Grayson Read Online Free PDF Page A

and I could feel waves of water peeling off his body and rolling under my legs and feet. Putting my face into the water, I looked down. He was about fifteen feet below me and if whales can smile I think he was smiling. He was moving his fluke (tail fin) up and down and slipping through the transparent gray water effortlessly with so much power and efficiency.
    About two-thirds of the way down his back I noticed a small hump and then behind the hump near his fluke were six small knuckles. They really looked more like giant dimples. I wanted to touch them. AndI wondered if the dimples on his body were like the dimples on a golf ball or like the ones on the wings of a plane that are made by severe hail storms. The dimples allow more wind to travel over the surface at a faster rate, which gives the ball and the plane more lift in the air. I wondered if the dimples on his back enabled water to travel over his body more quickly and if that gave him more lift than having a regular dorsal fin. I watched him swim.
    He flew effortlessly through the water, rolling over underwater and making a slow giant spiral. Pointing his head up and dropping his fluke behind him, he kicked a few times, displacing so much water so quickly that he rocketed to the surface. Then he suddenly dove, rolling flipper over flipper like a crop duster doing wild and daring aerial maneuvers.
    Despite his youth and size, the baby whale was in control of his flight through the water. He had learned to swim within an hour of his birth and it was obvious he was a natural. But he had refined his technique by practicing with his mother in the warm blue lagoons off Baja, Mexico. He knew just how far to kick his tailfin and when to hold his long soaring glide and how to alter his flipper position to turn precisely one way or the other.
    The baby whale surfaced and immediately spouted. The spout rose four feet into the air. I couldn’t help but smile. It was hard to believe that he was swimming so close to me. It was amazing to watch him. He seemed to be showing off or even trying to get me to play with him.
    When he took a breath he floated easily on the surface. I watched the two holes on top of his head open and close. The lungs in his back must have been as large as two weather balloons. And that, plus his body fat, helped him rest on the water’s surface and float with just the two holes in his head above the waterline so he could rest and breathe.
    I wanted to get closer to see him, to see him better, to see what he was all about.
    Turning his massive gray head, he looked directly at me with bright clear brown eyes the size of two enormous chestnuts. His face was mostly dark gray except for a couple of large white splotches near his chin, and he had vibrissae—small whiskers—on hisface. The vibrissae were like a cat’s whiskers, and he used them like a cat to sense what was around him.
    He seemed to be gentle, but his size was intimidating. I’d never before been in the water with a being that was so large. I swam closer. I had heard that baby gray whales sometimes let people pet them and I really wanted to see what he felt like.
    The baby whale rolled onto his side and floated. His body was breathtaking, perfectly streamlined. His mouth was large, stretching from one side of his head to the other and he held it slightly open, as if giving me a gentle smile. But he didn’t open it far enough to enable me to see the baleen that he would eventually use to feed from the muddy ocean bottom. His head was large and his body was very elongated. In relation to the size of his body, his fluke and pectoral flippers were very short. He reminded me of a giant and gentle dachshund puppy. The fins on either side of his body were perfectly shaped, just like canoe paddles, with points at the tips that enabled him to capture the water down to the tips of his flippers.
    He watched me swim breaststroke with my head above water. I swam slowly, keeping my eyes on him. Ididn’t