Chapter 3
Slivers of kaleidoscopic light pierced his eyelids. Coastal morning light. Very, very early coastal morning light. The golden hour. Rolling over on the couch and out of direct range from the illumination prodding him from sleep, Wes squinted at the bungalow’s wall clock.
Sunscreen, according to the dials.
Barely after five.
Very, very, very early.
But his jet lag made the chances of dropping back into a doze slim to none. Not with the hungry growls coming from his stomach. Not with the crash of waves just outside the bungalow, either.
The bedroom door was still closed.
Moving quietly, he shrugged off his afghan and the terrycloth robe.
Sleeping nude as he usually did hadn’t seemed right last night.
He kept a watch on the door while he unzipped his duffel to extract a pair of board shorts, a rash guard, and a tube of sunscreen, then rinsed his face and ran a toothbrush around his mouth over the kitchen sink.
He pulled his hair into its elastic and got dressed.
His stomach muttered again, almost louder than the tank behind him.
Isabel’s work on the pump and tubing had made some headway against its algal pea soup, but she was probably right about needing oysters for full filtration.
Unless the otters had shucked them all, there’d be some of those bivalves in the bay.
He should be out in the water, too, taking advantage of the light.
Maybe the waves would be warmer this morning?
With a fisheye lens port screwed onto his Nikon, which he snapped into its Ikelite underwater housing and clipped to a strap over his shoulder, he grabbed a strobe, a dive mask, a snorkel tube, and fins.
He kicked on his sandals and wandered outside.
The air was heavy, moisture beading on his arms as he ducked under a fringe of wind chimes, shells, and crystals at the bungalow’s half-moon gate, before ambling over to Baby.
A small oil slick pooled beneath her engine.
He gave her an apologetic pat. But she’d survived yesterday’s trip over the Santa Cruz mountains with no more damage than a splat of gull guano on her windshield, and now he was here in Monterey, ready for an exploratory dive—with minimal kinks in his neck. So everything was fine.
Or, mostly fine. There was still the conundrum of Isabel Wright.
Next hour’s problem, he decided.
He stepped off the road, past a sign pointing directions to the dirt-packed Monterey Bay Coastal Trail, down onto the beach.
The sand was prickly with driftwood, rock, saw-toothed grasses, cracked mussel shells, and patchy succulents.
A sage-scented wind bit the scar tissue on his shoulders.
Nothing like the fine powder and sweet breezes of Central America.
His contract with the Monterey Oceanic Research Institute had specified a long list of underwater hazards that he might encounter while photographing the region’s resurgent biodiversity: barracudas, riptides, plus great white sharks migrating in the bay’s canyon or ambushing prey in the kelp.
Decapitated abalone divers occasionally washed ashore.
There was also hypothermia, of course.
But he strode without pausing through a short forest of rockweed and a maze of intertidal crevices that teemed with hermit crabs and urchins, freckled barnacles, grazing turbaned snails, cowrie shells sheltering under algae, and fish trapped in pools after the last high tide.
At the surf’s edge, he left his sandals to be investigated by what might have been the arm of an octopus concealing itself in a discarded soda can.
Then he pulled on his fins, breathed to oxygenate his body against the inevitable gasp and shock of cold water, suctioned on his mask, and half-waded, half-plunged into the knee-high waves.
“Fuck!”
Immediate submersion was the best, quickest way to acclimate to a temperature change, but—Jesus.
When he breathed again, biting hard on the mouthpiece of his snorkel tube, shivering and pushing downward to douse his camera and his head, the waves left an icy burn on his skin.
He forced another breath through the tube, however.
Then another. He invited the chill deeper.
Breathe. He equalized it against the furnace-like heat of his chest, gauging his ability to hold air in his lungs while submerged, without expelling it in a reflexive exhale. . .
Breathe. . . again. . ..
Until—another breath, another—under a glint of sunlight parting the fog, his pain reduced to discomfort.
Just keep breathing. . .
Eventually, finally, after a twentieth breath. . . the chill became: stimulation.
Each muscle and hair came awake with vibrant, vivid alertness, sensitive to the slightest alterations in pressure and movement in his environment. Wes’s brain likewise leaped into high gear. Taste: salt. Hearing: surf. Touch: damp, cold, alive.
