolphins to mine harbors and boats. A similar scenario was proposed by the seventies film The Day of the Dolphin, in which a dolphin researcher, played by George C. Scott, finds his dolphins nabbed by thugs hoping to use them to deliver a bomb to the president’s yacht. In his memoir, Behind the Dolphin Smile, dolphin trainer Richard O’Barry confides that he was once approached by the CIA to train dolphins for military use. The Navy consistently denies that it is doing any such research with dolphins. But insiders have described a Navy technique of training dolphins to ram a person in the abdomen, an adaptation of the dolphin’s natural strategy of killing a shark by ramming it in the gills. What disturbs many people is the idea that dolphins—peaceful creatures that since the time of Pliny the Elder have been observed befriending human beings—are now being trained to kill. Dolphins are the most intelligent whales; and they can transfer information among themselves. Chimps can learn sign language, and one was observed teaching the language to her offspring. Suppose dolphins, which may be even more intelligent than chimps, started training their young in the techniques of killing humans? Consider how fast the “friendly whale phenomenon” swept through the gray-whale population. It wouldn’t be long before the oceans were full of killer dolphins. Instead of our having a friend in the sea, we would have a deadly new enemy, specifically trained to kill us. When people complain about using animals for warfare, the Navy sometimes counters that the Canine Corps, used in WWII, saved many Allied lives. But they neglect to point out that those dogs went through long, arduous periods of de-training before they were returned to society, precisely so that they wouldn’t kill people. If the Canine Corps had escaped or been released before they were de-programmed, they would have savaged civilian populations, preying especially on children, who are drawn to dogs as friendly playmates. With such ominous thoughts, I closed my eyes under the gaze of Delphinus, let my mind fill with the tumultous sounds of the wind, and fell asleep.
We say dawn breaks, as if something were shattering, but what we mean is that waves of light crest over the earth. The next morning, rinsed by those light waves, I walked along the beach, beside overhanging cliffs, and realized what an ancient place the camp was based on. The cliffs were almost solid fossil—uplifted prehistoric seabeds. Fossil oysters large enough to have held more than a pound of meat jutted out from the top, and fossil sand dollars perhaps seventy million years old lay at the base. Fossil sea lions, crabs, and whales littered the beach. There was an array of dead penguins and other birds on the beach, too. In the tide wrack were feathers, flippers, mummified animals, and countless shells. Dunes of stones led down to the water. One thing the ocean does exceptionally well is sort according to size. There were fields of large stones, then ridges of medium-size ones, then areas of even smaller stones. Looking out at the water, I saw a mother and baby whale lolling in the shallows. When had they arrived? Rolling on her side, the mother whale swung her flippers up and nursed the baby. When a pack of seals appeared, and began playfully to pester them, the baby snuggled up to its mother and cupped its flipper around her. The whales appeared to have stopped in the water, but the faster I walked toward them, the more they seemed to be just another yard ahead of me. Finally, I left them and headed for breakfast at the Peludo Palace.
After coffee, cheese, and cereal-crackers, Roger, Judy, and I climbed into a car with Rubén, the pilot, and set out for the airstrip half an hour away. Roger pushed the windshield-washer button, but nothing happened. “No skunks,” he said in Spanish to Rubén. Patagonians call the squirting washers “skunks.” As a car passed us from the opposite direction, its driver put a hand against the front window. Roger did the same. In Argentina, car windows are made to shatter utterly on impact, so that someone thrown through the window in an accident won’t get slashed by glass. Unfortunately, a sharp flying stone can shatter the glass, too, so locals mistakenly think they can hold the windshield together with one hand. Whenever they pass an oncoming car, they prop a hand against the windshield.
