Far From The Sea We Know (3 page)

“Not all so busy, Julia,” Martin Bell said,
as he strolled out his office door.

“I’m sorry, Doctor, I thought you didn’t
want to see anyone today.”

“I didn’t. Except this young fellow,
apparently.”

The director of the Point was not a tall
man, but stood his full height with easy confidence. In spite of a
wind burned face framed by a silver mane of fine hair, he seemed
younger than his nearly seventy years. Matthew had liked him from
their few short meetings and would have even if Doctor Bell were
not world renowned as a brilliant pioneer in marine science.

Bell stood for a moment appraising him, yet
it felt totally free of judgment. Finally the director spoke.

“A good morning to you, my rash friend. What
trouble are you stirring up now?”

“I hope it’s not trouble, Doctor Bell. I saw
something I can’t understand and—”

“Good. An auspicious start. Come in.” He
turned to his receptionist. “If anyone calls, tell them I’m…yes,
you’re right as usual. Busy, absorbed, pondering the imponderable.
And Julia? Get outside today, get some sun and air, won’t you? Take
the rest of the day off.”

He gave her a wink and she smiled back, with
just a trace of a blush on her pale cheeks.

Bell closed the door after Matthew entered
the office.

“I don’t understand why that woman needs to
spend virtually every evening in a club, dancing away. What a
waste. Sit down, Matthew, I just need to have a quick look at my
appointments to see if she has succeeded in keeping my morning
free.”

Bell’s office at the Point was on the
eastern corner of the main building, awash in morning light from an
array of windows that made up the walls. The view of the Strait of
Juan de Fuca was almost too dazzling. Bell sat on a large old
wooden office chair, swiveling back and forth as he quickly leafed
through memos and Post-It notes on what seemed like a still largely
uncharted desk. He abruptly pushed most of them to one side and
looked up at Matthew.

“Now then, let’s have the lot. Spare me
nothing.”

Matthew told his story as plainly as he
could. He tried to stick with his experience only and leave out any
attempt at interpretation. Bell was famous for a low tolerance of
waffling.

Yet Bell sat and listened to him without
interrupting.

When he had finished his story, Matthew
said, “I know this doesn’t makes sense, Doctor Bell, but that’s the
way it was. If there’s anything you know that might explain
this…”

“I’m aware they call me ‘Captain Nemo’
behind my back around here, and perhaps not all my expeditions have
been successful. I’ve learned to be open to almost anything, and I
know what it’s like to be disbelieved. Still, enough has panned out
over the years to keep the hounds of academia at their distance.
It’s changed here over the last few years, you know. Too many bean
counters, too much career politics. The students seem to spend most
of their time honing grant-chasing skills.”

Bell stared through the window at a sailing
ketch headed out of the Strait to the open sea and said, “As you’ve
already conceded, your story does sound like utter nonsense, I’m
afraid.”

Bell was right. He could not defend his
experience with any kind of proof or explanation—not to Bell, not
to anyone.

“If you had told me this story a few days
ago,” Bell continued, “I would probably have been seeing you to the
door by this point in the interview.”

Matthew waited as Bell sifted through some
papers, found a manila folder, and opened it. He scrutinized its
contents then looked up and stared at Matthew across the expanse of
the desk as if from across a sea. His eyebrows went up and stayed
suspended above his clear eyes until he finally let out a slow
sigh. It seemed suddenly very quiet.

“Considering what you told me about time and
location,” Bell said, “I can tell you the name of at least one of
the whales you saw.”

“You had a transmitting tag on one of the
whales?”

“Yes, Lefty is one of ours. She has a gash,
healed over now, on her right flipper. She’s probably not the one
that caught your attention, but she had to have been among the
others.”

A large map showing all the oceans and
continents covered the entire wall opposite the windows. Bell got
up and walked to it, his distinctive stride that of someone moving
through open wilderness, rather than across office carpeting.

He pointed to Scammon Lagoon in Mexico, and
swept his hand up to a location off the coast of British Columbia,
due west of Vancouver.

