The Whales of Pend d'Oreille

Qaqon lived out in the vast western ocean and swam its coastal waterways. She was that rare creature who followed the line of joy and the sublime. Being a whale she could travel that line with little hinderance. Every sensation that led her closer to the sublime would alter her course through the water. The hunt and the prey, warm sparkling light on a calm morning lagoon, the lashing threat of storm flung spray and the precipices of tempestuous waves. All of these and more drove her with energy and intention across the seas.

She would float on a calm evening and contemplate the bright orb of the moon as it rose through the tall fir and pine trees. The only sounds, her gentle respiration steaming into the cold evening air, the sound of small waves lapping the pebbled shore. The light of day failing. And here she could sense the movement of the seas, the water as it stirred to the moon’s presence. A patient eye sensing the movement of the earth as a slow continuous motion. With this she was aware of the earth’s great slow grinding rotation. This cycle that within other cycles drove her existence.

Companionship was not her priority and yet two males Quesdred and Quaglug accompanied her. They were both entranced by her. Quesdred was the larger and stronger of the pair and he found Qaqon’s physicality and risk taking intoxicating. How she would carefully multiply risks to enhance the joy of some activity. Quaglug was gracile and was more attracted to her keen intellect, inventive play, tricks of the mind or altering of circumstance to extract the maximum joy.

Together they followed and joined the joy and havoc she would engender. They lived in that space where consciousness is defined by the aesthetic, this would engender joy, and this would in turn drive the evolution of life. Of course they were there to play their part in that great line of life where that brought the male and female together. Somehow over the years Quesdred and Qualug managed to create more of a brotherhood than a violent rivalry. It helped that Qaqon made the decision as to who she would partner with. This too seemed to derive from her pursuit of joy and variety and their differences became important aspects of this.

Within whale society one might observe scientifically that this was an unusual arrangement. Some might suspect she was shunned by the broader society of cetaceans, but it was actually more indifference on her part. As for the males, attraction overrode any sense of norms.

We cannot now speak of what species they were, for they existed something like 12,000 years ago and so that they were lost in the depths of time. What did happen to them we have some better, however slight, idea and this is their story as their descendants might tell it.

It was a clear dark night with a calm sea those many years ago. Orion shone brightly his belt and sword, the Pleiades sparkled the blue sparks of young stars and the red eye of Taurus shown as some fading giant in the sky. These reflected on the still water in their ancient place in the sky as Qaqon watched with wonder. From this place in the sky a new star appeared and rapidly grew into a ragged streak across the ink velvet night leaving a trail of bright diminishing lights in its wake accompanied by thunderous booms in the still night air, until a great rock struck far up into the north. The crack of its entry stunned, but the bright flash and terrific roar that rolled across the calm sea and roiled its surface was far worse.

An orange glow persisted in the sky for days and soon word came of a great cascading river flowing into the sea. It carried in its fresh water everything from the land in great abundance, rocks, mud, ice, trees, whole forests. And of course the animals of the land too flowed down this great boiling river, the bear, the elk, the moose, the caribou, the deer. All the great animals and also all of the small ones too.

The whales arrived on the edge of the calamity, this great jubilee of feeding for the ocean’s predators. They gathered at the calming brink and picked amongst the great rafts of 250 ft trees, some bobbing upright their root balls intact, for the broken bodies of these lost creatures so far from solid ground. There were frenzies of competition each time one was found and this jubilee would be remembered as a fat and lazy time.

Qaqon , Quesdred, and Quaglug too were drawn to the bounty and feasted themselves fat on it. Qaqon soon grew bored of what was more a search than a hunt and so ventured towards the source. As they drew closer the water became fresher and more clogged with ice and debris. The meat became fresher and they would at times find live prey swimming or clambering onto ice that provided for more interest.

Soon they found themselves in the strongest current and Qaqon could not resist the thrill of following this freshwater line of power and violence. She tested her and her companions skills against the steady supply of debris that continued to be hurled off of the land. For where the great rock struck was 3000 ft of ice holding back an untold amount of water, suddenly heated and released to flow across half a continent.

And they swam up this great deluge pausing to rest at huge swirling eddies before rejoining the main flow. On three occasions their progress was slowed by great waterfalls and each took turns learning to master the ability to thrust themselves into the vertical fall and with every sense of their skin, wriggle towards the greatest volume where one could almost be hoisted up to the lip and a flick of a great tail would push them over the top.

They had no knowledge of the land as they were creatures of the sea. What they knew was what they could see from the shore, tree carpeted hills and snowcapped peaks beyond. All they followed now was this thinning turbulent ribbon of water that supported and sustained them.

Soon they were hundreds of miles away from and two thousand feet above the western ocean, their home and refuge. As they swam they would feel the water’s power and pull relent and now instead of swirling eddies found their rest in calm pools. Still the water provided fresh carcasses to feed on and debris to dodge until one day they could not proceed any further. The water slowed to rivers too small to accommodate them. They grew bored and so decided it was time to go home.

