The audible THUD, over the sound of the engine, was accompanied by a heavy shudder. What on Earth is he doing? I wondered, peering over the bow at the creature only inches below the foaming water, streaming past between us.
THUD…
He seemed the most enormous dolphin I had seen. A great grey beast, tearing through the sea at pace, then turning inward and hammering his body against the hull.
THUD…
I felt the vibrations in my fingers as I gripped the cold railing. As I watched, bewildered, he turned on his side and one great eye looked into mine. Two creatures, one of the air, one of the water, peering through the boundary between worlds.
That was long ago in another place. But every once in a while these fragile moments of accidental connection strike, cleaving the clean lines we draw around our existence.
My son and and Arctic fox call to each other in plaintive cat-like barks, the small boy in his bedroom, the fox on the cold mountain.
OW!…OW!…OW!… he calls, hands cupped around his mouth.
Moments pass and then,
OW!…OW!…OW! … comes the distant, longing reply.
A musk ox, startled by my presence at the stream where he takes his morning drink snorts and tosses his ragged locks. He stands alert, mane wafting in the breeze, me crouched frozen over the faintly tinkling water, eyes locked. Seconds pass in slience. Then he remembers himself, snorts again, and gallops away.
On another day, the low thunder of a disintegrating iceberg sparks me to look up, knowing already that the far-away event is already long done and that all I will see is the slow spread of white fragments drifting across the gentle curves of ocean. Perhaps the overturned berg is still rocking slowly…first this way…then that way. But what I actually see – by pure chance and heralded by that unseen and unrelated icy scene moments earlier – is entirely different. Perhaps a mile away, the black fish-like outline of a humpback whale, its fins spread wide, sails clear of the water and crashes silently into the sea, sending spray shooting away in its wake.
On the last day of my first Greenlandic summer, I was alone on a small island. Engrossed in my work on a cloudless, calm day, I was wrenched from my focus by a nearby splash, looked up and saw nothing but ruffled water. I closed my notebook, sat down, and watched. A black shape rolled in the water, wet darkness sliding from its giant frame. Moments later, a whoosh and a spray announced its presence again. Over the next twenty minutes, metres from shore, the whale wallowed, rolled, lifted its pectoral fins and slapped them hard against the still water. Finally, it raised one giant mottled black and white fin, which hovered, wavered in the air. Then it slapped that fin down one last time, slid under the dark water, and was gone.
