blasting off breaths of air like small explosions--time slows the closer they come, until seconds life-long sweep them all up to his skiff. In an instant he is surrounded; they cruise in a twenty-foot circle. They seem agitated, frustrated.
Mad Jack clambers all around the benches of his boat, never gaining his seat. He wants to hide in the bottom of the skiff. He feels puny. The whales start noises like they are calling or starting something. They do not come any nearer than a dozen feet, but they fill his entire being. One orca lifts its flukes up into the razor-clear light and slams them down. Another raises and slams down. Another. Foam explodes at every swing.
And then a mournful crying pierces over the bay. The shriek splits the air and echoes through Mad Jack. The attitude of the whales change. Again, the shriek echoes around the bay. Mad Jack looks to see a figure in a skiff where the whale in the center had been--he is hunched over or exhausted. He is an Aleut, Mad Jack blankly notices.
Again, a sound--though in a different pitch--sails across the water. The whales slow and start filing away from him back in the direction of the Aleut. One by one, the man-high dorsal fins cruise off until Mad Jack is watching the Aleut in the skiff through triangular sights. Mad Jack lurches, grabs the starter chord again--he feels lashings wrapping around his wrists again. He shakes his head, yanks the cord, the motor mercifully catches, and he throws it into gear with a jerk to scream away out of this nightmare and back into the fog.
Chapter 2
"Skipper's back," Lockjaw announces over a puffed out lower lip. He fires a salvo of tobacco juice over the side and turns back from the gunwale. "Oh, good," says Hallie, "I want to take the skiff over to the Rustbucket and pick up that blonde bomber, go for a little ride," as he sticks his head out from the galley door that opens on the mid deck of the 60-foot boat. He raises his ball cap off his dark head to peer around for their boss. Tall and lanky, he has the quick moves of an athlete. "Oh yeah, there's our old Cappy--boy, he's got that baby floored wide open.
"Yeah," rejoins Lockjaw with another volley of tobacco juice over the side, "maybe he got us a couple of salmon. Set the barbecue to goin' and have us a good old party!"
