CHAPTER EIGHT

A Rippin' Talk

"Biology," said the pseudo Hawaiian, "dat bitch make sex puppets of everyone." Clay had just told him the story. The story was this:

Five years into her marriage to Nathan Quinn, Libby had gone for the summer to the Bering Sea to put satellite-tracking tags on female right whales. She had already begun working with Margaret Painborne, who was at the time trying to find out more about the mating and gestation behavior of right whales. The best way to do that was to keep constant tabs on the females. Now, sexing whales can be an incredibly difficult task, as their genitalia, for hydrodynamic reasons, are all internal. Without a biopsy or without being in the water with the animal (which means death in three minutes in the Bering Sea), about the only way to determine sex is to catch a female when she is with her calf or while the animals are mating. Libby and Margaret had decided to tag the animals while they were mating. Their base ship was an eighty-foot schooner loaned to the project by Scripps, but to do the actually tagging they used a nimble twelve-foot Zodiac with a forty-horse engine.

They'd spotted a female trying to evade the advances of two giant males. The right whale is one of the few animals in the world that uses a washout strategy for mating. That is, the females mate with several males, but the one who can wash out the others' seed most efficiently will pass his genes on to the next generation. Consequently, the guy with the largest tackle often wins, and male right whales have the biggest tackle in the world, with testes that weigh up to a ton and ten-foot penises that are not only long but prehensile, able to reach around a female from the side and introduce themselves on the sly.

Libby took the front of the boat, where she braced herself with a fifteen-foot fiberglass pole tipped with a barbed stainless point attached to the satellite unit. Margaret steered the outboard, maneuvering over frigid seven-foot seas, into the position where Libby could set the tag. Right whales are not particularly fast (whalers caught them in rowboats, for Christ's sake), but they are big and broad, and in the frenzy of a mating chase, a small Zodiac provides about as much protection from their thrashing, sixty-ton bodies as would wearing aluminum-foil armor to a joust. And noble Libby, action-girl nerd that she was, did look somewhat like a gallant knight in Day-Glo orange, her lance ready to strike as her trusty warhorse, Evinrude, powered her over the waves.

And as they approached the big female, a male on either side of her, the two sandwiching her so she could not escape, she rolled over onto her back, presenting her genitals to the sky. At that she slowed, and Margaret steered between the two tails of the males so Libby could set the tag. The female stopped then and floated up under the Zodiac. Margaret powered down the motor so as not to rake the animal with the prop.

"Shit!" Libby screamed. "Get us off! Get us off!" A swipe from the flukes of any of the animals would put them in the water, minutes from hypothermia and death. Libby had rolled her survival suit down so she could maneuver the harpoon. She'd be pulled under in seconds.

Suddenly, out of the water on either side of them came two huge penises, the males searching for their mark, moving closer to the female, producing waves that knocked the two women into the floor of the boat. Above them the two pink towers curved around looking for their target, feeling the edges of the boat, running slime across the rubber, over the biologists, poking, beating about, and generally abusing the women. The female now had the Zodiac centered exactly over her genitals, using the rubber boat as an ad hoc diaphragm. Then the two giant whale willies encountered one another in the middle of the Zodiac, and each evidently thinking that the other had found his target and not wanting to be left out, they let loose with great gushing gouts of sticky whale semen, filling the boat, covering the equipment, the scientists, washing the gunwales, swamping the motor, generally leaving everything but the gal whale completely and disgustingly jizzed. Mission accomplished, off they swam to strain a little postcoital krill out of the fray. Margaret suffered a concussion and a partially detached retina, Libby a dislocated shoulder and various scrapes and bruises, but the real trauma could not be assuaged with snaps, slings, and Betadine.

Several weeks later Libby rejoined Nate, who was down at the Chatham Strait with Clay filming feeding behavior. She walked into his cabin, hugged him, then stepped back and said, "Nate, I don't think I want to be married anymore." But what she really meant was "I'm done with penises forever, Nate, and pleasant as you are, I know that you are still attached to one. I've had my fill, so to speak. I'm moving on."

"Okay," Nate said. He told Clay later that for hours he had been feeling hungry and kept telling himself that he should stop working and go eat, but after Libby showed up, then left, he realized that he hadn't been hungry at all. The emptiness inside was from feeling lonesome. And Nate had stayed relatively lonesome and mostly heartbroken since that day (although he didn't whine about it, he just wore it). Clay didn't tell Kona this part. Confessions made over whiskey and campfires were privileged communication. Loyalty.

"So," said Nate, "Since the song appears, in most cases, to actually draw the attention of other males, who often join up with the singer, it would seem that the song cannot be directly connected to mating activity, other than it happens in the mating season. And since no one has actually observed humpbacks mating, even this assumption could be in error. If, indeed, the song is the male attempting to define his territory, it would seem ineffective, since other males tend to join singers, even those escorting cow/calf pairs. The study recommends that more studies be done to find out if there is, as previously thought, any direct correlation between humpback song and mating activity. Thank you. I'll take your questions."

Hands went up. Here it came: the crystal gazers, the whale buggers, the hippies, the hunters, the tourists, the developers, the wackos, the researchers (God help us, the researchers), and the idly curious. Nate didn't mind the curious. They were the only ones without an agenda. Everyone else was looking for confirmations, not answers. Should he go to a researcher first? Get it out of the way? Might as well go right to the dark side.

"Yes, Gilbert." He pointed to the Count. The tall researcher had taken off his sunglasses but had pulled down the brim of his hat as if to conceal the glowing red coals of his eyes. Or maybe Nate was just imagining that.

The Count said, "So with these small samplings — what was it, five instances of interactions among singers and others? — there's no real conclusion that you can reach about the relation to breeding or the robustness of the population? Correct?"

Nate sighed. Fuckwad, he thought. He spoke to the strange faces in the audience, the nonprofessionals. "As you know, Dr. Box, samples for whale-behavior studies are usually very small. It's understood that we have to extrapolate more from the data with whales than with other animals who are more easily observed. Small samples are an accepted limitation of the field."

"So what you are saying," Box continued, "is that you are trying to extrapolate the behavior of an animal that spends less than three percent of its time on the surface from observing its behavior on the surface. Isn't that akin to trying to extrapolate all of human civilization from looking at people's legs underwater at the beach? I mean, I don't see how you could possibly do it."