How long would I survive in the water, how cold is it? Maybe eight degrees, maybe ten. At ten degrees I would remain conscious for one hour. It would take three hours to freeze to death unless my panic kills me first and I start breathing through my mouth, swallowing water, throwing up, suffocating. Most people who drown are able to swim; it’s the panic that ends them, not the cold water. Or maybe it’s the whale that does me in, pulls me under, long before I’ve had time to get cold, tossing me around, playing with me, a heartless game driven by an animal’s incomprehensible impulses. And there is nobody here who can save me.

Again the whale exhales through its blowhole, an intense, loud sound. The column of water is so powerful that I can feel the drops where I’m standing. Should I do something, make noise? Maybe that would frighten it? Or agitate it?

I don’t do anything.

It glides underwater but just for a moment, then it’s back once more, only ten meters away now, headed straight for me. It’s going to capsize the boat, I will tumble overboard, it will drag me under, drag me under . . .

But at that minute it dives away, again it disappears. It is centimeters away from making contact with the broadside, as if intentionally, as if it’s playing with the boat and as if on cue. Now it surfaces again starboard. I jump in response to the powerful gush of its breathing.

It swims away from me, but turns, returns to me, glides through the water along the hull of the boat, as if it wanted to come up against it, caress the boat. But never touches it, and slowly my fear ebbs away.

Usually they travel in pairs or in groups. In the winter four hundred whales were beached in New Zealand—they couldn’t leave because they waited for each other. The smallest whales could have managed it, at high tide they could have swum away, but they stayed, never abandoned their parents, stayed with the pod, dying with the others instead.