Terrible Times
Come, gather round, little ones, and I’ll tell you a tale of terrible times. It was the Human Times.
I’ve seen humans, Uncle! They’re funny!
They’re funny now, Snorter, but they weren’t funny then. They used to cause terrible trouble.
How could they cause trouble, Uncle? There aren’t many of them, they always stay close to The Edge, they always stay close to The Top, and they’re so little and feeble!
It wasn’t always like this, Bubbler. There were lots more of them, and they didn’t always stay close to the edge.
How, Uncle? They’re terrible swimmers, and they have to breathe ever so often!
Ah, but they’re devilish clever, and they make things. Perhaps you’ve seen their boats…
Yes, yes, Uncle, of course I’ve seen their boats. I play with their little ones sometimes. It’s fun, they’re so funny.
You be careful, little Snorter. Their adults can turn nasty only too easily, and you’d be surprised how nasty they can be. Especially if one of their little ones dies – and that can happen so easily, so easily. Like you said, they have to breathe ever so often, and if one of them forgets to breathe, they die ever so quickly. Then you don’t want to be anywhere near the adults! Even if it’s not your fault, they’ll blame you, and like I said, they’re dangerous. Best to keep away from them. Seriously.
Oh Uncle! They’re such fun!
Fun they may be, little Snorter, but I mean it. Stay away!
I was saying, you’ve seen their boats. Well, the boats they make nowadays aren’t very big, and they don’t come far from the edge. But they used to make BIG boats, and they didn’t just come a bit further from the edge, they used to go everywhere, all over the top – and even sometimes below the top, right down to the bottom, deeper than we go. Maybe even as deep as the squid or the big whales. I don’t know.
How, Uncle? How did they breathe?
I don’t know, Spinner, I don’t know how they did lots of things they used to do.
Their boats used to go much faster than most of them go nowadays. Some of them even went faster than we go. Mostly that was just the smaller ones, but even the big ones could go nearly as fast as us. Those small, fast ones were the worst. They made a terrible noise, which is just as well really, because it meant you could get out of their way. And you really wanted to get out of their way, because if they hit you, they could injure you really badly. Your Great-great Aunt Halftail – well, you can see what happened to her! She was only a baby when it happened. She was lucky it was her tail, not her head. But she’s always a slow swimmer because of her half tail, and she always needs the rest of us to feed her, and help her along or she’d never keep up with the pod.
How could a boat do that to her tail, Uncle? I’ve bumped boats, it’s no trouble!
You be careful, little Snorter. I hope you’ve not bumped boats hard enough to knock the humans out!
Oh no, Uncle, I’m ever so gentle. I wouldn’t want to hurt a human!
You should stay away, little Snorter. You could hurt a human ever so easily, without even meaning to.
Well, in the Human Times, their boats were different. Some of the little boats were like the ones they have nowadays, but the big ones were BIG – bigger than the biggest whale. Much bigger than the biggest whale. And hard. If you bumped a big boat, it was like bumping a rock.
You know how your Grandad can do a spinning jump, right out of the water, and spin three or four times round in the air?
Oooh, yes, Uncle, I wish I could do that! I’ve been trying to do it myself, it’s such a great trick!
Well, on those big boats, they had a tail that could spin like that, only faster, and it could keep on spinning and spinning and spinning forever. You can’t spin your tail, can you? You have to spin your whole body. But those boats could spin their tails, without spinning their body at all. And that tail was hard like rock. It was bumping one of those spinning tails that cut off a big chunk of Great Aunt Halftail’s tail.
I thought you said Great-great Aunt before…
Yes, I did. She’s your great-great aunt, but she’s my great aunt. Like your Grandad is my Dad, and your Mum is my sister.
I told you that some of the little boats were like the boats the humans have nowadays. But even the little boats often had spinning tails. All the fast little boats had them, and they were the worst. Apart from the terrible noise, because they could go faster than we do, they could take you by surprise if you were in shallow water and couldn’t dive out of the way. And their tails spun even faster, so fast you couldn’t see that they were spinning…
If you couldn’t see they were spinning, how do you know they were spinning, Uncle?
Well, I don’t really know, but it’s a pretty safe guess. Of course I’ve never seen any of these things, but Great Aunt Halftail did, and so did my Grandmother – your Great Grandmother, who died before any of you were born. The tails on the big boats spun quite fast, but not so fast that you couldn’t see them spinning. And the bigger the boat, the bigger the tail, and the slower it spun. So the littler the boat, the smaller the tail – you could see that much – and the faster it spun. You could see that for middle-size boats, but it got harder and harder to see the smaller the boat and the smaller the tail. And it could still injure you just like a big one could, so I’m pretty sure it was spinning.
It was too little to take half a tail off, but it could make terrible cuts. Some of the oldies had awful scars from them when I was a youngster. Nobody in our pod, but in some of the other pods.
Is all this true, Uncle? Are you sure you’re not making up stories? If humans could make big boats like that before, why did they stop?
Well, I’m pretty sure it’s true, Whistler. All the oldies told the same story, and your Great-great Aunt Halftail still does, and they were alive in the last days of the Human Times. I don’t know why the humans stopped making big boats, but I can guess.
I think it’s because of sea level rise. I’m sure you’ve swum around some of the Weird Reefs?
Ooh yes, they’re spooky! And brilliant places for fishing!
