As he thinks, the water turns white where the sun hits it. The new sky reflects in a pool around it, like fish just hatched. The shimmering spreads and forages around his kayak. The world is streaming. Ulatka smiles. Rings of silver and blue and black dance in his eyes.
"Now," he breathes, "now!" From under his seat he takes on odd instrument, a drum with the gut of a fur seal stretched over it. He turns it in his hands musing, remembering. "It is still strong after all these years. Grandfather used it himself how many times before he gave it to me?" he whispers, "it has not cracked or dried anywhere."
He stares into the watery dazzle and begins to rub the skin of the drum. He rubs in slow strokes and raises from it a wail that carries strangely out, and echoes back He stops. And waits. Listens. Silence. He leans and rubs again, his palm against the seal gut, and raises, again, the strange wail; a three-note calling,:EEEOOOEEE. Again, it carries across the water around the inlet
It vibrates through the kayak and through the water. His forehead beads with sweat as he presses his arm and hand in aching. And stops. Waits. Listens. Silence. Ulatka starts again and a furrow creases between his eyes. The ache in his arm spreads, but the rest has brought new blood, and his muscles tingle as he strokes the seal gut. EEEOOOEEE. Over the side, deep beneath him, he sees a gleam streak past larger than his skiff. He rubs the skin of the drum again and its wail seems to ripple the water. The water churns in the new light from black to green.
Another sheet of white flashes beneath him. Then another. Another. He stops. Waits. Listens. Silence.
Then, fifty feet ahead, a geyser bursts into the sun-gold air, and from it a black-white body shears from the plume; sheaths of water and foam stream off, and a form long as a boat keeps rising upward, to hang, it seems, over him in the air. It leans off to one side, gains speed and slams back into the water, a fount of white blasting up where it disappeared. A wave lurches towards the kayak. Ulatka watches the wave roll up, lift the kayak, and forage past. The water resumes its syrupy sheen. Silence. Then twenty feet before him, a black spire pierces the surface and rises into the air. It keeps rising until a black triangle tall as a man confronts him. A gray and white swath flashes in the light over the black mound.
