Shallow Breath

46

Kate




In the Boxing Day tsunami, not a single animal that was free to move lost its life.

Kate has heard this ‘fact’ recently from her friend Carl, and is unsure what to make of it. She hopes it is true, but it could be like those other stories she has come across. She’d once heard of an elephant on a Thai beach rescuing a couple of tourists from the flooding water by swinging them onto its back. Later, she’d heard the same tale retold as a mahout whipping the elephant into a run, two terrified riders already clinging to its harness.

Stories have a habit of getting skewed, and sometimes things are not quite as they seem.

But The Cove is different, because Kate has seen these horrors for herself.

It began when Carl got hold of a copy of the Oscar-winning documentary on DVD, and a group of them watched it one night in the lounge room of their Thai guesthouse. At the time, the five of them – Kate, Carl, Lexie, Adam and Nick – had been working on a coral-restoration project in a village near Khao Lak. But once they had seen the film, they could not get it out of their heads. They made a plan to travel to Japan together, talk to the other conservation groups already there and determine if there was anything they could do.

The five of them journeyed to Taiji, a small village on the south-eastern tip of Honshu, where from September to March the dolphins were hunted each day. They stood on a hillside at dawn as a procession of fishermen paraded their boats through the harbour in single file. They answered questions from wary local police, all the while watching the boats pass the rocks and fan out as they headed towards the horizon, searching for their quarry. And they moved to a promontory, alongside a small group of hardy souls there to observe and protest, to witness the boats’ return.

On a lucky day, they were told later, the boats would reappear in dribs and drabs. But this was not such a day. Instead, the fishing vessels came back in a V-formation, long poles thrust into the water, funnels disgorging treacherous black smoke. Dwarfed between them, forty bottlenose dolphins were swimming for their lives.

Kate knew the creatures would be blinded by the clamour of the clanging metal poles as the fishermen banged on them relentlessly. Dolphins use sound to see, and there was no escape from the wall of chaotic, ceaseless noise – they could not cover their ears, or numb their senses, in the way a person can shut their eyes. As Kate and the others watched, one disorientated creature had thrown itself onto the rocks, and was left behind, battered and writhing, no good to either group now.

The rest were steadily guided through the gaping harbour mouth, their point of no return. Once the harbour had trapped and swallowed them, there was no direction left to go except the Cove.

The observers had all jumped into their cars and driven round to a small sandy beach, which was as close as they could get. Kate hadn’t seen what happened next, for the killing at the Cove had been hidden behind tarps and ropes. But its barriers were makeshift, and not impenetrable. There had been dislocated moments of witness: an escapee breaking away with blood ballooning in the water around it, caught by the tail and dragged once more under the tarps. The shuddering, blood-slicked bodies of the dead and dying that lined a gutting barge, ready for dismemberment into mercury-laden slabs of meat.

As it all unfolded, there had been animated chatter among the campaigners. Someone had spotted two rare rough-toothed dolphins within the group – not part of the fishermen’s allowed take. Sure enough, they spied these dolphins cordoned off, huddled together as part of a group of five.

A girl dressed in black had come over to talk to Kate’s group. ‘Today it’s bottlenose, but tomorrow it could be pilot whales, or Pacific white-sided dolphins,’ she said. ‘As long as it’s allowed by the government, they’ll take everything they find.’ She turned to study the little group milling together in the distance. ‘A dolphin heading into the Cove has to be driven in, or it will escape,’ she told them. ‘But a dolphin released from the Cove has to be driven back out to sea. By then they’ve seen many of their pod members, including young babies, get bludgeoned to death with knives and poles. They’ve been left swimming in the blood of their relatives, despite the fact that the killers quickly plug the wounds now, so we can’t watch the sea turn red. It’s not surprising, is it, that they stop fighting? They must be incoherent. We witness it again and again – within those few minutes behind the tarps, the few survivors lose the will to live.’



At that point, to Kate’s surprise, another group of people had arrived. ‘The trainers,’ the same girl murmured disgustedly. ‘Hand-selecting the prettiest dolphins for a life of captivity, and turning their backs on the dying cries of the rest. This is where the real money is. This is why they do it. A dolphin to be eaten is worth six hundred dollars. A dolphin to be saved, and petted, and ogled is worth more like a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. They are sent all over the world. A dolphin in a show might well have endured this or something similar to get there. ‘Shame!’ she suddenly turns and screams towards the trainers, and Kate jumps at the rawness in her voice, a mix of pain and anger and devastation. ‘Shame on you all! Shame!’

But the group ignores her, and gets to work.

‘You’ve seen the harbour pens,’ the girl says sadly. ‘That’s where they keep the dolphins for sale. And the pens at Dolphin Resort are even worse. They are training them up for life in nearby rooftop tanks and pools at the top of their hotel. The dolphins there die so quickly they need to constantly replenish their numbers. However bad the Cove seems to you, I think the worse fate is the pens.’

Back in Tokyo, the five of them tried to come to terms with what they had seen, and debated what they might do. Meanwhile, their research uncovered more shocking information. The horror wasn’t confined to Taiji – dolphin drives were happening in other pockets all along the coast of Japan.

While they were formulating their plans, Kate received word that Nana Jacobs was gravely ill. She flew home, promising to return as soon as she could. In the interim, Carl set up some meetings in Tokyo. And the others travelled to Iwate, to learn more about the dolphin drives that happened out at sea.

Carl was determined. He discovered that the conservation groups already in Taiji had specific codes of conduct, or agreements in place with authorities, which meant they couldn’t directly intervene. But the White Wave volunteers were different: unknown, and with their main strength being their diving expertise. Carl came up with an audacious, risky plan, and emailed it to the group a day before the tsunami struck. They had all replied in hours, saying they were in.

The tragedy of losing the others only made Carl and Kate more determined to complete the mission, in their memory. But they knew they needed four people at a minimum. After much searching, Carl found a local man who would help them. The rest had been left up to Kate.

She thought her plan had fallen apart when Desi said she couldn’t do it. But fate has intervened, and brought Maya to her instead.

Now they can begin.