"Christopher Moore - Fluke" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore Christopher)

pudding. A less trained listener might have thought that the whale was rejoicing, celebrating, shouting
howdy to the world to let everyone and everything know that he was alive and feeling good, but Nate
was a trained listener, perhaps the most trained listener in the world, and to his expert ears the whale was
saying -- Well, he had no idea what in the hell the whale was saying, did he? That's why they were out
there floating in that sapphire channel off Maui in a small speedboat, sloshing their breakfasts around at
seven in the morning: No one knew why the humpbacks sang. Nate had been listening to them, observing
them, photographing them, and poking them with sticks for twenty-five years, and he still had no idea
why, exactly, they sang.
"He's into his ribbits," Amy said, identifying a section of the whale's song that usually came right before
the animal was about to surface. The scientific term for this noise was "ribbits" because that's what they
sounded like. Science can be simple.
Nate peeked over the side and looked at the whale that was suspended head down in the water
about fifty feet below them. His flukes and pectoral fins were white and described a crystal-blue chevron
in the deep blue water. So still was the great beast that he might have been floating in space, the last
beacon of some long-dead space-traveling race -- except that he was making croaky noises that would
have sounded more appropriate coming out of a two-inch tree frog than the archaic remnant of a
superrace. Nate smiled. He liked ribbits. The whale flicked his tail once and shot out of Nate's field of
vision. "He's coming up," Nate said.
Amy tore off her headphones and picked up the motorized Nikon with the three-hundred-millimeter
lens. Nate quickly pulled up the hydrophone, allowing the wet cord to spool into a coil at his feet, then
turned to the console and started the engine. Then they waited.
There was a blast of air from behind them and they both spun around to see the column of water
vapor hanging in the air, but it was far, perhaps three hundred meters behind them -- too far away to be
their whale. That was the problem with the channel between Maui and Lanai where they worked: There
were so many whales that you often had a hard time distinguishing the one you were studying from the
hundreds of others. The abundance of animals was a both a blessing and a curse. "That our guy?" Amy
asked. All the singers were guys. As far as they knew anyway. The DNA tests had proven that.
"Nope."
There was another blow to their left, this one much closer. Nate could see the white flukes or blades
of his tail under the water, even from a hundred meters away. Amy hit the stop button on her watch.
Nate pushed the throttle forward and they were off. Amy braced a knee against the console to steady
herself, keeping the camera pointed toward the whale as the boat bounced along. He would blow three,
maybe four times, then fluke and dive. Amy had to be ready when the whale dove to get a clear shot of
his flukes so he could be identified and cataloged. When they were within thirty yards of the whale, Nate
backed the throttle down and held them in position. The whale blew again, and they were close enough
to catch some of the mist. There was none of the dead fish and massive morning-mouth smell that they
would have encountered in Alaska. Humpbacks didn't feed while they were in Hawaii.
The whale fluked and Amy fired off two quick frames with the Nikon.
"Good boy," Amy said to the whale. She hit the lap timer button on her watch.
Nate cut the engine and the speedboat settled into the gentle swell. He threw the hydrophone
overboard, then hit the record button on the recorder that was bungee-corded to the console. Amy set
the camera on the seat in front of the console, then snatched their notebook out of a waterproof pouch.
"He's right on sixteen minutes," Amy said, checking the time and recording it in the notebook. She
wrote the time and the frame numbers of the film she had just shot. Nate read her the footage number off
the recorder, then the longitude and latitude from the portable GPS (global positioning system) device.
She put down the notebook, and they listened. They weren't right on top of the whale as they had been
before, but they could hear him singing through the recorder's speaker. Nate put on the headphones and
sat back to listen.
That's how field research was. Moments of frantic activity followed by long periods of waiting.
(Nate's first ex-wife had once commented that their sex life could be described in exactly the same way,