Rubén’s Cessna 182 was hangared at a nearby estancia, next to a long dirt airstrip. Each year Rubén flies Roger and other camp people out over the bays, to photograph whales. Because the plane’s tail letters are LV-JCY, Roger’s children used to call it Love Juicy. We climbed aboard and headed for the southern bay, which was said to be packed with whales. Rubén spotted whales in the water, flew straight to them, and did steep turns around them at three hundred feet, while Roger knelt and shots pictures of each animal. On an outline of the peninsula, I penciled in 
+ + (two females, with one calf each) at our approximate position and, a little farther along, another +. As Roger finished each roll of film, I handed him a fresh one and marked the number of the roll and the date on the used one. After an hour of steep turns, we headed back to the airstrip. Rubén rolled out a yellow drum of gas and attached a green hand pump to it that looked like a coffee grinder. Judy pumped gas from it into a hose, which Rubén fed into a can topped with chamois (to filter out contaminating water), and pumped the gas from the can into the wing. It was a lengthy process. Then Rubén and Judy climbed aboard and in a moment we were airborne again, flying over the great flat deserts. Sheep trails converged and overlapped at the far-flung water tanks. In a few minutes, Rubén landed on a dirt road, paused just long enough for me to get out, turned the plane around, and took off to spend the day photographing whales. Three kilometers from camp, at the spot where the camp road meets the main one, I began walking down roads that resembled gutted riverbeds. A herd of ten guanacos took flight when they saw me. Two mares (“rabbits with white miniskirts,” Roger called them) scampered away as I passed, and lizards swaggered under bushes. In an hour, I stood on the rise overlooking camp. Two boat trails leading from the boathouse to the water told me that the chicos were already out at work. When I got to the house, I was struck by the stillness and silence. Everyone was gone. Climbing up to my hut, I took off my jacket and walked out to the cliff hut, a little less than a mile away. An icy morning had turned into a torrid noon, which would no doubt drop to near freezing by nightfall. From the cliff hut, I saw below in the water the same mother and baby I had seen earlier. She had a large, distinctive wound on one flank, and the callosities on her snout formed a sort of parenthesis. To some earlier observer, they resembled fangs, and thus she was named Fang. Her new calf nestled beside her. They had spent all morning close to camp. The sunlight made a glittering path over the water. Each time the whales surfaced, drops of water sparkled around them.
Fang and her calf were close below me, but the whole bay was a waltz of mother and baby whales. Right whales are pregnant for only about a year, which seems like a short time. After all, an elephant calf gestates for twenty-two months, and a whale is larger than an elephant. When an elephant calf is born it has to scramble up onto its legs, but a whale calf can go straight from the amniotic fluid of its mother’s womb into the womb of the ocean. It doesn’t have to support itself. Whales, being warm-blooded mammals, which breathe as we do, could, in principle, live on land, but if a whale were on land, its organs would be crushed under its own weight. It needs the water to support its massive size, which is one of the reasons stranded whales fare so poorly. Because a whale baby doesn’t have to stand up, its bones are so flexible that you could take the rib bone of a baby whale and bend it back and forth as if it were made of hard rubber. Baby whales are virtually weightless. It’s as though they were flying. Another lovely thing about whale mothers and babies is that a mother whale is herself 97 percent water. When she speaks, the sound she makes travels directly through the water, through her body and her womb, and her baby hears it. But because there is no air in the womb, the baby can’t speak back. The baby must wait in the mother’s womb for a year, listening, until it’s born into a world where it can finally answer.
A newborn whale calf does not leave its mother’s side but often swims along eye to eye with her. Sometimes the mother whale swims so that with every downstroke of her tail, she touches the calf. Sometimes the calf gets obstreperous and bangs into its mother, or even breaches onto its mother’s back. Finally, she will lose her patience and punish it by rolling over quickly onto her back as the calf is ready to ram her for, say, the fifteenth time. Then she catches it by the small of its tail and holds it underwater so that it begins spluttering, wheezing, sneezing, coughing. In a little while she lets it go. After that, the calf resumes its eye-to-eye position and is careful not to act up again. Hungry calves will butt their mothers, climb all over them, and slide off them, trying to get their mothers to roll over and let them nurse. Occasionally, a mother will calm a hyperactive calf by sliding underneath it and turning over to pick it up out of the water and balance it on her chest, holding it between her flippers. Every now and then, with a flipper the size of a wall, a mother reaches over and pats the calf sweetly.
