Blueback

XIII

Dora Jackson had been worrying for years when the storm came. Each year the weather grew more fierce and erratic. Strange things happened every season. One year a leopard seal arrived on the beach all the way from Antarctica. Another year the salmon didn’t show at all. She found five dead dolphins snagged in the cliffs at Robbers Head. Abel and Stella wrote letters and called but they were too busy with work to come home much anymore and Dora had trouble keeping everything going on her own now. The orchard was getting away from her. Rabbits got into the vegetables at night and foxes to the hens. Her fingers were stiff with arthritis and engines defeated her.

She took Abel’s old boat out some days to fish or she walked with her thoughts along the beach and through the karri trees. In winter the bay was quiet, the way it used to be. No boats came. The place could be itself.

When it came, the storm was like a cyclone. It blew down her fences and took the roof off her freezer shed. The sea grew tormented. It buckled and swelled and bunted against the cliffs and headlands. Surf hammered the shore and chewed it away. The air was thick with foam and sand and spray. Wind gusts screamed till she covered her ears. The old house rattled and rocked like an old lugger at sea. Dora Jackson lay in bed until it was all over.

Late in the morning she got up to see the mess. She walked down to the shore to see a strange jumble of white stumps on the beach. As she got close she saw they were whale bones, thousands and thousands of them all along the bay. They stood like posts and broken teeth and tombstones where the storm had exposed them. Dora Jackson stepped over and under and around them. It was like walking through a graveyard. These bones had lain here under the sand of Longboat Bay for a century or more. She’d walked over them for forty years without knowing. It was a terrible feeling having history unearth itself so suddenly.

She sat all day with bones around her, bones the Jacksons had left here in their whaling days. It was whaling and sealing that brought the Jacksons here in wooden ships last century. Blubber oil and baleen, seal fur and fish had paid for this land over time. The Jacksons were all dead now, generations of men, women and children and only Abel and her were left. It had come down to them. They had lived from the sea all this time. Dora saw what must be done. Now it was time to help the sea live. She must protect the bay for all time.

That night in the wreckage of her house, Dora Jackson began writing letters. She wrote till dawn and the next night she went at it again. She wrote hundreds of them. They were like a coral spawn, those letters, tiny white messages that drifted out from Longboat Bay into the offices of people all over the country. Politicians, bosses, scientists all ignored her, but they had no idea how stubborn she could be. Month after month the letters went out, over and over, back and forward. Photos of Blueback landed on the desks of newspaper editors. There was something about that fat blue face with its moony eye which seemed to look right into you. Abel’s mother was patient. She outlasted them all.

Abel and Stella were diving in the warm everclear water of a rare lagoon when the fax came through on the expedition boat. Abel read it before he had towelled himself dry. He read it aloud to Stella as she peeled out of her suit. The message said that Longboat Bay had been declared a sanctuary, a marine park where everything that grew and swam there was protected by law. Stella went straight up the companionway to the bridge and called in a chopper. Abel went below to pack.

On the plane home, high over the Pacific Ocean, Abel Jackson had a dream. In the dream his mother was dead. She floated in Longboat Bay like seaweed as he swam from shore to reach her. Gulls and terns whirled above her, wailing. As he reached her he touched her face, her old, beautiful face, and she sank beneath the surface. She tilted over and wheeled like a starfish into the blackest deep. Out of the blur came a dark shape. Blueback. The old fish followed her down into the darkness, his tail swinging like a gate as they both disappeared.

‘You’re crying,’ said Stella when he woke.

‘Yes.’

‘Was it a bad dream?’

‘No, not bad. Sad, I suppose. All these years I just wanted to know about the sea. I’ve been everywhere, I’ve studied, I’ve given lectures, become a bigshot. But you know, my mother is still the one who understands it. She doesn’t go anywhere at all. She grows vegetables and eats fish. And she’s saved a place. I’m a scientist, a big cheese, but I’ve never saved a place. She learnt by staying put, by watching and listening. Feeling things. She didn’t need a computer and two degrees and a frequent flyer program. She’s part of the bay. That’s how she knows it.’

The jet rumbled beneath them. Stella squeezed his hand.

‘But you had to leave, Abel. You had school and work to think of.’

He shrugged. ‘But all I ever wanted to do was figure out what keeps it all together. When I was a boy I just wanted to know what Blueback thought about things. I wanted to learn the language of the sea.’

‘Like Dora says, maybe you don’t need words.’

The plane rumbled on, taking him home.