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Everyone refused to face reality here, I thought.

May suddenly began to tug my hand hard and gesture toward the beach.

"What is it, May?" I put my hand over my eyes and gazed. "Cary? Why are those people gathering down there?"

"Where?" He looked. "Oh no, not again," he said, and started over the sand.

"What is it?" We hurried to keep up with him. A thousand yards or so away, a number of people circled something big and dark on the beach. "Cary?"

"It's a beached sperm whale," he called back. He broke into a trot. May and I tried to keep up.

Nearly two dozen people had already reached the pathetic creature. It was at least fifty feet long. It lay on its side, its one visible eye open, bulging. It was gigantic and powerful looking, but right now it was helpless, dying. Most of the people, tourists, who had come to see it were timid and remained a dozen feet or so away, but some young teenagers

demonstrated their bravado by rushing to it and slapping their hands on its body. Cary drew closer, keeping far enough back to prevent his shiny good shoes from getting wet. I drew closer with May.

"What happened?"

"It beached itself," he said.

"Why?"

"Lots of theories about that. Some think they become ill and seem to know that coming to shore or beaching will help them die."

"Does it look sick?"

"I don't know."

"What other reason might the whale have for doing this?" I asked.

"Whales have a built-in sonar system with which they navigate deep water. Sometimes, when they're in water only one hundred or two hundred feet deep, it disturbs the sonar and the whales get echoes and become con-fused, so they end up beached."

"What's going to happen? Can't it swim away with the tide?" I asked.

"The problem is when they reach land like this, the weight of their bodies is so great it crushes their lungs or hampers their breathing so much they become over-heated and die. It looks as if that's what's happened here."

"Oh Cary, isn't there anything we can do?"

"You think you can push that back out to sea?" he said. "And even if you get him back into the water, he'd probably wash up again down shore. Anybody send for the Coast Guard?" he asked the crowd.

"Somebody said something about that," a tall man replied.

"If they come, they might try to do something. If they don't show up soon. ."

"What?"

He gazed around. The kids were still

tormenting the whale, slapping it, going up and gazing into its eye, one threatening to poke the eye out with a stick he had found on the sand.

"Stop it!" I screamed.

They paused for a moment, saw it was only me, and continued their pranks.

"That's not so bad," Cary said. "People sometimes come down at night and start to cut off pieces while the whales are still alive," he explained angrily.

"Oh no, Cary."

We heard a car horn and looked back. Uncle Jacob and Aunt Sara had pulled down the road and were gesturing. "We've got to go," he said.