The Tide Walker

Chapter 1: The Far Bar

The fog came off the bay so thick that Jacob Boudreau could not see the end of his own worm fork.

He walked anyway. He knew the way. Out past the wharf, where the creek dried to a red ditch between the pilings. Down the ramp of broken concrete, onto the gravel. Then left, along the line of old weir stakes, until the gravel ran out and the mud began.

The mud of the Minas Basin was not brown like ordinary mud. It was red, the deep, rusty red of a clay flowerpot, and it went on for kilometers. Twice a day the tide pulled back so far that the whole bay turned into a desert of wet clay and silver channels. Twice a day it came home again, filling everything, sixteen meters of water stacked where Jacob was now walking. People who came from away never quite believed it. They stood on the wharf at low tide and stared at the boats lying on their sides in the mud, and you could see them thinking that someone had pulled a plug.

Jacob had grown up with it. He was fourteen, small for his age, with a narrow face and hair his mother said was the exact color of wet sand. At school he was the kid who sat near the window and didn't say much. Out here he was somebody else. Out here he knew things.

He knew that the low water this morning was at 7:41. He knew the tide would begin to turn back by eight and would not reach the far bar until about half past ten. He knew that the channel to his right, the one the old men called the Gut, would fill first and fastest. He knew where the mud was hard enough to run on and where it would swallow a leg to the knee.

He knew all of it because Florence MacPherson had taught him.

*Never go out past the Backbone without two things,* she used to say, tapping him on the chest with one bony finger. *The time of the turn, and the way home. You forget either one, the bay will remind you. And it only reminds you once.*

The Backbone was what Florence called the long ridge of gravel that ran out from the point like the spine of a buried animal. It was hard and safe and you could walk it even when the water was coming. Jacob crossed it now, feeling the stones crunch under his boots, and kept going toward the far bar.

He wasn't supposed to be out here alone. His father usually came with him, the two of them digging bloodworms side by side before the sun was up, filling the plastic tubs that Stanley Abbott bought by the pound and shipped to bait shops in Maine. But last night had been a bad night in the Boudreau kitchen.

Jacob had lain in bed listening through the floor. His mother had come home from her shift at the hospital in Truro around midnight, and his father had been waiting up for her, and it had started the way it always started now. Quiet at first. Then not quiet.

*We can't keep doing this, Patrick.* That was his mother. *The bank called again. I talked to Joyce at the credit union. If we sell now, before winter, we come out with something. If we wait, we come out with nothing.*

*And go where?*

*Halifax. I can get days at the Infirmary. Jacob can go to a real school with more than eighty kids in it.*

*He doesn't want a real school. He wants the bay.*

*He's fourteen. He doesn't know what he wants.*

Jacob had pulled the pillow over his head then, but he could still hear his father's voice, low and stubborn, and then the back door, and then the truck starting in the driveway. When his alarm went off at four, his father's boots were by the door and his father was asleep on the couch with his mouth open, smelling of beer. Jacob had stood over him for a moment. Then he had taken the fork and the buckets and gone out by himself.

He told himself it was so the worms would get dug. That was part of it. The rest of it was that out here, nobody was arguing.

The fog shifted around him. Sometimes it opened for a moment and he caught a glimpse of the flats stretching away, glossy and wrinkled, and then it closed again. Gulls cried somewhere above him. Water trickled in the little creeks that crossed the mud, all of it running the same way, out toward the deep channel and the sea.

He reached the far bar just after half past five. It was a long hump of firmer sand, three kilometers from the wharf, and the best worm digging in Sanford Cove was along its edges. Jacob set down his buckets, rolled his shoulders, and drove the fork into the mud.

He dug for a while. Turn the mud, look for the red flicker of a worm, grab it before it pulled back down, drop it in the tub. Turn the mud again. It was slow work and his back ached, but there was a rhythm to it that he liked. He thought about nothing. He thought about Halifax and then made himself stop thinking about Halifax. He thought about Florence, and the way she had looked at him last week, puzzled and kind, and said, *Angus, you've grown.*

Angus was her brother. Angus had been dead since before Jacob's father was born.

She was eighty-one. She had spent forty years measuring this bay for the government, out in all weathers with her tide gauges and her survey poles and her notebooks. She knew more about the Minas Basin than anybody alive. Lately, though, she left the kettle on until it boiled dry. Lately she forgot what day it was. And lately she kept saying the same thing, over and over, as if she were afraid somebody would forget it.