For hours, I sat quietly and watched the busy nursery bay. Fang rolled onto her weighty side, and her baby nursed. Then the baby got rambunctious and strayed a little too far. Mother lowed to it in a combination of foghorn and moo, calling it back within eyeshot. From time to time, Fang submerged slowly, her tail hanging limp and loose, trailing one tip of a fluke in the water. She made burpy sounds, with occasional moans, and I think she may have been napping.
When a whale sleeps, it slowly tumbles in an any-old-crazy, end-over-end, sideways fashion, and may even bonk its head on the bottom. Or it just lies quietly, looking like a corpse. When it rises again to breathe in the midst of its sleep, it comes up as slow as a dream, breaks the surface, breathes a few times and, without even diving, falls again slowly toward the bottom. Right whales sometimes sleep in the mornings on calm days in Argentina, and some of them seem to be head-heavy, with light tails. The result is that they fall forward and their tails rise out of the water. Humpbacks are rarely visible when they’re sleeping, because they’re less buoyant and usually sink fast. But the behavior of right whales is easy to study, because they’re at-the-surface whales. They’re so fat that they float when relaxed, and they spend a lot of time with their backs in the air. When they’re asleep at the surface, their breathing rate drops tremendously, they don’t close their nostrils completely between breaths, and so sometimes they snore. In fact they make marvelous, rude, after-dinner noises as they sleep. When they wake, they stretch their backs, open their mouths, and yawn. Sometimes they lift their tails up and shake them, and then they go about their business. Often, they sleep at the surface so long on calm days that their backs get sunburned; and then they peel the same way humans do, but on a big, whale-size scale. The loose skin from their backs falls into the water and becomes food for birds. When they breach, they shed a lot of loose skin as they hit the water, and seagulls, realizing this, fly out fast to a breaching whale. Not much skin sheds from the tail. The gulls know that, and when a whale is merely hitting its tail on the water, they don’t bother with it.
A gull swept down, pulled a piece of skin from Fang’s back, and Fang, in obvious pain, shook her head and tail simultaneously, flexed almost in half, then dove underwater. The gull flew to another pair of whales nearby, attacked them, and went off. A bizarre habit had developed among the gulls in this bay. Instead of waiting for the whales to shed skin, they landed on the backs of whales and carved the skin and blubber off. Two species of gulls—the brown-headed gulls and the kelp gulls—yanked off long strips of skin and set up feeding territories on the backs of their own particular whales. When Roger first started studying right whales at Valdés Peninsula, he noticed that only brown-headed gulls were peeling the skin off the backs of sleeping, sunburned whales. Soon, however, the kelp gulls not only learned this technique but also began carving holes in backs. The result was that whales like Fang were pitted with craters made by gulls. When a gull landed on a whale’s back, the whale panicked. This year there were fewer whales in the bay, and Roger thought the kelp gulls might have been chasing them away, to bays where kelp gulls don’t yet know the tricks.
Juan appeared at the edge of camp, on foot, apparently hiking in from a walk to a neighboring bay. By the time I got back to the main house, he was just arriving, wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and a knitted hat.
“Tired?” I asked with an inflection that said, I really hope you aren’t. “Want to go find some whales?”
He grinned. “Just let me get a Coke, then vamos.”
I put on a leotard and tights and began crawling into a half-inch-thick wetsuit that included Farmer John overalls, a beaver-tail jacket, boots, gloves, and a hood. There was so much neoprene in the suit, trapping air, that I’d need to wear weights around my waist to keep from bobbing on the surface.
Sitting on the porch whale skull, John watched me suit up. He looked anxious. “Be careful,” he said. “This morning, I was out in a boat with Tom collecting breath samples and the calf of that mother over there”—he pointed to Fang and her baby, just around the curve of the beach—“rocked the boat with its flipper and gave us a scare.”
