ECHOLOCATION by Lucy Atkins

They woke to the sound of the sky crashing in; the whoosh and wheeze of stars falling, blowing holes in the pine needled floor, craters that echoed and banged off the mountains in the dawn.

Ellen sat up in bed, then Kai next to her, "Mama!"

Jonas wavered over them, his blond hair on alert, no pants.

"Get your pack," she said. "I have the kit right here. We can follow them." Jonas scrabbled around, whacked on jeans, boots, then he was out, ahead of them. Ellen fought the urge to scream, trapped by laces and buttons and zippers. She shoved Kai’s little feet into his shoes, tugged a fleece over his head and grabbed her recording equipment, camera, log book.

"Are they here?" Kai’s eyes were bright as beachcomber glass in the grey light. The sound of breaths in the bay filled the air.

She heard the Zodiac’s outboard turning over as she ran to the shore, Kai’s hand in hers, their feet crunching over needles and dust, onto the rocks where the littleneck clams crackled underfoot. And there they were: magnificent black humps oiled by the sea: ten, twelve dorsal fins cresting the waves in slow synchrony. Even now it took her breath to see them.

The matriarch blew and the sound echoed off mountains that cupped the bay like giants’ hands. The pod curled towards open sea then back again, towards the inlets, sounding out the Chinook.

"It’s A31," said Ellen to Jonas as she hefted Kai into the boat. Above them, the oystercatchers in their outcrop nests made a shrill percussion to the huffs and blows of the whales. She helped Kai with his life vest, passing straps under his chunky legs, the squish of his babyfat making her kiss him, briefly, on the crown and catch his sweet sleepy smell.

"I see Arka!" he cried, hopefully. "I see her children too!"

Arka and her family had been their first visitors to the floathouse the day Kai slipped into his father’s hands with the doctor still bumping across Totem Bay in his speedboat. Afterwards, when Ellen lay in the bed, scraped out by the animal effort of childbirth, they heard distant clicks on the hydrophone. Jonas leaped to his feet, grabbed Kai and rushed to the deck, holding his son up like a prize as the pod rolled in. It was the only time she could remember when the whales returned for the salmon, that she did not go straight for her recording equipment: all she had wanted was her baby against her, bathed in their song.

They began, jokingly, to call Arka the ‘godmother’. At times the whales seemed more real to them than Kai’s godmother, Susannah, in her Saltspring gallery, the aunts and uncles dotted across the globe, or the distant grandmothers - disapproving in Portland, disbelieving in Stockholm. On her crumb of British Columbian coast with ten other houses, no mains electricity, a baby that had to be bathed in the sink and a difficult, blue-eyed diver to love, Ellen rarely even missed them.

She installed Kai in his nest under the canopy and snapped his life vest to the D-ring. Jonas turned and grinned at her over their son’s head, his face alight with killer whales and the dawn. The sky glowered, wind picking up as he steered the boat out. She tested the recording equipment, getting ready to drop the hydrophone. Then she took her camera, clipped on the zoom and lifted it to her eye to find Arka.

There. The familiar eye markings, the ghost grey saddle patch and the dorsal fin with its kinked tip. She worked to identify Arka’s children, Flash and Tula, her sister, Nan, with her own calves, Dinos, a big ten year old bull, and his reckless younger brother, Salish. And then there was Co-Co, Arka’s firstborn, seventeen years old now, almost grown. When she had explained to Kai that whales stayed with their mothers all their lives, he’d looked blank as if to say "why wouldn’t they?" She’d tried to expand, saying how one day he’d move away from her and have a family of his own, but she had to stop when she saw on his face a growing alarm that mirrored hers.

The floathouse was a sketch of smoke in the firs now. Jonas cut the engine and Ellen lowered the hydrophone, slid on earphones – caught the first weeeoooouuuuppppp! She traced the arrangement of rapid high notes - a rainforest of exotic birds in oceanic echoes. Definitely the A31 dialect: a greeting. She smiled.

"You want to listen?" She turned to Kai and flicked her headphone off one ear.

"Wind’s blowing up," called Jonas.

At the stern, Dinos’s head lurched out of the water, pebble eye gazing calmly at her over Jonas’ shoulder before he submerged. She grabbed her camera. The waves were rising. She realised they’d left their life vests back at camp.

"Coming in from the Northwest," Jonas called. Their eyes met. He turned back to the wheel. She slid Kai’s earphones onto his head, watching his face spasm with delight then settle into the peaceful thrill of the sounds.

Arka’s body breached starboard. The whale sucked a breath, submerged; then Dinos spy-hopped, his torpedo head rising just metres from Kai’s nest – a walloping display of belly - nine tons of killer whale still happy to glide alongside his mother, doing his share of the childcare. He surfaced again, just ten metres off. His tail thwacked the water. The sound clapped off the mountains making them laugh.

The air pressure tightened. Waves progressed towards the boat. No sunrise, just bruised clouds gathering and salt spray on their skin.

"We should go back," she called to Jonas, but she put on the phones and zoomed in on Dinos’s six foot dorsal. She could feel the shot coming. Up! There you go: he nosed the sky. She snapped his colossal belly, quick shutterspeed against the clouds.