*September. Watch September. Perigee, new moon, and whatever weather comes up the coast. Same as the year of the flood. That'll be the big one.*

Jacob had looked it up in the tide tables. She was right about the moon, at least. On the twenty-second of September the moon would be new and closer to the earth than it had been all year. The tide that day would be one of the biggest of the decade. Whether the weather would do anything, nobody could say.

He straightened up to stretch his back.

That was when he heard it.

It was a sound like someone letting out a long, tired breath, except that it was enormous. A wet, rushing *whoosh*, as loud as air brakes on a truck, followed by a slow, rattling pull of air going back in.

Jacob stood perfectly still.

The fog pressed in around him. The gulls had gone quiet. Somewhere to his left, water was trickling in a channel.

Then it came again. *Whoosh.* And the long, rattling breath.

It wasn't him. He was holding his breath. It wasn't the wind, because there wasn't any wind.

Something out there was breathing.

Jacob picked up his fork, not because he thought it would help but because it felt better to be holding something. He walked toward the sound, slowly, testing each step. The mud along the edge of the bar was firm. Then it began to slope down toward one of the side channels, softer, wetter, and the trickling grew louder.

The fog thinned. A dark shape rose out of it.

At first he thought it was a boat. A big black hull lying on its side in the channel, the kind of thing that sometimes broke loose from a mooring in a storm and ended up out on the flats. Then the shape moved. A ripple went down the length of it, and a huge flat tail lifted a little way out of the shallow water and fell back with a slap that he felt in his chest.

It was a whale.

It lay in the bottom of the draining channel, tilted onto its side, in water that came barely halfway up its body. It was longer than his father's boat. Its skin was black and smooth and shining wet where the water still touched it, but higher up, where the air had reached it, the skin was going dull and gray. There was no fin on its back. Its head was huge, a third of the whole animal, and the top of the head was covered with rough, pale patches, like crusted barnacles, in a pattern that looked almost like somebody had wiped a dirty thumb across it.

Jacob knew that head. There was a poster on the wall at the general store, faded from years of sun, with a picture of a whale exactly like this. *North Atlantic Right Whale,* it said. *One of the most endangered large whales on earth. Report all sightings.*

The whale breathed again. The twin blowholes on top of its head opened, and a spray of mist shot into the air in a V shape, and the smell hit him, fishy and sour and warm.

It was alive.

Jacob made himself look closer. He made himself see everything, the way Florence had taught him to look at a channel before he stepped into it.

There was rope. A length of thick blue-and-orange line was wrapped around the whale's right flipper, the one that lay on top. It was wound twice around and pulled so tight that it had cut into the skin, leaving raw pink grooves. From the flipper the rope ran forward along the body and disappeared into the whale's mouth, caught at the corner of its long curved jaw. Another length of it trailed out the far side and down into the mud, where it went taut and vanished.

The whale's eye was open. It was small, much smaller than he would have expected in a head that size, and dark, and it was looking at him.

Jacob had seen animals stranded on the flats before. Seals, mostly. Once a porpoise. They always died. His father said it was the weight. Out of the water, a big animal's own body crushed it. Its lungs couldn't work. Its skin dried and cracked in the sun.

He looked up. Above the fog, the sky was already turning from gray to pale yellow. The sun was coming. In an hour, maybe less, the fog would burn off, and the whale would be lying on the flats in the full August sun with nothing to cover it.

He looked at his watch. 5:52.

The tide would not reach this channel for almost five hours.

The whale breathed again, a long, shuddering breath, and the eye stayed on him.

Jacob put down his fork. Then he picked it up again, and picked up his bucket, and started down into the channel.

*Think,* he told himself. *Think like Florence. What's the first thing?*

The first thing was that it couldn't breathe properly. Its head was tilted down toward the bottom of the channel, and every time it breathed out, water and mud sprayed around the blowholes. If it slid any farther, it might drown out here in a few inches of water, in the middle of a desert.

The second thing was that it was drying out.

The third thing was that he was one kid with a worm fork and a bucket, three kilometers from anybody.

He stepped closer. The whale's tail twitched, and he froze. The tail alone was wider than he was tall. One slap from it would break every bone in his body.

"Easy," he said. His voice came out thin and strange in the fog. "Easy. I'm not going to hurt you."

The whale breathed.

"Okay," Jacob said, to the whale and to himself. "Okay. I can't do this alone. But I can start."

He began to dig.