To tell the truth, if I was going swimming I’d have felt much safer with Roger on board, but I had been waiting all week for the water to calm down and all afternoon for Roger to get back from flying. It was already past four, and I very much doubted that he intended to return before sunset. So, some of my caution evaporated, and I knew it was now or never.
Juan returned from the Peludo Palace and tugged on a thin wetsuit and boots, and we went down to the beach, where Minolo joined us in the Zodiac. As we pulled out, I saw John and Tom on the porch, standing next to the sighting scopes. Heading north along the bay, we came upon two mothers and calves, but the mothers were naturally protective of their calves and hurried them away. We wanted to find a young adult. Juan had been collecting loose skin for Judy and then going into the water to photograph the heads of the whales it came from in order to identify them. I hoped to join him. We searched for an hour but found none in the mood to be approached. Finally, we headed back toward camp and, coming around a bend, discovered Fang and her calf still playing. We cut the motor about two hundred yards from the whales. Juan and I slipped over the side of the boat and began to swim toward them, approaching as quietly as possible, so that they wouldn’t construe any of our movements as aggressive. In a few minutes, we were only yards from the mother’s head. Looking down, I saw the three-month-old baby beside her underwater, its callosities bright in the murky green water. Slowly, Juan and I swam all the way around them, getting closer and closer. The long wound on Fang’s flank looked red and angry. When her large tail lifted out of the water, its beauty stunned me for a moment, and then I yanked Juan’s hand, to draw his attention, and we pulled back. At fifty feet long, weighing about fifty tons, all she would have needed to do was hit us with a flipper to crush us, or swat us with her tail to kill us instantly. But she was moving her tail gently, slowly, without malice. It would be as if a human being, walking across a meadow, had come upon a strange new animal. Our instinct wouldn’t be to kill it but to get closer and have a look, perhaps touch it. Right whales are grazers, which have balleen plates, not teeth. We did not look like lunch. She swung her head around so that her mouth was within two feet of me, then turned her head on edge to reveal a large white patch and, under that, an eye shaped much like a human eye. I looked directly into her eye, and she looked directly back at me, as we hung in the water, studying each other.
I wish you well, I thought, applying all the weight of my concentration, in case it was possible for her to sense my mood. I did not imagine she could decipher the words, but many animals can sense fear in humans. Perhaps they can also sense other emotions.
Her dark, plumlike eye fixed me and we stared deeply at one another for some time. The curve of her mouth gave her a Mona Lisa smile, but that was just a felicity of her anatomy. The only emotion I sensed was her curiosity. That shone through her watchfulness, her repeated turning toward us, her extreme passivity, her caution with flippers and tail. Apparently, she was doing what we were—swimming close to a strange, fascinating life-form, taking care not to frighten or hurt it. Perhaps, seeing us slip over the side of the Zodiac, she thought it had given birth and we were its young. In that case, she might have been thinking how little we resembled our parent. Or perhaps she understood only too well that we were intelligent beasts who lived in the strange, dangerous world of the land, where whales can get stranded, lose their bearings and equilibrium, and die. Perhaps she knew somehow that we live in that desert beyond the waves from which whales rarely return, a kingdom we rule, where we thrive. A whale’s glimpse of us is almost as rare as our glimpse of a whale. They have never seen us mating, they have rarely if at all seen us feeding, they have never seen us give birth, suckle our young, die of old age. They have never observed our society, our normal habits. They would not know how to tell our sex, since we hide our reproductive organs. Perhaps they know that human males tend to have more facial hair than females, just as we know that male right whales tend to have more callosities on their faces than females. But they would still find it hard to distinguish between a clothed, short-haired, clean-shaven man and a clothed, short-haired woman.