Well, the Weird Reefs are full of stuff that humans made – and you be careful in the Weird Reefs, some of the things humans made are dangerous! And sometimes bits of the Weird Reefs collapse, too. In fact, I’m pretty sure that the Weird Reefs aren’t just full of stuff that humans made, I’m pretty sure the humans actually made the Weird Reefs entirely. And when they made them, they weren’t in the water at all, they were beyond The Edge. I’m pretty sure the humans made them to live in. And then sea level rise happened, and they had to move out, beyond the new Edge.
Ooh! Don’t humans live in boats, then? They live beyond the Edge??
Well, some of them live in boats, I think. The oldies were pretty sure some of the humans lived in boats, but most of them live beyond the edge, I think. I’ve never done it, but your Grandad has done jumps out of the water to watch humans sometimes, and he says they get out of the boats and swim beyond The Edge. They seem to be better at swimming out of the water than in it!
But you still haven’t told why the humans stopped making big boats.
Give me time! I’ll get to that. At the side of the Weird Reefs – the side away from The Edge, where the Weird Reefs stop quite suddenly – there are deeper channels, often with steep sides. And in those deep channels, there are the remains of the big boats. It takes a bit of imagination to realize that that’s what they are, because the bottoms of the big boats, that the oldies were familiar with and told me about, are buried in mud, and the tops of them – well, they’re weird. But I’ve swished the mud away from the tail end of a couple of them, and sure enough, there’s that spinning tail. Only it’s not spinning now, but it’s just like the oldies described. With three flukes instead of two, and you can see how it’s twisted so that spinning pushed the boat along.
I’m pretty sure that what happened is that when sea level rose, the deep places where the humans could take their big boats to The Edge weren’t at the edge any longer, so the big boats weren’t any use any more, because humans really mostly live beyond The Edge.
I’m pretty sure that the deep channels were made by humans, too, because almost the only places you find them like that are at the side of Weird Reefs. You’d think that the humans could have made new deep channels at the new Edge, except that the Edge keeps moving now, because sea level is still rising…
Did The Edge stay in the same place for a long time then, so that they could make those deep channels?
Yes, yes. The Edge only started retreating when the oldies who were old when Great Aunt Halftail was small were small. Before that, The Edge had been in pretty much the same place forever, generation after generation, as far back as the tales tell, everyone knew that. It was really a surprise when it started retreating. You can tell where the edge had been for a long time, because in most places there’s a fairly flat shelf of bottom where it was, and then an extra steep bit that used to be just beyond The Edge. And of course there are little Weird Reefs here and there all along what used to be just beyond The Edge, apart from the Big Weird Reefs. All old human places, it seems pretty obvious to me, with human things around.
But lots of things have changed, apart from The Edge retreating, even in my lifetime. Many places, the water near The Edge used to be a bit mucky and horrible, and it’s getting better – but in a few places, quite a few places, it’s getting MUCH worse. Everything seems to die in those places, and even all round them everything seems sickly. You don’t want to eat fish or seals around those places, you can see the seals getting ill and some of them dying much younger than they should. They’re old human places, but not all old human places are bad. Most are good fishing, like you said, Whistler. Listen to the oldies – they’ll tell you where’s bad, or how to spot the bad places.
But the really, really big change is that there aren’t nearly as many humans as there used to be. It’s not just that there aren’t any big boats any more, there aren’t nearly as many little boats, either. The humans used to take lots of fish – there are old tales that they even took whales!
How could humans take whales, Uncle?
With those big boats, and machines they’d made. But I’ve never seen it, and nor had Great Aunt Halftail or my Grandmother. Just old tales, but probably true anyway, I think. When you look at some of the things in the Weird Reefs, you can believe almost anything.
Some of their boats had huge nets, that collected fish by the million. Sometimes other creatures would get caught too. It was slaughter. There was really a shortage of fish, and the oldies were sometimes starving. The humans still take fish, but only in tiny quantities now. They’re no problem now.
There’s much less rubbish in the water now, too. I’m sure the rubbish was made by humans. Grandmother used to say they threw a lot of it out of their big boats, so it must have been them. But a lot of it used to come out of rivers, too…
What are rivers, Uncle?
Oh, you know the places at The Edge where the water gets thinner, and you tend to sink a bit, and have to be careful to keep near the surface and not run out of breath? And the water tastes funny? That’s river water, coming down rivers from beyond The Edge. It mixes in with proper water in the end, but close to where it first comes over The Edge it can be really thin. And some rivers used to bring a lot of rubbish, but that’s stopped now. Well, if Grandmother was right that the humans made the rubbish, that probably means there aren’t so many humans beyond The Edge as there used to be, too. Or they’ve given up making rubbish.
That’s a big plus, because a lot of creatures died from eating rubbish. You and I wouldn’t eat rubbish on purpose, but sometimes you might have eaten something that had rubbish in its insides, that you didn’t know was there. No, I know you wouldn’t eat anything that was dead already, but it might have eaten rubbish and not died of it yet. You never knew. Maybe that’s what some of the oldies died of. We’d never know.
Another big plus is that there’s lots more fish – and lots more seals – than there were during the Human Times. Old tales from many generations ago told of times before the Human Times, when there were plenty of fish, and plenty of seals, and no rubbish, and how terrible the Human Times were.
Well, thank goodness the Human Times are over.
There are still humans, Uncle, you know there are!
Yes, but not so many, and they don’t do such terrible things any longer. It’s not their time any more.