Grayson by Lynne Cox Page A

hands.
    Someone else shouted, “Yes. There she is!”
    “There she blows!” A fountain of white spray shot out of the water ten feet into the air.
    People were laughing, shouting, pointing, clapping, cheering, and squeezing against the south-facing sideof the pier. Parents were lifting kids on their shoulders, and older kids were ducking under and weaving in between the adults to get a better view.
    There she was, one of earth’s most amazing creatures. Swimming toward us.
    Grayson took a few quick breaths and dove, and I stuck my head underwater.
    There were sounds coming from the distance, sounds I’d never heard before. They were large, intense, so big I could feel them rumbling through the water.
    Then there was nothing. No sound. No feeling. Nothing. Just the rushing sounds of my bubbles rolling out of my mouth, past my ears.
    I looked for Grayson. He was gone. Had he found her? Had he swum away with her?
    Then I heard his mother: She was talking and she had a beautiful voice—a voice that made me laugh and smile.
    She was singing, her clicking and chirping strung together. She paused and made a series of sounds, high sounds and low ones and probably so many more at frequencies that were too low for any of us to hear.
    There was a pause. And then I heard a second voice. It had to be Grayson. It was. It was Grayson. He had found her! He was clicking and grunting.
    What was he saying to her? What was she saying to him? Was he explaining that he had been looking for her for most of the morning? That he was scared, but that some humans had stayed with him and helped him find her?
    They had found each other. That was all that really mattered.
    Surfacing, I looked up at Steve. He was beaming. For the first time since I met him, Steve was so emotional he couldn’t speak. He smiled and shook his head and pressed his index finger into the corner of his eye to brush away a tear.
    Grayson and his mother surfaced near the lifeguard boat. Everyone on the pier and in the boats was smiling, laughing, pointing, exclaiming about the beauty of the whales and the magic of seeing the mother and son swimming together.
    Grayson and his mother dove and surfaced ten feet from me. I made sure not to move between mother and son, but they swam over to me.
    Grayson’s mother was enormous, at least forty-five feet long—longer, I think, than the lifeguard boat. She swam slowly past me. I felt tiny beside her. I held my breath and felt powerful energy emanating from her body. Was she speaking to me? Was she using low frequencies, sounds that were too low for me to hear but that I could feel? I treaded water and looked closer.
    She had patches of white barnacles on her sides, dimples on her upper jaw, and more barnacles along her chin. There were three long grooves along her throat that allowed her throat to expand when she fed, and I caught a glimpse of her pink tongue. It was longer than my arm and probably weighed more than a ton. She had baleen plates in her mouth. She used these to filter food—amphipods, mollusks, squid, and other little marine animals—out of the water once she reached the Arctic waters and started feeding again.
    She turned and swam to within five feet of me. She was massive and it was amazing; she could move so slowly and she was able to gauge her speed and her size. She knew how close she could get without swimming down something as small as me.
    She circled back and swam even closer. I wasthrilled to see this magnificent being beside me. She was so big the wave coming off her body pushed me back, but I was compelled to pull closer to her.
    She dove deep under me, and I felt the water quickening. I realized she had been swimming under me when we were at the jetty earlier that morning. That’s where she’d lost Grayson. She did what any mother would do; she doubled back and retraced the route she had taken with Grayson that morning. She must have panicked, trying to find her baby in the ocean. She took a massive