A huge grey whale came near the canoe and stayed by him when he stopped to sleep. He wasn’t certain how he knew, but he felt somehow that it was a female and she, as he thought of her, stayed near him for days.

She was not aggressive nor even very active but several times nudged the side of the canoe when he was sitting in it and raised her nose to the top of the edge. He found himself smiling and then, without really knowing why, tried to picture-remember his mother and reached out to touch-pet the nose of the whale.

She came back time after time, floating next to the canoe and seemed very careful not to damage the boat or him, for she could have flipped the canoe over easily just by pressing down on the edge but didn’t, and she seemed to enjoy his touch.

She was, he thought, kind. Somehow kind. She wanted to know him and he felt-thought a kindness from her, and every time they were close together he thought of his mother, how she must have been gentle this way, kind and gentle and caring and the whale made him deeply sad and in some way gently happy at the same time. Gave him a memory of something that never existed.

He named her Grace because he had known an old lady named Grace on the docks who took care of him and fed him by letting him suck on a milk-and-grease-soaked rag when he was an infant. She held him and hummed a soft sound when he was eating, a not-quite-music sound and he caught himself making the same sound when whale-Grace was nearby. A kind of not-song and not-chant while he daydreamed of how his mother must have looked.

Later he came upon a small island well offshore – they were more rare now in the big bays – and stopped for three days to dry clothing and the canoe a bit and whale-Grace left him. He mourned her leaving and for many days after that he kept looking for her as he paddled and stopped to rest, but she did not find him again.

All this time, out in the bays, the whale frenzy kept going. When he stopped to rest or dry out – it misted more often now – it was like a private show just for his entertainment. Once, when he was lying by a warming fire and watching out in the bay there were spouts of whales blowing everywhere, like little vapour trees growing and falling back and three times he saw two grey whales come up and out of the water next to each other at the same time, nearly touching, so that when they fell back they made a small mountain of a splash and he wondered if they weren’t really dancing. Which made him wonder if they had music – he had heard their songs through the hull of the canoe when they were close – and if that might lead them to dance.