The Pacific Giants by Jean Flitcroft Page A

lap and leaned back on the bed. “Lee would love that—she loves rhymes and limericks.”
    She felt guilty keeping Caddy a secret. So why not tell Lee? After all, Lee had shared Vanessa’s adventure with Nessie.
    Vanessa sighed. Her thoughts returned to their walk along the beach after dinner. She just hadn’t found the right moment to mention Caddy. Lee had done most of the talking. She seemed to want to talk about the whales, and Vanessa had been very happy to listen. They had not discovered anything new about the whale hunters, Lee had said, but they had gotten great recordings of the whales’ song.
    â€œIt’s amazing, Vanessa. The male humpbacks in the same area sing the same song. So the North Pacificmales sing something different from the southern hemisphere males. But the next year when they migrate back up from Hawaii, the song has evolved into something new.”
    It was getting dark by the time they came in.
    â€œOh, I forgot to tell you the most important thing, though,” Lee said as they climbed the stairs. “Dr. Mitchell said it would be OK for you to visit the research center with me on Friday.”
    Vanessa had been thrilled. Just two days away—she couldn’t wait!
    She put down her book now and picked up Toddy.
    â€œAny ideas about the illegal whale hunting?” Vanessa asked him.
    Nothing.
    â€œI wonder how Lee is going to track them down.”
    Nothing.
    Vanessa smoothed the long hair off the face of the shrunken head, put it back on the pillow, and said sternly, “OK, if you’re not prepared to talk, then you can listen and learn.”
    Vanessa read the first chapter of the book to Toddy. She did it quietly, listening all the time for sounds of people on the stairs, just in case. It was interestingstuff about cryptozoology and the definitions, but Vanessa really wanted to know about Caddy. She flicked ahead, skipping through the pictures of native petroglyphs made by the Indian tribes, who spoke of a sea serpent in the waters.
    She stopped at a picture of a man in a suit and tie with the words “Caddy’s ‘godfather,’ Archie Wills” underneath. She read on.
    The first mention of the name “Cadborosaurus” appeared on 11 October 1933. Several suggestions for names for the monster had been received by the
Victoria Daily Times
, one of which is “Cadborosaurus,” which can be shortened to “Caddy,” in honor of Cadboro Bay, where the creature was first sighted.
    Vanessa’s eyes stopped on a picture of Caddy. It was a postcard from 1933, drawn by Charles Eagles. Beneath it she read, “Body approximately twenty feet, tail thirty feet, head and neck ten feet. Total length sixty feet.”
    While she couldn’t really say much about the length of the creature she’d seen, the head certainly looked similar.
    She wriggled with suppressed excitement. She read on.
    â€œYour modern man would rather disbelieve something than believe it,” Archie Wills wrote. “He likes to think he is cynical and hard-boiled, whereas he is the most credulous creature ever made. When he can’t understand a thing like astronomy, or relativity, or finance, he believes anything you care to tell him, if you tell him with sufficient scientific or financial trimmings. But the trouble is he can understand a sea serpent. He can visualize it. Therefore he disbelieves it. His disbelief flatters his vanity, makes him think he is a superior fellow. Well, it doesn’t make him a superior fellow. Any fool can disbelieve in sea serpents.”
    â€œThat’s almost exactly what my mum used to say to me, Toddy. She said that some scientists believe that science is truth, whereas science sometimes clouds the truth and hides the obvious.”
    Vanessa shut the book with a snap. She wouldn’t allow herself to read the whole thing in one go. That would be gorging herself. She would take it bit by bit, digest