In all the green beauty Thomas recalls his purpose before he needs to rise and take a breath and he listens to the water because he doesn’t know how Witka determined what needed to be done in the thickets of seaweed or the forest of swaying kelp and the school of silver fish all in a circle beside him, a marvel of fish, he hears the sounds of all the life in water, the clicks and ticking, and for a while time changes. It seems he was there listening, hearing what almost amounted to words and now he no longer needs to breathe. He hears a low rumble, the kind Ruth describes, the low rumble of a whale and it comes to him and it looks at him with its wise old eye and he knows everything in that gaze. He knows how small a human is, not in size, but in other ways. As he rises to the surface, it helps him, pushes him slowly and it exhales a breath as he surfaces, too, gasping for air. For a while he catches his breath, choking, the upper world reeling around him. The whale leaves. He is suddenly cold and aware of it and then he swims in a ways, floating with the current until he is butted up against the sand of the near shore and he stands, seaweed in his hair, suddenly colder, and he walks, no, he limps with the cold and his old injury no one had seen—one of his injuries—and with everything reeling around him still. He comes out of the water and sits down on the beach where things meet in the world between sea and land. Finally, with as much dignity as a bedeviled wet man with sticks in his hair and sand on his flesh can summon, he goes indoors and drinks hot water and later he meets with the people who are still waiting patiently even though it has started to mist outside and is growing chilly, and he says, “We are going to be better people. That is our job now. We are going to be good people. The ocean says we are not going to kill the whales until some year when it may be right. They are our mothers. They are our grandmothers. It is our job to care for them.” Then he sings an old whale song he has never learned. He looks toward the ocean, and the song, it comes to him from out of a hole opened in time. He sings it, a little embarrassed at first, then growing stronger in voice.

“We are going to become better people.”

“I’ve heard that song before,” one old woman says later. It was so long ago she can’t remember where exactly except she thinks it was her own grandmother’s song, but then again it could have been Witka who sang it or maybe the whole village back when it was just a little place with old buildings that were dark from the sea spray and rain and time.