“We electronically tagged Lefty about nine
weeks ago in Baja, just before the migration north began. She
appears to have been part of the grouping of whales that you saw.
She was at the same coordinates at the same time, if what you just
told me is correct. Fortunate that you troubled to get that down,
wasn’t it?”

“You can thank old Livijo.”

Bell looked back to the window, dazzling
light off the water filtered through his white hair. He paused a
moment before going on.

“There’s something extremely peculiar
connected with this, Matthew. We had a confirmed visual sighting of
Lefty two days before you saw your whales.”

He returned to the map and pointed to a spot
south of the first location, well within the established migration
routes of the grays.

“About here. She was on her own with her
calf. It fits that she could get to where you saw her, if we allow
eighty kilometers per day. It fits. At this previous sighting of
Lefty, there were no other grays closer than a couple of
kilometers. I’ve never seen migrating grays act like a pod in the
way you described. You said there were at least fifty,
correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, they do socialize a bit in the
breeding grounds, but not while migrating. Of course, grays can
appear to travel together, but it would be more accurate to say
that they just happen to be going the same way at the same time.
I’ve seen clusters of fifteen or so, but forty or fifty swimming
together? Not grays, not while migrating. So, if true, worth
investigating for that alone.”

“I agree,” Matthew said.

“Of course, but there’s another bone in this
stew, you see, because virtually to the minute of the time you say
the whales vanished, we lost contact and then had a cluster of
garbled signals before picking them up again.” Bell gestured toward
the manila folder. “This is according to a report that landed on my
desk this morning.”

“Doctor, I don’t really know what they
did.”

“Correct, so we will say, ‘appeared to
vanish.’ In any case, it matches the time Harold reported for loss
of contact. He was monitoring Lefty at the time.”

“Harold Conlan?” Matthew asked. “Well…”

“Yes, I know, a bit obsessive, but he does a
thorough job organizing data. When I need it, that’s damn helpful.
Even if he did once tell me there were 8.67 females in the average
pod of Orcas.”

“I’ve worked with Harold.” Matthew said.

“Tends to wander a bit too long among the
details, agreed, but diligence paid off this time. After the
garbled signals settled down, we got clear readings again. Lefty’s
signal came from a location, let’s see, right here.”

Bell pointed to another location on the map,
off the coast of Vancouver Island, but almost a hundred kilometers
further north. “This all happened in less than a minute.”

“That can’t be right,” Matthew said, “and I
have no idea whether I saw Lefty.”

“Well, you may have, though you wouldn’t
have been looking for her, would you? The GPS data we have for the
time you gave puts Lefty at the same location that you said you
were at during your sighting. You were using satellite navigation
gear on your fishing boat, of course.”

“Nothing fancy, but still accurate to within
ten meters.”

“How quickly we get used to the advances of
technology!” Bell said with a laugh. “In any case, that puts Lefty
within the group you observed, and the point is, they seemed to
have moved in a way that doesn’t seem possible!” Bell rubbed his
hands together. “We shall know soon enough. The
Valentina
is
on the way to meet them.”

The
Valentina
was the Point’s
flagship, one of the best small research vessels in the world. The
chance to join her crew someday was a dream Matthew held closely
and that desire had kept him going when he struggled with the most
challenging academics.

Bell pointed to the map again.

“The
Valentina
is about here now and
should be able to get to the signal’s source late today. Andrew
Thorssen is skippering her, as you know. You need people, Matthew,
not just tracking devices.”

Bell went back to his desk, pushed the
papers back in the folder and handed it to Matthew.

“I’d like you to look over Harold’s report
and talk to me again after lunch.”

Matthew shifted uncomfortably on his
feet.

“I have a class after lunch, Doctor Bell.
It’s my first one of the semester.”

“Then how about dinner tonight? We are
having one of Margaret’s specialties.”

“Yes…yes, of course,” he said, amazed at the
invitation. It was almost unheard of for Bell to allow anyone from
the Point into his sanctuary.

