To read or not to read?
Read these opening paragraphs to decide if you may like to read or not to read the rest of the book!
Kaya.
Writing such a word, Bobby Wabalanginy couldn't help but smile. Nobody ever done writ that before, he thought. Nobody ever writ hello or yes that way!
Roze a wail...
Bobby Wabalanginy wrote with damp chalk, brittle as weak bone. Bobby wrote on a thin piece of slate. Moving between languages, Bobby wrote on stone.
With a name like Bobby Wabalanginy he knew the difficulty of spelling.
Boby Wablngn wrote roze on a wail.
But there was no whale. Bobby was imagining, remembering...
Rite wail.
Bobby already knew what it was like to be up close beside a right whale. He was not much more than a baby when he first saw whales rolling between him and the islands: a very close island , a big family of whales breathing easily, spouts sparkling in the sunlight, great black bodies glossy in the blue and sunlit sea. Bobby wanted to enter the water and swim out to them, but swaddled against his mother's body, his spirit could only call. Unlike that Bible man, Jonah, Bobby wasn't frightened because he carried a story deep inside himself, a story Menak gave him wrapped around the memory of a fiery pulsing whale heart...
On a sunny day, walking along a long arm of rock beside a calm ocean, you see the water suddenly bulging as a great bubble comes to the surface and oh! water streams from the barnacled flesh and there is the vast back of a whale. You are enclosed in moist whale breath.
Barnacles stud the smooth dark skin, and crabs scurry across it. That black back must be slippery, treacherous like rock...But you see the hole in its back, the breath going in and out, and you think
of all the blow holes along this coast; how a clever man can slip into them, fly inland one moment, back to the ocean the next.
Always curious, always brave, you take one one step and the whale is underfoot. Two steps more and you are sliding deep into a dark and breathing cave that resonates with whale song. Beside you beats a blood filled heart so warm it could be fire.
Plunge your hands into that whale heart, lean into it and squeeze and let your voice join the whale's roar. Sing that song your father taught you as the whale dives, down, deep.
How dark it is beneath the sea, and looking through the whale's eyes you see bubbles slide past you like...
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