They turned and swam back to discover that they could not return. Here too the water was too small to support them. They spent the next few days frantically searching the shoreline for a way out. Their great sleek heads ached with the idea that the water was not limitless. They could see across their new watery home from one end to the other.

Had they been able to see further, as the few birds could casting their crooked silhouettes overhead, they would have ached even more. For all downstream of them was a scoured landscape that had the soil and gravel stripped from the bedrock. All of it redeposited on rippled plains down to the sea. These great ripples were as if on a beach when the tide recedes and yet they are measured in feet and miles not inches and feet.

Where Qaqon, Quesdred, and Quaglug found themselves was less devastated; the towering mountains and hills on the edge of their inland home, their small sea, stayed above boiling fury of the water. Tall trees still carpeted the mountains and hills while the wildlife held onto these islands of sanctuary.

Once the facts of their new home came to rest they had to deal with the practical matters of eating. The jubilee that had started their adventure had ended, they had been cast from their home in the western sea and now would begin what was later called in their lore the great destitution.

A period of hunger and disease, want and isolation. They had to use their immense talents and intellect to fashion a new existence in this place. They found the water to be less buoyant and unhealthy. As they consumed their fat reserves they lost more buoyancy and became creatures of strength and power to adapt.

Quickly they learned where the shoals of fat silver salmon travelled in the depths. How to catch a moose swimming across the lake and stalk other luckless land dwellers. In fall the migrating waterfowl could be swallowed by the flock. The creatures of this new land had never encountered this sort of danger and Qaqon and her companions exploited this blindness relentlessly.

Slowly too, returned the joy in the sublime. A heavy snow falling silently across the still lake. Storms of such thunder and lightning as to recall that night the great rock fell from the sky. The same pattern of stars so familiar in the western ocean. They would delight in especially cold days in exhaling spumes of mist to watch them form clouds of sparkling ice crystals to settle on the lake surface.

And so too did they return to the cycles of life and Qaqon selected Quaglug this season as her partner. Perhaps she understood the need for smaller offspring to fit this smaller world. Quesdred would spend more time alone, never far, and always on the watch for danger.

The whales also noticed during the time of destitution the presence of man. This was not entirely new but their presence was much more visible in this smaller world. Men would cross the lake in small boats and the whales treated them with caution knowing them too to be cunning and dangerous predators.

We of course know whales communicate but understanding is another matter. For they would communicate in metaphor in lyrical revelries of song. This primitive language of the natural world reflected the nature they lived in. Communication would evoke the joyous beauty around them. It would evoke the darkest beauty as well and celebrate all aspects of life. It would seem to us like the densest poetry interwoven with images, metaphor, memory, and humor.

They would take the world as it came as a whole and could not in any sense dissect it into components. We can gain some idea of this if we take our own word nature. We think of nature as the world around us and in modern context the world outside of man’s influence.

It was not always like this for the boundary is a modern invention. Still nature is the world that is around us. We also use the word nature to describe or understand something or someone. We think of the nature of a person or an object. In this we tend to mean something more than the object’s appearance or its surface. The nature of something is to understand its whole. The surface plus the totality of it, what it is like the color how it feels to interact with it, perhaps, how it makes us feel. In this way the two uses of the word are consistent. We view Nature as the natural world as a whole, not as a collection of components. The nature of something or someone is the same idea; all of it in a way that defies scientific dissection and analysis.

This is probably the best way we could imagine communicating with these whales. They see the whole and as such could they distinguish between a relationship with another whale and say their relationship with water, the air, and the land? Certainly not, as they are inseparable. In this understanding sits their idea of love, and cherishment. A love that transcends the individual and inhabits the entire world.

The whales looked about their new world and they found that above the flood ravaged slopes there were trees. Trees themselves were not new but now they seemed to be all about them. These great living giants stood tall and straight on the slopes.

They understood the trees I suppose because they understood equilibrium. As creatures of the water everything was in equilibrium. Where they balanced density they saw the tension of trees straining to keep strict alignment with the pull of the earth. The trees pushed against it as they grew and resisted the tug of winds powerful enough to have them sway or creak and even break.

These winds would stretch or twist the tree and perhaps in the slow sap-rising way the tree would sense this perhaps as a gentle relief of tensions and with more force could feel the injury or perhaps strengthening in reaction to these forces.

Once the equilibriums were broken the tree itself would break and fall to the ground.

The whales also understood that the world was barren of feeling. The world was indifferent to life and suffering. It just was. It was life that changed the world. It was life that invented joy, and love. That life needed these as a buffer against an unfeeling pile of rock, water and ice. This is what life strove for, this ascension. Life was also cruel, life would return to non-life. Non-life would become again life.

And here on this grand tableau these lost whales created a new world from a lost one.