All these years he had been told stories about his father, the war hero, the man of his mother’s childhood, the man she waited for. He remembered the day sitting in the airport when he didn’t appear.

When the hunt was first proposed, the old people in the white houses said it was not the right time to hunt; the people were not prepared. Marco dreaded the hunt. It was a lie, Ruth had said. A scheme. Marco agreed with his mother’s protest, but if the hunt was going to happen, his being there was the only thing he could do, no matter how knotted his heart.

One day when he was visiting his mother, as he sat at her little table, Ruth looked at him with her dark eyes, her wet hair wrapped in a towel, and she said, “You’ll understand the right thing to do. Don’t worry. It will be fine.”

He was serious and intelligent. He had grown. His shoulders were wide and strong, tanned under his straight hair, so like hers. His arms like hers, too, only stronger. The old men had taught him to paddle their old cedar canoes. He was powerful from paddling ocean current and waves, and from swimming and diving, a secret he kept from his mother. He moved with a kind of refinement.

She sat across from him. “You’ll know.” Because the old men in the white houses had taught him the proper behavior and the prayers. “You are the one who has been given the songs.”

Oh whale, take pity on us. We are broken. We are weak. We are small. We are hungry mere humans.

He was the one who would hold the old harpoon, although it was only a token position, since the whale, if the hunt took place, would be killed with a missile harpoon and machine guns and Marco would only sing, guide the way, and offer words. He felt torn in half, feeling love for whales. He once swam with two of the whales. They watched him with their ancient eyes and he felt his own small being as a human.

Marco, with his thin mustache, was by rights the chosen, but there were those who thought it unfair, even though he had the strongest of bodies, the quietest of eyes, and clarity of mind.

Thomas listened when the elders said Marco was the one who had been prepared. This began in him a growing respect for the boy.

Others thought it wasn’t right that a young man would be chosen over warriors to hold the honored place. “Hell,” said Dwight. “Some of us have seen war. We know what we’re doing. He’s just a kid.” The older men had life experience.

“Yeah,” said Dimitri, “but remember. He’s just the one carrying the old harpoon. He’s like the queen, a figurehead. He won’t be doing anything else.”

Marco, unfortunately, knew only a part of what led up to the decision to hunt, the politics, the dealings, but he had his conflicts: He had the depths of tradition, but he was also a man, and as far as young men go, they want to be with their peers. They want others to be like themselves. It is why they are the “meat,” as his father, Thomas, had once said, why they are sent to fight the wars of other men. Marco could fish and mend nets, as Ruth had taught him. He could speak the language and he understood and knew the whales that passed by. He could sing, pray, swim, canoe, fish, bring in wood, survive alone if he had to, but he couldn’t stitch together the truths of divided worlds, double people, let alone the factions and jealousies within his own tribe, especially when the jealousy was directed at him. Nor did Thomas know the doubleness that existed here, in his own place. He knew only his own.