RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR. Philip Hoare

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СКАЧАТЬ known for what reason they run themselves aground on dry land; at all events it is said that they do so at times, and for no obvious reason.’

      This is no wild strand on the Cape’s ocean shore. It’s the town beach on the bay, overlooked by the rear porches of shops and restaurants; this stranded cetacean might well have been a late-night throwaway, along with the lobster and clam shells. Yet these tame waters can be dangerous places, too. One morning, out on my deck, I’d seen fins in the distance, between the breakwater and the pier. Through my binoculars I watched a small pod of common dolphins moving restlessly up and down. I cycled down to see them from close quarters. Too close, I realised; they were in danger of grounding. I stood barely ankle-deep, and they were only twenty feet from me, where the blue became sandy brown. It seemed impossible that they could even be swimming there. The potential for disaster turned it into a quiet crisis, a clip from a natural history documentary with the voiceover removed, a scene ignored by the townsfolk going about their business.

      For a dolphin to beach itself is a drastic act. Recent studies suggest that the animals ‘will strand themselves when they are very weak because they don’t want to drown’, says Andrew Brownlow, a Scottish scientist. There seems to be ‘something very deep in the terrestrial mammalian core that fires up when they are in extremis’. It is both suicidal and a desperate last attempt at survival. At least, that is how we see it. We sanctify these creatures as salves for our own depredations, and seem always to have done so. Around AD 180, the Greco-Roman poet Oppian declared that hunting ‘the kingly dolphin’ was immoral, on the grounds that they were once humans who had exchanged the land for the sea. ‘But even now the righteous spirit of men in them preserves human thought and human deeds.’

      Dennis called me with the news. Minutes later, we were driving down to the harbour. The day before, on the whalewatch boat, we’d watched the pod of dolphins moving through the clear waters in search of food. Among them was this individual. Such small groups of dolphins have close matrilineal relationships and are intensely loyal. Did it die in the night, on the dark and lonely beach, calling for its family as they called back? This beautiful, naked animal, now lying at my bended knees, was as smooth and patterned as a piece of porcelain. There was nothing morbid about it; it still seemed full of life.

      I run my hands over its body. The fins are finely shaped, rubbery and tactile, caressed and caressing when alive; the taut flanks taper to the muscular tail. The eyes are disconcertingly open, unseeing, untouched by the gulls, which often fall to feed on stranded cetaceans even before they’ve expired. Clearly displayed on its underbelly is the animal’s genital slit, flanked by two smaller mammary slits, betraying, in this indecent exposure, its sex. I insert my finger, ostensibly to investigate if she, as she had now become, had bred, but in reality out of prurient curiosity.

      I say a Hail Mary for my sins.

      After we have recorded her dimensions as if measuring her for a new outfit, I stretch out beside her for comparison; not for scientific reasons, but my own: head to tail, toe to beak, sensing how similar we are. I imagine her as a human in a dolphin wetsuit. I think of her bones, lighter than mine since they did not have to bear the full weight of gravity; I might replace my burdensome skeleton with hers, transformed from the inside out. I think about how much of my life is spent vertical or horizontal, upright on land or level with the water – a sensation known as proprioception: the apprehension of one’s body in space; the way we want to be comfortable in the world, yet are never really reconciled to the business of being physical.

      I lie there like a lover, her body a mirror for my own. Her blowhole would never again burst open in exultation, in the joy of being a dolphin. She wouldn’t wriggle free of the sand, working her vigorous tail to swim away. The patina of decay had spread along her flanks like the silvery bloom on a plum. Dennis’s knife cuts into the dorsal fin as the instructions on his form dictate, slicing off its tip in a liquorice-allsort sandwich of black skin and white fat. I feel an odd compulsion to bite down on the excised morsel. The teeth come next, each ivory needle arranged regularly along the narrow jaws. Research suggests that they may act as a sonic tool, helping to transmit sound back to a dolphin’s inner ears.

      Compared to this complex animal, I am sensorially inept, a dumb being barely able to feel anything. She could hear-see in the depths, heat-seeking sand eels and surfing with humpbacks; she could bond with her pod, using her signature whistle and those of her friends to call them. She could echo-locate her peers, sensing their emotional states, knowing how they felt, almost telepathically. She had a culture and expressed her self in a state of collective individualism and, as we now know, exhibited an emotional maturity possibly in excess of our own. But her life of apparent ease has been brought to an end on this urban shore. Passersby ask, ‘What kind of fish is that?’ Waiters sit on restaurant steps smoking cigarettes before the start of their next shift. In another age, their counterparts might have served it to their customers. In the nineteen-sixties, the town’s Sea View diner had humpback on the menu.

      Dennis saws at the jaw, hacking out the four teeth required for analysis by the organisation for whom he is acting. The serrated blade grates against bone, the worst hour in the dentist’s chair you could imagine. The gums part and, two by two, the teeth are extracted. Blood trickles into the sand. The outrage is complete. Our samples bagged and the animal’s flanks duly marked with the organisation’s acronym, we drive off, leaving her alone on the beach, ready to roll in the next tide, as though its comforting waves might wash her back to life.

      Dead or alive, we all strike the same pose; the same way my mother sat in a sepia photograph of her as a young woman in the garden of her suburban family home, resting her weight on one hand on the chair as she half turns to the camera like the movie stars she’d seen; the same way she’d sit in the last photograph I took sixty years later of her in our garden barely a mile away, adopting the same position; the same pose that, I realise, I too take up as I sit and turn to a camera which is not there.

      Out in the bay, the moored boats act as weather vanes, swivelling and turning with the direction of the wind. I look out from my deck to the horizon. It’s my barometer. If it’s straight, there’ll be whalewatching today; if it’s wavy and irregular, perhaps not. Today it is level. So we go to sea.

      There’s nothing so exciting as that rising feeling as the boat readies to leave the harbour, potent with the prospect of the day ahead. Even as it stands tethered to the wharf, Dolphin VIII is a vessel invested with its own momentum, as though it would leave whether or not anybody was on board; a great grinding mass of steel plates and engines whirring deep down below, a powerful industrial connection with the resisting churning water. As I board with its crew – the fisherman turned captain, the taciturn first mate, the poet naturalist, the East European galley staff with professional futures back home – I feel a perennial outsider, for all that I’ve been sailing on these same boats, watching the same whales, for fifteen years. No one is ever sure of their place here, no one quite secure: the crew only work if the weather is good and the punters are paying their wages. Weather, work, people, whales: it is all an uneasy alliance, a nervous contract drawn up on an inconstant sea, agreed by a common pursuit. At least, for those few hours.

      After a long bitter winter, the Cape has come to life. As I peer down into the green water, the reason is clear: fields of silvery sand eels, roused in their millions from the sea floor by the sun and now pooling in wriggling tangles, turning this way and that as one mass, just below the surface. These slender fish supply an entire food chain; their arrival could equally herald the crowds that will soon teem through the town’s streets.

      Only half an hour out from the land, a frenzy is in progress. Northern gannets are plunging into the bait like white-and-yellow torpedoes. A raft of loons, with stiletto-sharp bills and freckled oil-green wings, are working the same source. Harbour porpoises roll through the waves; grey seals bob like bottles.

      Suddenly, СКАЧАТЬ