The Zodiac no longer skipped with each wave but bucked. Jonas opened and closed his mouth.

"What?" she pulled one headphone off. The wind boxed her ear. "Just a couple more shots, okay?" She glanced at Kai, then at the blackening sky and steadied herself, feet apart, as the Zodiac lurched again. There was Co-Co, usually so shy, but breaching now close to the boat, and beside her – it was! – a new calf, glued to her as if conjoined.

"Oh my God, Jonas! Co-Co had a calf!"

She zoomed in, caught them just a few metres off. The pictures would be spectacular, mother and calf - a 350lb tube of new muscle - breaching under a petrol sky, their markings tooth-white in the odd light. A wave thwacked into the side of the boat, soaking her arm. Kai was dry still under the canopy, plugged in to the world beneath the hull. The matriarch curved around the bow.

"Did you log her? Oh my god, Jonas, she’s beautiful. She looks brand new!"

Jonas balanced the log book on the side and started up the engine, grim-faced now. His forearms bulged with the effort of turning the boat. Another wave hit. Ellen gripped the side. She switched off the hydrophone and the recording equipment.

The whales moved in unusual patterns now. The boat tipped with another wave and the log book slid off the dashboard - Jonas lurched for it with one hand.

Where the next wave came from Ellen would never know.

She felt the air first; a chill scooped by the travelling wall of water, then before she could crouch, it hit the boat side-on, ripped it up so they hung suspended in eery silence, then a terrible slow tilting and the drop. It felt as if they were poised on a snout then flipped; a toy in some curious cetacean game. The dropping was the worst.

She must have lunged for Kai because when they hit the surface he was in her arms, soaked like a seal and aghast. Salt stung her eyes. Everything roared. The hull felt cold and slippery as a salmon under her cheek. Somewhere nearby she heard Arka blow, definitely concerned.

"OK Kai. It’s ok. Mama’s here." She looked around for Jonas. His absence at the wheel felt like surgery: pure and wrong.

She gripped Kai as another wave hit, checked his life-vest, then stuck the boat in neutral. She grabbed the wheel and began to scan the waves, screaming his name while with one hand found the distress channel to Mayday the coast guard.

Arka surfaced a few metres from the stern, breathed, submerged. The boat lurched on another wave. She bent to Kai, one hand on the wheel, one on his. "You hold tight to this, here." She squeezed his fingers round the D-ring. "Don’t let go. Don’t let go." Beneath the roar of the wind she heard the VHF crackle a response.

A flash of something pale in the water. She dropped the receiver, kicked off her shoes. There was a rope at her feet. She grabbed it and tied one end round her waist, the other to the rail. Poised on the edge above the sea she looked at Kai, his eyes and mouth dark holes in his face. For a moment she clung to the metal. She could not leave him and jump. She could not leave his father and stay.

Arka’s unhurried back slid past, slick as oil. For a moment she was sure that the whale was nosing Jonas to the surface. She was so slow, so close Ellen could have reached out and stroked her fin. The matriarch looked steadily at her as she passed.

In the nights that followed, Ellen’s rage centred on the whale. Somewhere beneath the surface Arka had watched Jonas sink, limbs ceasing, hair floating around his beloved head. She could have saved him. She chose to let Jonas die.

Back in the floathouse Ellen switched off the hydrophone. She wrapped herself in her husband’s clothes at night to drown out the sound of the sea. Relatives rallied. But Ellen told no one about the rope. No-one could know how close she had come to jumping.

She shut up the floathouse and moved Kai to Vancouver, abandoning her research to teach would-be oceanographers, none daring to ask about the man whose underwater footage they studied. Kai forgot how he had spent the first three years of his life listening to killer whales. He developed a love of baseball. But Ellen spoke less and less until, four summers on, Susannah closed up her gallery and took them all back to Totem Bay.

"At the very least," she said, "You have to clear it out."

Susannah and Kai got the generator working; from the deck Ellen heard their jubilant cries and the familiar roaring clanking sound. While they cleaned mildew and dust from the kitchen to make coffee, Ellen watched Totem Bay.

It turned out the hydrophone was still working.

Just after Kai’s birthday they came. In the midst of complicated dreams, their breaths echoed off the mountains and the floathouse filled with sonar clicks and calls.

"Are they here?" Bony eight year old legs white in her doorway at dawn. "What’s that ticking sound?"

"Echolocation," she mumbled. "Foraging. They’re rebounding the sounds off the kelp to locate the salmon."

He ran to the deck and she rose slowly, took her camera and followed him, slapped by the chill of the breaking day and her son’s face, lit up by the whales and the dawn.

She would recognize Arka’s sounds anywhere. It came in her dreams and had stayed way after Jonas’s voice slipped from memory. The matriarch breached in the bay, her whole family around her. And there was the grandchild: a sleek four year old cow. Ellen felt herself smile.

"Mom!" Kai tugged her arm. "What are they saying?"

When she looked down at his face she saw his father’s Viking eyes and for the first time in four years she felt that she might not, after all, be torn in two.