The Night of the Whales

One January night almost 50 years ago I found myself looking straight into the eye of a large black whale. It had just finished swimming on its back, exposing a gleaming white underbelly, through a dense bed of kelp. The whale's swimming motion was slow, sinuous, and obviously sensual, as though it were enjoying a deeply satisfying back rub. Now it had righted itself and was swimming closer into the kelp bed, the inner edge of which was not more than 10 yards from the rocky beach where I stood. There it stopped for what seemed like a very long time.

Soon I became acutely aware that the whale's small, beady eye was fixed on me in what looked like a malevolent glare. Yielding to a small-boy impulse, I threw a rock at the whale. The rock hit the whale squarely on its shiny wet-black back, just behind its high dorsal fin. Instantly the whale raised its tail flukes, brought them down hard on the water, and drenched me in spray. I scrambled up the rocky beach, quite scared.