Free Whale Pot Bay by Des Hunt

out to sea. ‘They get killed all around New Zealand; caught in the gear that we use for fishing. The industry calls it bycatch, but they really should call it murder.’ He breathed deeply a couple of times before continuing. ‘Worldwide, we kill about a thousand a day as bycatch. But we probably kill a whole lot more because we’re removing the food that they eat. And that’s why I need to cut open this calf. To get evidence of what is happening.’
    He crouched down and pulled the flaps of the stomach open. ‘Look at this! It’s almost empty. This calf has not been getting enough food. It’s almost a year old. It shouldbe able to feed for itself, but look…’ He scooped his gloved hand around inside and then held it up for us to see. ‘This should be full of squid beaks and there’re none.’ He fished around in the mess with his other hand and held up a coiled shell that I knew as the ram’s horn shell. ‘There are a couple of these, but they’re not the normal food for a pygmy. They would eat these only if they can’t get enough of the normal squid. This animal has died because we are taking too much squid. We caused this young whale to die just as surely as if we’d killed it with a harpoon.’
    With a shake of his head, he went back to his work. We watched in silence, stunned by the intensity of his outburst. It was clear to everyone that he hated the task he was doing, as much as we, the spectators, hated watching him.
    The shadows of the cliffs had moved well across Whale Pot Bay by the time the necropsy was finished. I was the only one who watched it all. Melanie and the others moved into the sea to check on the mother, who was still patrolling beyond the wave-break.
    Dad and Milt had gone to collapse the fence to the whale graveyard. That doesn’t take a lot of work, as it was made to be pulled down: it was always anticipated that there would be more corpses sometime.
    We use our boat tractor to bury them. The bigger ones have to be hauled up the beach, whereas the babies can be scooped up by the front-end loader. I heard the tractor burst into life while Colin and I were washing his instruments in the sea.
    Half an hour later, the hole was dug and we were ready for the burial. They rolled the calf onto the scoop while I climbed onto the tractor. Milt joined me to stand on the axle for the short journey up the beach. The others formed a procession behind, just as if it was a funeral.
    It took a bit of manoeuvring to get everything lined up so that the body fell into the bottom of the hole. Dad had dug it much larger than was needed to bury a calf. I knew why, and backed the tractor away without making any attempt to fill the hole.
    ‘Aren’t you going fill it in?’ asked Stephanie, after I’d turned off the tractor.
    I gave a small shake of my head. ‘Not yet.’
    ‘Why not?’
    I looked over to Dad and Colin, hoping they’d answer for me, but neither of them seemed willing to speak.
    Then Stephanie worked it out for herself. ‘You think the mother’s going to die, don’t you?’ she accused.
    Nobody answered.
    ‘Well, she’s not!’ Stephanie yelled. ‘She’s not!’ She glared around the group challenging us to contradict her.
    No one did. Instead, Milt said, ‘Fill it in, Jake.’
    So I did, although I didn’t run the tractor over the pile to compact the sand, just in case when I came back in the morning I had to dig it all up again.

Chapter 10
    I slept badly that night, and it wasn’t because I was worried about the female whale. It seemed that she was going to be all right. Just before we’d left the beach, we’d seen her head out to sea.
    No, it wasn’t the whale that worried me: it was Scatworm.
    While parking the tractor after burying the whale calf, I’d taken a sweep over by the track. At one place you get a view up into a bushy gulley. It was there that I saw a figure scrambling through the gorse. It was getting too dark to see anything plainly, and at first I