When he entered the water, his wife, by spiritual rule, went underground. Even when she was very old and stooped, she dug the hole herself. With a small shovel and with her own thin, wrinkled hands. This was the way it was always done. She dug a hole, like a bear den, deep inside the giant roots of a tree. She covered herself with skins and she stayed under the earth, eyes closed, visions in her head of what her husband was seeing inside the water. She was beneath ground; he was beneath water. Maybe she breathed for him. People wondered if they were that connected because it was known that in the cold and dark they were as one.

With his mind and heart, Grandfather Witka told Mary, her catholic name, “My hands are swollen and cold,” and about a flotilla of plankton he’d just passed through. He said, “It’s like a snowstorm,” and as he talked she saw it, too, as far away as she was. She asked the water to have mercy on the old man she’d known as a child when he climbed trees, laughed, practiced holding his breath, and hunted his first seal. “Look,” he’d said, his first gift to her, smiling, a tooth missing. “It’s for you. I want to marry you someday.”

She smiled. “Only a seal? I’m worth more than that.” She laughed and walked away, looking back at him once or twice over her shoulder.

Mary sang to the whales, onio way no, loving them enough that one of them might listen and offer itself to her people. Entombed with the smell of cedar, curled like an infant newly born, even though her hair was gray now, her face bony, she was suspended and stiff. And then together, when he saw a whale, the two of them pleaded and spoke. Look how we are suffering. Take pity on us. Our people are small. We are hungry.

It was said the whale listened mostly to the woman because who could ignore her pleading, singing, beautiful voice?

The last time Witka entered the sea he did not return. Worse, a storm arrived. They all feared that this time, at his age, his heart failed and he would not come back to the air world where they lived. His daughter, the mother of Thomas, was little more than a child. She didn’t know where her mother had buried herself in the trees. Out of grief, she pounded the gray sand beach with her fists. She was such a thin girl, too. She stood by the black rocks in her nightgown looking out into the dark water, watching in vain. She held hands with one of Witka’s girlfriends and together they cried and hugged each other and grieved for the lost old man.

Then, when all had given up and some turned toward home, someone yelled, “Look,” and he came out of the dark underwater cave where he had anchored himself and rolled out of the green swells of the waves onto the sand, coughing. When he surfaced, the water rolling off his head and face, he took a great breath. He dragged himself up, skinny with age, wrinkled, and walked out from the sea with kelp still on him, looking anything but dignified. A fish caught in the kelp escaped his hair and dropped back down to the tide. He walked like a stick, stiff from the cold, and his face was nearly blue. He walked straight over to his daughter and said, “Girl, do you want to scare the whales away, hitting the ground so hard? I heard it all the way out there.” She ran off, ashamed, while he laughed. Everyone waited for his pronouncement. This time he said, with smiling eyes, “Yes, tomorrow. It is the right time for us to bring a whale back home,” as he looked with great joy at the green land and sunlight and his wife walking—no, floating—toward him, earth and twigs still clinging to her hands and clothes and hair.