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was in a rather irritable and fighting mood all the time. This caused him to cruise some distance up a river one day by mistake.
    He had swum fast for several seconds into the river’s broad estuary, not realizing that it was not part of the sea, until the sour and bitter taste, the vibrations caused by something heavy being thrown in near him, alerted him to the fact that he was going in a wrong direction, toward a likely impasse as well as human enemies. He could even hear the churn of machinery. He turned and dived lower, heading back the way he had come.
    The water was foul, the river bed covered with jagged metal pieces, cylinders large and small, rotting ropes and chains. Boats above him tossed in the disturbance he made on the river’s surface, and men’s voices cried out. The whale shot forward with a great thrust of his tail, and something scratchy swept over his head, tweaked a lance, and stuck.
    For a few seconds he felt resistance, but not enough to stop him, and he reached the open sea at last. But when he paused, he felt a weight on either side of him, tending to pull him downward. He could see several weights on either side, all attached to one another on a cord which lay across the back of his head. The whale swam backwards, but the weights stayed with him. The rope or chain was somehow caught in the lances that stuck in him. He nosed toward one weight, but did not touch it: it was shaped like the floating things that bordered the routes into rivers, but these were smaller. To rise for air was now not so quickly done and, if he wished to cruise near the surface for brit, the weights came with him reluctantly, and slowly sank again.
    On one of the whale’s surfacings for air in the North Pacific, the sight of his high, white exhalation gave rise to a shout which the whale heard. He had come up rather close to a fishing boat, the kind with both sail and motor, the kind not to be feared. But the whale shot himself toward the boat for sport, to hear the men cry out again, and now their yelps sounded frightened. The whale realized that on either side of him the weights that he dragged made a wide fluttering on the water, as if he himself were larger. As he swerved, not touching the boat, he saw the more ominous shape of a whaler. It was probably heading for him, having sighted his blowing.
    The fishing vessel had started its motor.
    The whale headed for the larger vessel with a reckless lunge of mingled anger and pain. He knew that with his weights there would be no escape. Pain from the lances in him made him slow, the fast fishing vessel was going past him, so the whale passed its stern without touching it.
    Seconds later, there was an explosion underwater that gave a sensation of pressure on the whale’s ears. Great splashes followed, objects fell into the sea, then came the sucking sound of a rush of water. The whale saw a hunk of the fishing vessel, one whole end of it, sinking downward, and he swam away.
    Of that eight-man crew there were five survivors, so another story went out: there was a whale in the area with mines attached. Beware! As ever, one survivor said he had seen at least six mines, and the next man said ten. But they agreed that the mines were painted yellow, like some used years ago in the rivers of Korea and Viet Nam. All agreed that the whale had to be destroyed. But no single captain volunteered for the job.
    It would take several boats, whalers with harpoon guns, to kill the whale safely. The whalers said they could do it, if ever enough of them got together in the same area as the whale. Three boats might do it, four certainly. But time passed, the whale was not seen where he had been seen, and the idea of a search was abandoned as unprofitable. Every man thought that some other ship would encounter the whale, not his.
    The whale was still moving north on a pleasant current. It was the only thing pleasant in his existence now. He was alone and in nagging pain from his many slight