Silver Bay(33)
Author: Jojo Moyes

‘If we can stabilise him,’ someone was muttering, ‘we might be able to get him further out to the bay . . .’

They rocked the calf gently, helping it recover its water balance, which it would have lost during its time on the shore. After an hour or so, they went deeper, Liza and Greg now submerged to their chests, neither wearing a wet-suit, shivering as they urged the little creature to swim towards its mother. Liza’s teeth were chattering and I was chilled too.

Still the baby didn’t move.

‘Okay, we won’t push him off,’ said one of the men, when they had given up hope of him swimming. ‘We’ll just stand here for a bit and let him work out where he is while he’s supported. Perhaps he needs a little more time to orient himself.’

Even half elevated by water a baby whale is awesomely heavy. From the shore, Yoshi at my side, I watched as the four of them stood, Liza’s thin shoulders braced against the weight, and whispered words of encouragement to the calf, trying to will it into swimming back to its mother.

By that time it was getting on for two a.m. and it was obvious to us all that the calf was in a bad way. It seemed exhausted; its breathing was irregular, its eye closing periodically. Perhaps it had been sick before, I thought. Perhaps its mother knew this but still couldn’t let it go.

I don’t know how long they stood there. The night took on a weird, timeless quality, the hours creeping along in a fug of cold, muttered conversations and growing despair. Two cars came past, lured by the sight of torchlight on the beach. One was full of giggling young people who got out and offered to help. We thanked them and sent them away – the last thing the poor creature needed was a load of drunken teenagers careering about the place. At one point Yoshi and I made coffee on the berthed Moby One, then she and Lance stepped in so that each helper could break for fifteen minutes and warm themselves with a hot drink. But the night dragged, and I borrowed a jacket to go on top of the one I was already wearing because somehow the bones of the old chill that much deeper.

Then we heard it: a terrible, faint sound from out at sea, a strange keening and lowing, the rare sound of whalesong above water.

‘It’s his mother!’ cried Liza. ‘She’s calling him.’

Yoshi shook her head. ‘The females don’t sing,’ she said. ‘It’s far more likely to be a male.’

‘How many times have you heard whalesong with your head above water?’ Liza demanded. ‘It’s the mother, I know it.’

Yoshi didn’t push the point. Eventually she said, ‘There have been studies that showed a singer accompanying the mother and child at a distance. Like an escort. He may have been looking out for them.’

‘Doesn’t seem to have done this little fellow much good,’ said one of the National Parks men, as we sat on the damp sand. ‘He doesn’t seem to have the energy to fight.’

Next to me, Liza shook her head. Her fingers were blue with cold. ‘He’s got to. He’s just disorientated. If we give him long enough, he might work out where his mother is. That he can hear her must count for something.’

But none of us was quite sure how much that little calf could hear now. To me the poor thing looked half dead, and he was now visibly battling for breath. I was no longer sure who they were holding it in the water for. By then I was barely able to stay on my feet; while I have a robust constitution, I’m too old to stay up all night, and found that when I sat down, as Yoshi kept telling me to do, I would drift off briefly, brought to by the urgent discussions a few feet away.

For that is the worst thing when a whale beaches: it is as if they have chosen to die, and we humans, uncomprehending, merely prolong their agony by fighting it. Every time one is saved, every time one swims triumphantly out to sea, it makes us more certain of our actions, more sure that we should only ever fight to save them. But what if sometimes we should leave well alone? What if the baby needed to go? And if we had left him alone, would the mother have come and nudged him back into the water herself? I had heard of it happening. The idea that we might have contributed to the animals’ distress was too awful to dwell on and I closed my mind to it, trying to think instead of domestic minutiae – Hannah’s sports shoes, a broken kettle, the last time I did my accounts. Occasionally, I suspect, I drifted into sleep.

Finally, as the sun broke over the headland, casting a pale blue light over our little group on the sand, I jolted properly awake as one of the National Parks guys announced that there was no hope. ‘We should euthanase,’ he said, rubbing his eyes. ‘Leave it any longer and we’ll risk the mother coming in and beaching herself.’

‘But he’s still alive,’ said Liza. The pale light revealed her to be grey and exhausted. She kept shivering in her wet clothes, but refused to change into the dry ones offered by Yoshi, because they’d only get wet when she went in again. ‘Surely while there’s life . . .’

Greg placed his arm round her shoulders and squeezed. His eyes were rimmed with red, and his face was dark with stubble. ‘We’ve done everything we can, Liza. We can’t risk the mother too.’

‘But he’s not actually sick!’ she cried. ‘It’s just those bloody boats. If we can get him out to his mother, he’ll be okay.’

‘No, he won’t.’ The National Parks man laid a hand on the baby’s back. ‘We’ve had him here for eight hours, we’ve walked him into deeper water and back to the shallows, and he’s barely moved. He’s too young to rear, and he’s too frail to get back out there. If we take him deeper he’ll drown, and that’s not something I’m prepared to be part of. I’m sorry, guys, but he’s not going anywhere.’

‘It’s a bad business,’ said Lance. Yoshi, drawn under his arm, had begun to cry – I was fighting tears myself.

‘Half an hour more,’ Liza pleaded, her hands smoothing the baby’s skin. ‘Just half an hour more. If we can just get him back to his mother . . . Look, she’d know if he wasn’t going to make it? Right? She’d have left him by now.’

I had to look away. I couldn’t bear what I heard in her voice. The man headed for his truck. ‘His mother’s not going to help him now. I’m sorry.’

‘Let him die close to her, then,’ Liza pleaded. ‘Don’t let him die alone. We can take him out to be close to her.’

‘I can’t do that. Even if the trip didn’t traumatise him, there’s no guarantee that she’d let us anywhere near. We might stress her even more.’