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Morning is bad. We have barely slept. I knew we would be punished for this and we are, we are a chorus of moans and groans as we drag ourselves up to start another day. It’s been raining on and off but any larger storms have not yet reached us. Nobody talks much as we travel down the coast and then splash our way through the tunnel to the vault. But it is a different kind of silence than the depressed trudging we have taken to lately: this is a silence that holds purpose. A great crack has opened in the concrete of the back wall and water is gushing from the schism. The decision is made for us: there will be no more futile patching, no more scrambling to remove water. We are surrendering this vault to the sea, and we are going to save as many packets of seeds as we can by ferrying them up to our lighthouse freezer. And maybe there are too many, and maybe there isn’t enough time, but we will just… keep going. We will run, for every second of the time we have left.

We speed like mad up the coast of Shearwater to our beach, where we pile the first load onto a pallet. The pallet is attached to the back of the quad bike and then dragged up to the lighthouse freezer. And then we run back down the hill for another load. It is grueling, and the rain is harder and more lashing than we’d like, but we keep on. The vault floor is underwater, the empty bottom shelf submerged. The pump does next to nothing. The crack gushes.

I have felt this kind of frenzied focus before.

But the end of all that effort came to nothing. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t save my home. We were forced to flee, Hank forced me to flee. And I saw, in my effort—and Hank’s lack of effort—a simple truth I did not want to acknowledge. He did not love our home like I loved it. Not even the garden we grew together. He did not love it like it was his body back up on the hill, burning.

We went to sleep that night on the ground of a crowded evacuation point, a showground filled with displaced people. We lay under a sky of falling ash, drifting and dreamy like snow. I imagined it falling to cover my body, to embalm me.

But tonight sleep comes easily, knowing the people around me care the same way I do, they care more, they are willing to fight.

The next morning, there is a throng of seabirds not far off the coastline. They dive and squawk and wheel through the air.

“There’ll be a big school of fish out there,” Raff tells me. He and I are in the front Zodiac, returning from the vault with our first load for the day. Fen is in the boat behind us, and following up at the rear are Dominic and Orly in the Frog.

The rain has paused, but the charcoal sky remains full and poised. I hear a clap of thunder off in the distance. Huge waves look white on the horizon.

“There’s rips all through here,” Raff tells me as he steers out of them. “Sea’s not happy today.”

The birds don’t seem it either; there is something tense about the sound of them, though they should be joyful at such a buffet. I can see the school shimmering at the surface of the water, a broiling pot.

And then for the second time in a short span, Raff and I round the rocks of the headland and come in toward our beach, and we see our two humpbacks. Only this time it’s not their tails arching gracefully out of the water or the sprays of their blowholes. It’s their bodies on the black sand.

Raff lets go of the throttle and the boat comes to a stop, lifted by the waves. He has gone bone white.

“What are you doing?” I ask over the crash of surf.

“They’re dead.”

“Maybe not.”

“Even if they’re not, we can’t refloat them.”

“Let’s at least investigate,” I say, though I know he’s right.

He steers the Zodiac onto the shore. The rest of his family have seen the whales now, they’re nearing the sand too. I don’t wait for them but run to the mother whale. She doesn’t seem as big as she did when she was falling on top of me; nonetheless she is a very large creature. The curve of her back is about as high as my head, her length many times mine. I can’t tell if she’s alive. There is no breathing happening, no movement. Raff goes to her closed eye, which is as big as a grapefruit. He very gently touches the eyelid, and it opens.

We both gasp. The whale’s eye swivels to us. “It’s okay,” I say, needing to comfort her.

A burst of air leaves her blowhole.

“Pull something over your nose and mouth,” Raff tells me. “They carry heaps of bacteria.”

Dominic, Fen, and Orly are joining us now and we all pull our neck gators or scarves over our faces. Dom moves past us to check on the baby, and his kids are following, but I find I can’t go over there, I can’t even look at it.

“It’s alive!” Orly shouts at me and I could dissolve with relief, although maybe this is worse because all it means is witnessing a slow death.

We convene a little way up the beach.

“What do we do?” Fen asks. “We have to keep them wet, I know that much.”

“Raff?”

“There’s no use,” he says.

“Mate,” Dom says softly, pulling his son’s gaze to him. “Let’s just talk it through, get it straight. What are the main concerns?”

Raff rubs his eyes, maybe searching his memory for what he knows about strandings.

“Their own weight is crushing them,” he says. “And they’re over heating. We have to stabilize them before we can think about trying to get them back into the water.”

“Good,” Dom says. “How do we do that?”

“Like Fen said, keep their skin wet and covered so it doesn’t get damaged by the sun.”

“Okay, so we’ll set up tarps,” Dom says calmly. “And we can cover them in wet sheets, and we’ll use buckets. What else.”

“I think we have to help their fins from getting fractured,” Raff says. “You dig holes for them.”

The mother whale’s fins do look at an awkward angle on the sand.

“When’s high tide?” I ask.

“It’s falling now,” Fen says, “lowest around four this arv, then it’ll be back in tonight around eleven.”

“That’s our timeline, then,” Dom says. “We’ll need high tide to get them out.”

But Orly is shaking his head. “What about the seeds?” he asks. “We’re not even close to finished.”

It is a disaster, there is no doubt about that. We don’t have enough bodies, enough hands.

“How do you eat an elephant?” Dom asks him.

