From the Field Notes of Colonel Aubrey Fitch-Harrington, FRS

Observations Upon the Fauna of Southern Africa — Volume III (In Preparation)

“The Southern Right Whale (Eubalaena australis) was named the right whale to hunt: slow enough to catch under sail, dense enough in blubber to float when dead, close enough to the coast to work from small boats. The whalers of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries found it and named it with the simple directness of an industry naming its primary resource. By the early twentieth century, the International Whaling Commission was calling it commercially extinct — not biologically extinct, but so reduced in numbers that hunting it was no longer economically viable. This was the measure used. The population at its lowest point: perhaps a few hundred in the entire Southern Ocean. The species returns to Walker Bay in the Western Cape every year to calve — June to November — the same bay, the individual whales identified by the callosities on their heads, which are as unique as fingerprints. Some individuals have been returning to this bay for over thirty years. The author stood on the cliff above Hermanus and watched a species that was nearly hunted to nothing doing what it does here every year. He notes that standing on the cliff in June watching what came back is not nothing.”

He heard the blow before he saw the whale.

The sound came from below the cliff — a sharp, wet exhalation, the specific quality of it arriving through the air from the water forty metres below, and then the whale was visible: the enormous dark shape, the white of the callosities on the head catching the morning light, moving along the bay with the specific unhurried motion of something that has made long journeys and considers this particular bay, at this particular time of year, its destination.

The air on the cliff smelled of salt and the cold Benguela current and the particular quality of Western Cape morning air in the winter months — sharp and clean and carrying nothing from inland, everything from the sea.

He watched the whale move south along the bay.

He had his field notes. He wrote: Southern Right Whale. Walker Bay. One individual, morning, moving south. Callosities visible. Large.

Then he opened the file on the name.

The right whale to hunt.

Slow enough to catch under sail. Dense enough in blubber to float when dead. Close to shore. The name was a description of utility: this was the one. The seventeenth and eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had found it in every bay along the Southern African coast and in the great stretches of the Southern Ocean, and had hunted it with the industry appropriate to something correctly identified as the right one.

The population at the lowest point: perhaps a few hundred. Not in Walker Bay — in the whole Southern Ocean.

Then protection. Then slow recovery. Then the annual return to the calving bays — Walker Bay, De Hoop, Plettenberg Bay, the other sheltered waters along the coast. The research teams arriving in June with their photograph catalogues, identifying the returning individuals by the callosities on their heads, patterns as specific as fingerprints, some individuals recognised across thirty years of returns.

“They remember,” he said.

“Yes,” Cetshwayo said.

“The bay.”

“The bay. The season. The safe water.”