Stranding "Mookeeo! Where are you?" Straysee called, desperate to find her calf. She surfaced and expelled a geyser of stale air. An acrid taste in the water fed her panic.
She dived, swam parallel to the surface, and called his name again. "Mookeeo! Mookeeo, come here!" She approached the surface cautiously for another breath, searching for spaces between floating pools of gwee. She feared her calf might already be coated with the slime.
Members of Opo pod panicked and split apart. Straysee had never seen anything like this chaos. Dolphins always faced a crisis united, never apart. Mookeeo must have fled in the panic. Where was he? She breached high above the waves, searching for his fin. No luck.
She knew he could survive without her. He would leave her soon, but she wasn't ready to let him go yet. He was her first calf and her love. She needed his touch. She needed to know he was OK. She had to find him. She called him again and again.
Frantically searching, she swam farther from where the pod had been, risking her own life. Gwee ools became larger, spaces between them farther apart. She needed air so badly she had to surface in a gwee pool. It coated her skin and eyes. The fumes, ugh, the air. Straysee could barely keep herself afloat.
Mookeeo and Jocee, another juvee male in Opo pod, had wandered away when they heard the grinding noise of an approaching kruga and rode the bow wave. It wasn't unusual for Mookeeo to separate from Straysee these days. He was almost full-grown and soon he would leave his mother-calf tweeoo and form a new juvee tweeoo with Jocee.
They rode farther and longer than they ever had before. Finally, Jocee peeled away from the kruga. "Let's go back, Mookeeo," he said.
"Go ahead."
"What do you mean, go ahead?"
"You go, not me. I'm having too much fun."
"You crazy, Mookeeo? We're already too far from the pod. You're not going alone, are you? Come on, Mookeeo, nobody swims alone."
"Yeah, yeah, I know - our tenets and rules and all that swee. Don't worry about me. See you later, dol."
Mookeeo adjusted his flippers, like wings, to glide up and down and positioned his body and flukes for surfing. He barely broke the surface as he blew and descended again in shallow dives. Ignoring hunger pangs, Mookeeo feasted instead on the thrill of the ride. The wave pushed him forward, propelling him effortlessly through the water, and the speed and power charged him with great joy. Time seemed to stop and a lightheaded feeling lifted his spirit above the waves.
The kruga approached a strange object towering above the ocean's surface. Unlike a kruga, it didn't move and it made no sounds, except waves slapping against it. Mookeeo heard the engine cut back and felt the force of the bow wave shrink. He moved aside from the kruga as it docked.
Never before had he been this far from the pod. Still curious, Mookeeo sonared the object and received weak echoes from concrete columns that absorbed his clicks, and a crisp reflection of sound from a round pipe between the columns. With echoes like the sides of a kruga, he recognized the pipe was metallic.
He dived deeper, exploring by sonar, sensing the depth of the continental shelf beyond the columns. The speed of his echoes told him the sea floor was a blue, as deep as the length of a blue whale.
Descending toward the bottom, he discovered the columns plunged straight to the ocean floor. They seemed alien and unnatural to him, because they didn't move, as though they were unaffected by waves, surge and currents. He followed it a short distance until he felt a distortion of his sonic waves, where a black curtain fanned out with the current, flowing away from him and rising to the surface.
Coming up for air, he breached and looked at the surface. He saw a black sea gull and heard its cry. Black patches, with pink and violet hues, and white fish bellies floated on distant waves. Could that be gwee? He wondered, trying to remember what his mother had told him about it. Didn't she say it was toxic and huwees spread it from huge krugas? There aren't any huge krugas here, so it can't be gwee, can it?
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