No caffeine shot could compare.
How the hell had Isabel done this at night, though?
Next hour’s problem.
He kicked off from the sea floor. Practised, powerful rotations of his arms and hips moved him away from the shore.
Kicking toward the breakers, he angled beneath their white-capped heights.
He maintained his smooth passage through the surf by stroking down to where the turbulence settled into something softer, heaving but slow.
When he surfaced to spout a wet jet through his tube, breathe, and adjust the seal on his mask, he’d emerged beyond the waves.
Ribbons of dark, iridescent kelp layered the water around him.
Fronds and gas-filled floats grazed his legs with each undulation of the subaqueous garden.
Or was that a fish nibbling at his knees?
He stifled his laughter into a blast of bubbles.
With his mask snapped back in place, his strobe powered on for illumination through the cloudy swells, he exhaled and sank out of sight from a heron fishing the canopy, down into the kelp to investigate the curiosities there.
To be investigated, too.
He found himself nose-to-nose with a sea lion.
A whiskered snout bumped his lens, then his left ear.
Fighting the continued urge to laugh, he compelled his body to remain loose and relaxed, his hands to remain on his camera.
The Marine Mammal Protection Act recommended keeping a distance of at least fifty yards from wild dolphins, porpoises, seals, sea lions, and sea turtles, and one hundred yards for larger whales.
Not that the sea lion couldn’t approach him, if it wanted to.
It clearly did. But despite the creature’s interest in his equipment, fiddling with its folded ears or rubbing the white knob between its eyes (the burgeoning bump identified this as a juvenile male) was banned.
So was the so-called “take” of wild marine mammals: unlicensed hunting, killing, capturing, trafficking, or harassment.
Instead, the sea lion harassed him with impunity for almost a whole minute before losing interest. It angled away into the bay’s spears of sunlight and shade. Wes surfaced with a gasp and a gurgle, then immediately resubmerged.
Click: his camera captured a kelp-swaddled otter pup’s tail wiggling overhead, impatient for its mother to return with a crab and a smashing stone.
Click: a diving pelican gulped up a flash of sardines in its gular pouch, before speeding away with the catch, a cormorant in pursuit.
Translucent clusters of brainless, gelatinous moon jellies drifted with the currents, their bell-shaped bodies pulsing.
Kicking out of their path, he eyed their trailing colloblasts with respect.
He traded glances with a piebald wrasse hunting crustaceans in the fronds.
An octopus’s suckered tentacle twitched the seaweed into a protective cocoon.
Its color shifted with the mutable passage of waves, shadow, and sunlight around it.
Clever, sneaky thing.
He snapped another photo, breathed, and when he sank down again, only a blot of ink remained of the hidden cephalopod. He swam to the marine floor. Anchored into the substrate, the kelp was healthy, its roots a haven for crabs, five-armed brittle stars, sponges, anemones, and tubular tunicates.
But after he’d kicked farther out toward the edges of the forest, the biodiversity thinned with the thinning of the kelp.
Squadrons of urchins grazed the roots and severed the algae from their bases.
Farther still, the garden petered out to ugly barrens, where those same urchins and sea stars crowded over each other on the cobble.
A wasteland. Even while Wes frowned at the emptiness, however, an otter swooped into view, pried up an urchin, selected a rock to break past the spines of its prey, tucked that stone into a specialized flap of skin under its foreleg, and sped back to the surface.
Isabel was right; the California sea otter was a keystone species.
MORI’s instructions for his assignment had mentioned that the population was thriving again in the protected bay; the institute had requested shots of the charismatic creatures at work, play, and rest. A few hundred otters could clear these urchins and sea stars within a generation, opening the way for the giant kelp forests to expand into the undersea acres they’d once covered, before Europeans destroyed much of Monterey’s ecosystem.
Obviously, the urchins weren’t bad in isolation.
But when the Monterey waters lost their otters to pelt hunters, those spiny monsters wreaked havoc.
Under the wrong conditions, even native animals could become invasive. . .
In addition to researching the species in MORI’s brief while traveling back from Costa Rica, he’d listened through about ten natural history audiobooks.
How had Isabel come by her own knowledge of aquariums and marine ecosystems?