“Splendid. We’ll see you at seven. Read the
report, will you? Strange coincidence that you were there.
Sometimes, you know, chance plays us and sometimes
for
us.”

Bell sat down and looked at Matthew for
another long instant, then began foraging through the landscape of
papers and files. Matthew took his leave silently.

He walked down the hall and out into the
bright shimmer of day, Bell’s last comment ringing in his head.

Matthew leaned back against the seat as his
old pickup bumped along the gravel road toward Bell’s legendary
stronghold. A billowing cloud of dust floated up behind as if
erasing his only way back.

He had planned to stop off along the way to
buy some wine, and then remembered the Bells’ reputations as
gourmets. Anything he would pick would probably be a joke. Instead,
he packed some salmon that a friend up north had smoked. Copper
River, the best, so it should pass.

A rare roll of thunder sounded in the
distance reminding him that this had been the driest spring since
record keeping began. Anomalies like this were becoming more common
and if nothing changed—or changed soon enough—the day would come
when Nature would snap everything to a balance as she had long
before, and all would be swept away like the drift and trash from
the beach.

A rabbit suddenly ran into his path. He hit
the brakes, and the small pickup skidded into a slide on the loose
gravel. The truck was going into the ditch and heading straight
toward a large cedar, when he let off the brake pedal, and swerved
back onto the road. A half second longer, it would have been too
late.

Stupid! Why did he always do that?

Heart pounding, he drove slowly, trying to
calm down. A glint of water was now visible through the trees. Off
to the west, the storm clouds still lingered as if waiting their
chance. He reached a clearing and came to a stop. The dust that had
been trailing along behind caught up and passed by him before
slowly settling back to earth. He sat for a while and caught up
with himself, gazing out across the Strait, where ocean waters
dissolved into a dark sky.

An ancient but shiny green pickup truck and
Bell’s vintage Jaguar sedan were parked under a shed roof. Although
it was not necessary, he pulled on the emergency brake. The report
Bell had given him to read lay on the floor, and he gathered the
pages back into the folder before getting out.

The sound of his truck door slamming
reverberated off the cliff face above and echoed across the water.
Above, Doctor Bell’s sanctuary was perched on a bluff that rose
almost vertically out of the sea and served as a fitting prelude to
the soaring Olympics further south. The house had that rare quality
of belonging where it was, enhancing the land and seascape rather
than detracting from it. The path up followed a natural fault line
in the cliff face. Bell was already coming down to meet him.

“Welcome, Matthew. Come, I want to show you
something before we go inside.”

Bell led the way along a side path to a
stone terrace built at the edge of the cliff. He grasped the
railing of galvanized iron that ran around the edge in a
semicircle, and leaned out into the soft updrafts. The view was a
spectacular. Across the sea to the north, Canada seemed close
enough to touch. The thunderheads looked as if they would pass them
by this time.

“Thirty years ago, when Margaret and I first
found this land,” Bell said, “this terrace was our first piece of
work. We lived out here in a collection of tents and trailers for
close to three years, staying in town during the worst of the
winter. The kids loved it.”

They stood in silence, their gaze
irresistibly drawn to the horizon.

“None of them live anywhere near here, now.
Agnes is somewhere off the coast of Madagascar, Colin’s in Prague.
We just heard that Jonathan will be in Nepal for at least another
year. Scattered over the shrinking earth. However Pen, our
youngest, has come for a visit.”

A voice was calling. Margaret Bell stood on
the verandah, waving to her husband.

“We’re coming!” Bell answered in an almost
musical yell. He turned to Matthew as they walked along. “Never
keep a woman waiting when the food is hot.”

The walked to the house in silence, arrived
at the front door. “Welcome to our home,” Bell said.

Some might have called it a mansion, but it
had a sprawling breeziness that gave no sense of pretense, only a
comfortable graciousness. The smooth but unfinished woods that made
up the trim and doors had been left to age and mellow into subtle
shades of amber and gray. The walls were hand plastered, but not
excessively rustic.