“Dad!”

“How?”

Orly sighs. “One bite at a time. Okay—but we’re not forgetting about them.”

“We’re not,” his dad agrees.

The kids hurry into action but I take Dom’s arm and pull him aside.

“We shouldn’t do this,” I say.

“Do what?”

“We should take the kids away from this beach and put them back on the seeds. That might actually be achievable.”

Dom frowns, searching my face.

“This is not. This is cruel,” I say. “It will be backbreaking work for hours, purely to watch the animals die.”

Dom looks at the whales, and then his kids, considering my words. I will him silently to listen to me. To not put them through this. He meets my eyes. “You’re probably right,” he says. “But I think not trying would haunt them more.”

On the crest of the hill I look down at the creatures on the sand. They are close to the waterline; at high tide that water will come up and over them, but I don’t think it will be enough to wash them free. We are doing this, Dom has decided. So we may as well do it properly. My mind starts thinking about angles and equipment. I don’t think we have a crane at our disposal, but I definitely saw a tractor with a bucket attachment, so that will have to do. The baby will be easier to refloat but I don’t need Raff to tell me it won’t survive without its mother. I’m not sure she would survive either, without her baby. There is no point saving one without the other.

We have the weather on our side. There is no sun to harm the whales’ skin, and there is a light drizzle to help keep them wet and cool. We wet the sheets and blankets and drape them over the huge bodies, covering as much area as we can, and we move quickly to dig the holes for their fins, so they can lie comfortably. These holes we fill with seawater to help keep them cool, and then we are running up and down from the water with buckets.

I signal to Dom. “You and I will need to think about how to move them. We’ve got about eleven hours until high tide.”

“No crane,” he says.

“No, so it’s trenches, and that’s best done while tide’s low.”

We leave the kids to keep filling buckets while we jog over to the storage unit at the base. The tractor, as well as having a forklift, has a long-armed bucket excavator we can use in the sand. Dom fills the tractor with diesel. I drag things out of the way so it has a clear exit through the roller door, and he drives the old yellow vehicle onto the beach. The wheels are so enormous that they aren’t bothered by the seawater lapping at them; I am hoping like hell it doesn’t get bogged, and Dom manages to steer it up onto the sand and back over to the whales. He works the controls so the bucket takes huge mouthfuls of sand and dumps them to the side, slowly gouging the beginnings of a trench. I worry about the noise freaking the whales out.

I take the moment to remind the kids to have some water. Raff is running himself into the ground. Hours pass. Fen, who has taken to timing the whales’ breaths, says their breathing has slowed and become more regular. Hopefully this means they are less stressed. On a five-minute break somewhere in the afternoon, I move so I can see the mother’s right eye, trained always to rest on her calf where it lies beside her.

I look at this whale’s skin, all the scratches and barnacles I can recall so clearly in my mind. I place a flat hand on her body and I try to feel the beat of her heart.

“I washed up on this beach,” I tell her softly. “My body was brought here by the sea and lived. Yours will too.”

Her eyelid falls closed and in this moment she seems so weary. But it opens again and she looks at me, and I know why.

“What do you want me to tell it?” I ask her, but I already know.

I don’t want to go to the baby. I can’t bear the thought of it, have been trying to pretend it’s not even here. But I think this mother needs me to and I think I would do anything for her. So I walk over to this smaller whale and I place my hand gently on its head, near its open eye that is looking at me. “Little one,” I say softly. “You’re not alone.”

The tide is coming back in now. We still have a few hours until it’s at its highest, and Dom is making great progress. The trench for the adult whale is done—he has dug a long pathway as far into the water as he can move the tractor, and he is now working on the same kind of pathway for the baby.

Fen and I start getting a tarp beneath the smaller creature. We stand on either side and work the material slowly and carefully down into the sand, sliding it inch by inch under the weight of the huge body. It’s slow, difficult work, tiring on our hands and backs and necks, but soon it’s done. There’s no point trying to do the same for the mother—even if we could get one underneath her, she’s far too heavy for a tarp to make any difference. Instead we work on digging the trench up around her body.

All day I have been readying myself for this not to work. I think of how we will console the kids. But here is the nature of life. That we must love things with our whole selves, knowing they will die.

It’s raining hard when the tide reaches us, too soon. The ocean will need to do its work for the mother whale; there’s nothing more we can do for her now, so we set to dragging the baby out into the waves. I think it probably weighs about a ton. We aren’t making much difference. Too few bodies, one of them a child. Though he is straining as hard as the rest of us, using everything he has. I can see tears streaming down Raff’s cheeks and I don’t know if it’s the effort or the knowledge that this won’t work. The baby isn’t moving. But we keep pulling, all of us. I have spent many years working my body hard, but I have never asked it for this much, I have never demanded anything of the sort, and I think we will all, at least, know we left nothing behind. We gave it everything. We tried for them. And as we pull and pull and pull, with waves smashing into us and Dom pulling the greatest load of all, I start to feel a little give. As the water flows over the smaller body, as it sucks powerfully back out and we drag in time with it, the tarp moves. Water gets in under it and with every wave the baby whale is lifted a touch more, is inched farther out until finally the water is deep enough that the creature can float. We see its fins lift, we see its small knobby dorsal, we see its body move from side to side, finding its balance, and then we see it start to swim, and we are all of us cheering, our throats raw, our bodies spent.

As one we turn to the mother, who has not moved.