When Fang had first seen us in the Zodiac, we were wearing large smoked plastic eyes. Now we had small eyes shaped like hers—but two on the front of the head, like a flounder or a seal, not an eye on either side, like a fish or a whale. In the water, our eyes were encased in a glass jar, our mouths stretched around a rubber tube, and our feet were flippers. Instead of diving like marine mammals, we floated on the surface. To Fang, I must have looked spastic and octopuslike, with my thin limbs dangling. Human beings possess such immense powers that few animals cause us to feel truly humble. A whale does, swimming beside you, as big as a reclining building, its eye carefully observing you. It could easily devastate you with a twitch, and yet it doesn’t. Still, although it lives in a gliding, quiet, investigate-it-first realm, it is not as benign as a Zen monk. Aggression plays a big role in its life, especially during courtship. Whales have weapons that are equal in their effects to our pointing a gun at somebody, squeezing a finger, and blowing him away. When they strike each other with their flukes in battles, they hit flat, but they sometimes slash the water with the edge. That fluke edge could break a person in two instantly. But such an attack has never happened in the times people have been known to swim with whales. On rare occasions, unprovoked whales have struck boats with their flukes, perhaps by accident, on at least one occasion killing a man. And there are three reported instances of a whale breaching onto a boat, again resulting in deaths. But they don’t attack swimmers. In many of our science-fiction stories, aliens appear on earth and terrible fights ensue, with everyone shooting weapons that burn, sting, or blow others up. To us, what is alien is treacherous and evil. Whales do not visualize aliens in that way. So although it was frightening to float beside an animal as immense and powerful as a whale, I knew that if I showed her where I was and what I was and that I meant her no harm, she would return the courtesy.
Suddenly, Juan pulled me back a few feet and, turning, I saw the calf swimming around to our side, though staying close to its mother. Big as an elephant, it still looked like a baby. Only a few months old, it was a frisky pup and rampantly curious. It swam right up, turned one eye at us, took a good look, then wheeled its head around to look at us with the other eye. When it turned, it swung its mouth right up to my chest, and I reached out to touch it, but Juan pulled my hand back. I looked at him and nodded. A touch could have startled the baby, which might not have known its own strength yet. In a reflex, its flipper or tail could have swatted us. It might not have known that if humans are held underwater—by a playful flipper, say—they can drown. Its flippers hung in the water by its sides, and its small callosities looked like a crop of fieldstones. When it rolled, it revealed a patch of white on its belly and an anal slit. Swimming forward, it fanned its tail, and the water suddenly felt chillier as it stirred up cold from the bottom. The mother was swimming forward to keep up with it, and we followed, hanging quietly in the water, trying to breathe slowly and kick our flippers as little as possible. Curving back around, Fang turned on her side so that she could see us, and waited as we swam up close again. Below me, her flipper hovered large as a freight elevator. Tilting it very gently in place, she appeared to be sculling; her tail, too, was barely moving. Each time she and the baby blew, a fine mist sprayed into the air, accompanied by a whumping sound, as of a pedal organ. Both mother and calf made no sudden moves around us, no acts of aggression.
We did not have their insulation of blubber to warm us in such frigid waters and, growing cold at last after an hour of traveling slowly along the bay with them, we began to swim back toward the beach. To save energy, we rolled onto our backs and kicked with our fins. When we were a few hundred yards away from her, Fang put her head up in a spy hop. Then she dove, rolled, lifted a flipper high into the air like a black rubber sail, and waved it back and forth. The calf did the same. Juan and I laughed. They were not waving at us, only rolling and playing now that we were out of the way. But it was so human a gesture that we automatically waved our arms overhead in reply. Then we turned back onto our faces again. Spears of sunlight cut through the thick green water and disappeared into the depths, a bottom soon revealed itself as tawny brown about thirty feet below us, and then the sand grew visible, along with occasional shells, and then the riot of shells near shore, and finally the pebbles of the shallows. Taking off our fins, we stepped from one liquid realm to another, from the whale road, as the Anglo-Saxons called the ocean, back onto the land of humans.