Fluke or I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings - By Christopher Moore Page 0,45
is what it looks like."
"Shut up," said Amy, up for a breath. "I'm trying to listen."
"You look like that cartoon character in 'B.C. that used to watch fish all day."
"That way," said Amy, up again, pointing and dog-shaking the water out of her hair onto the Ph.D. "About six hundred yards."
"Six hundred yards? You're sure?"
"Give or take fifty."
"If we're within a half mile of a singer, I'll buy you dinner."
" 'Kay. What do you suppose the freight is to fly a lobster from Maine to my plate in Lahaina?"
"I'm not going to need to know that."
"Drive the boat, please. Over there." And she pointed again, not unlike Babe Ruth indicating the Wrigley Field fence over which he would hit the famous promised home run (except Amy was thin, a girl, and alive).
Quinn heard the singer even before they put the hydrophone in the water. The whole boat started resonating to the song as they coasted into a drift.
Amy hopped up on the bow and pointed to some white spots dancing below the surface - pectoral fins and a tail. "There he is!"
If there had been a crowd, they would have gone wild.
Quinn smiled. Amy looked back at him and grinned. "Steak and lobster," she said. "Something red and French and expensive for the wine, something on fire for dessert - don't care what it is, long as there's flames coming off it - then a backrub before I send you back to your cabin alone, disappointed and confused. Ha!"
"It's a date," said Quinn.
"No, it's not a date. It's a bet, which you have lost miserably because you had the audacity to doubt me, and for which you shall remain ever sorry. Ha!"
"Shall we work now? Or would you like to gloat a bit longer?"
"Hmmm, let me think about it..."
She's so small, yet she contains so much evil, Quinn thought. He threw the field journal at her and read her the longitude and latitude off the GPS. "Film's in the camera. New roll. I loaded it this morning."
"I was thinking I'd gloat some more." Amy picked up the notebook, then paused as she opened it to begin writing. "Singing stopped."
"Sometimes I think they just stop singing to freak me out."
"He's moving," Amy said, pointing.
"Moving," Quinn repeated. He looked over the side and saw the white pec fins and flukes flash out of sight. "Hold on." He started the engine.
"They can hunt these kind, as far as I'm concerned," Quinn said after they'd been on the whale for two hours.
They'd recorded three full cycles of the song and gotten a crossbow biopsy, but the whale simply would not fluke, so they hadn't been able to get an ID photo. A lot of good it did to have a DNA sample when you couldn't identify the animal.
"Hunt them and make them into pet food," Nate continued. "Get their tainted, nonfluking genes out of the gene pool."
"Maybe you should have a doughnut or something, get your blood sugar up," Amy said.
"Use their pathetic, nonfluking baleen for corsets and umbrella stays. Use their vertebrae for footstools. Use their intestines to make giant, nonfluking whale sausages to serve at state fairs. Remove their putrid unfluking gonads and - »
"I thought you liked these animals."
"Yeah, but not when they won't cooperate."
The whale had led them five miles out toward Molokai and very close to the wind line, where the waves were too big and the current too fast to stay on a singer. If the whale continued in this direction, they would lose him within the next two dive cycles and the day would be wasted. What was even more frustrating was that this animal was hanging in the water and singing with his tail only a few feet below the surface. Typically, a singer in the channel would be thirty to fifty feet down - this guy was at about seven. Nate kept having to pull up the hydrophone to keep it from bopping the whale in the noggin as they drifted over it.
"He's coming up," Amy said. She grabbed the camera off the seat and aimed it at a spot twenty yards or so in front of the boat so the auto-focus and exposure would already be set.
Nate pulled up the hydrophone with two yanks and started the engine. The whale was moving faster this time. Nate adjusted the throttle to put Amy at the right distance for a full-frame tail shot.