Chapter 7: Cut Cable

Minnow giggled and fled back into the house with the lipstick.

"Two what?" I called after her.

The screen door banged.

Jet was looking hard at the water.

"She counts things," he said. "Gulls. Boats. Freckles. Ignore her."

He went down the ladder before I could ask what came after two.

The state wanted data, so the next morning I started getting it.

Margie and I loaded three hydrophones onto the Second Wind.

We brought a spool of cable and a box of waterproof recorders I'd bought on my own credit card in March.

"How much did these cost?" Margie said.

"Don't ask."

"I'm asking."

"About what your boat engine cost."

She looked at the box with new respect.

We dropped the first one off the end of her own dock, on a weighted line.

The second went down off the north ledges, wedged in a crack in the granite.

Its cable ran up to a recorder in a cooler bolted to the rock.

The third went on the ferry dock in town.

The harbormaster said I could use the inside piling as long as nobody tripped on my wire.

"Three sites," I told Margie, on the ride home. "Every night. Every song, timed and logged. He can't say it's his data if he never touched the gear."

"And what's the state going to make of a song?"

"That something lives in that cove that nobody's studied. That's enough to protect it."

The first two nights were beautiful.

All three hydrophones caught Jet's song between two and four, faint at the ferry dock and loud on the ledges.

I watched the spectrograms bloom on my screen.

The third morning I drove into town at seven to swap the ferry dock batteries.

The ferry line was already forty people long.

Islanders with coolers, two reporters with coffee, a mother with twins in a double stroller.

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