Читать книгу And on the Surface Die - Lou Allin - Страница 8

Prologue

The sea spread satiny glass across the sheltered bay. Amid lazy undulations, a blue heron rode his kelp-bed carpet and peered for minnows. White meringue clouds watched their reflections, overweighted galleons on a cerulean mirror floating towards the Olympic Mountains of Washington State. Up poked the mustachioed face of an acrobatic seal, which flipped in a lazy pose to warm its belly in the September sun. Deep below, a red rock crab found something to its liking. Soft tissue gave way as it inched along propelled by large nippers, using smaller chelipads close to the head to urge meaty delicacies into its eager maw. Then a fickle current swept the meal away, and the hapless crab dropped over a shelf to the deeper sea floor, where it was seized by an opportune Dungeness cousin.

Trailing a frothy cloud of bubbles, a snorkeler angled down for a peek at a host of purple sea urchins. Carrying an underwater camera, he feathered his fins through the heavy tendrils of bull kelp, bulbous at one end, fat whips which bobbed on the tides until tossed ashore. The man paused to admire a cluster of whelks and a nervous school of sculpins, then took a few grab shots of a sea cucumber. A forest of leathery brown rockweed, clinging to the slippy basalt with its disc-like holdfasts, drifted into his path, then the dark crimson blades of Turkish towel seaweed. Carefully he pushed it aside, startling a juvenile octopus, which had scuttled from a mollusk- mounded crevice. He checked his watch. Ten o’clock already. He should be getting back to the car. Monica was meeting him for brunch at Point No Point. With his appetite fueled by the cold water and exertion, he could almost taste their luscious cheese scones.

Then something large glided into his peripheral vision, and he turned, moving his legs to stabilize himself. Whales were common around the island, but they didn’t usually come so close to shore...unless they were sick or injured. A mane of yellow hair and a chalk-pale face with vacant light-blue eyes searched his like a diffident lover. Hands clutched at him. He coughed out his mouthpiece and surged to the surface with a silent scream, choking as he yanked off his mask and thrashed his fins as if a killer shark rode his tail. When he scrabbled over the rocky shelf, his prize Canon fell onto the coral, cracking the lens.