Ambergris

The boy fell to the sand in a thud, grabbed a handful, flung it down with force, and pouted. The father felt his blood pressure rising. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to pursue this further. He recalled in his youth, the trip to Canada, the accident, it still lingered in his mind, Dad driving by and telling him not to look. He looked. And he didn’t want to look again. He shook the image free and raised the camera to his eye. An oblong dark gray object with white spots lay center beneath the gulls, some having lighted on it. He released the camera and rested it against his belly.

As he drew within a few hundred feet the seagulls perched atop the mass flew up to be absorbed in the chaos. Waves of nausea, stirred by the tremendous stench, began a retching sequence in his belly. With his right hand he pulled the lens cloth from his front pocket and placed it over his nose. With his left hand he brought the camera up for a closer look. He moved the crosshairs along the curvaceous object...back and forth...twice. He studied one end carefully and concluded he was looking at a tail. Damn, that’s a big fish. Must be a whale. Turning around and looking at the boy, he found him darting up and down the beach and sliding into the sand, but maintaining his distance.

The odor remained constant, thwarting even the wind, continually fed by the beast, exuding gas, squeezed out by its own tremendous mass. The lens cloth was pulled snug to his nose as he marched forward. The gulls complained in force, an intimidating chorus of sonorous cries filling the skies at alarming levels.

A Humpback, he concluded when standing within a few feet. The arid wrinkled corpse, gritty with stubbles of sand, and caked in bird feces, bore no similarities to the creatures he had observed during a whale-sighting trip out of Hyannis last summer. The creatures enthralled him and the group at starboard as they breached the ocean surface, soaring in the air, and falling back to the sea in a thunderous clap. He pitied the whale for having succumbed to what he considered an unbefitting death for such a majestic creature.

The oppressive teaming of smell and sound began strangling his senses. He decided to take a quick look around the creature and make a hasty departure back to his son. Starting at the tail, he observed something he missed at a distance. Exposed, like the vertebrae of a dinosaur in the badlands of South Dakota, the tight coils of a thick rope, secured at one end around the flukes of the whale, and at the other, a knotty oak tree at the periphery of the woods. It occurred to him that Park Rangers, or some other group acting in an official capacity, had probably been by and taken action. He determined that the authorities had some practical reason for not allowing the carcass to return to sea.

 As he walked around the tail he studied the thick rope. It had made deep cuts into the blubber. He wondered how this could have happened if the rope had been attached after the whale expired. Perhaps the motion of the ebb and tide of the sea had generated the necessary friction. He walked around to the head. A gelled eye, black and lifeless, reflected the gulls. He bent to his knees and observed the long mouth, its shape forming an eerie, yet natural smile. He leaned forward to look at the strange baleen sprouting from plates in the whale’s mouth. The majority was encrusted and steadfast, but a few fibers remained loose to toss in the wind. Intermixed in the dark gray hair-like baleen were finer strands of brown. These were not organized at the roof of the mouth like the gray fibers. A burst of wind howled from the east, infiltrating passages into the whale, and a lone sweet scent drifted from behind the wall of baleen. He felt a strange compulsion to lift the baleen and feel it in his hands. As a tuft rested in his palm, he rolled the individual fibers between his fingers. The brown strands felt very fine to his touch. Driven by ever more curiosity, he lifted the baleen and looked behind -

He fell back and screamed, “Oh my gosh.”

The boy had surreptitiously crept close.

“Get out of here, Brett,” he yelled as he backpedaled, sand spraying beneath his feet. “Dear Lord--” He fell into the surf.

The boy froze.

From the beach, opposite his approach to the carcass, a man was running toward them.

“We gotta go-- we gotta - ” The father recovered from the surf...his trousers drenched - grabbed his son, hoisted him to his shoulders, and ran in the direction of the dike.

From behind: “Hoosier!”