Off the coast of Faroe

AUTHOR'S NOTE: The story below is a figment of my imagination based on the news about the dolphin slayings in the Faroe Island area.

My life is the sea. I revel in it, I love it in all its moods. I love how it feels on my skin. When I ripple through the water, I love the rush, the friction, felt only ever so slightly against my skin, especially when I am going fast. It feels good then, the water rippling off my back, it feels like the caress of a hundred feathers, like how humans feel I suppose, when they run fast slicing through the air.

Hi, I am Xenius. I am an only kid and mom and dad sometimes joke that I am their Nemo. But of course, I was born much before the movie was made and my name is Xenius.

Our kind, the Calderon Dolphins (we are also called the long-finned pilot whales. Isn't that funny, I suppose we can be called whales and I suppose we have long fins, although I would like mine to be as strong as next door Toby's, but why are we called pilots? I have seen aeroplanes sometimes flying across the ocean, they look like huge scary birds, scarier than the eagles and the sea gulls and stuff. Pilots are human beings, we look nothing like them. Humans are funny that way, a lot of the time what they say does not make any sense) are a very friendly lot, we love to have fun and we live in huge noisy communities. Our little settlement is called the Creaky Rock and around twenty of us live here. The place has a Faroese name too but it is too weird and I and the other kids prefer to call it Creaky Rock. Old Ma Boman, the scary Matriarch of Creaky Rock, insists on us learning Faroese because she says, we might be creatures of the ocean but we are as good Faroese as any of the islanders. Personally, I prefer English. Though I can't really tell old Ma Boman that. She can smack very hard with her fins and she forcibly makes me wash my fins every time. I think even her son Uncle Bo and his wife Mrs. Bo live in terror of her. But I must say, Old Ma Boman might be a right cranky fish but she is not that bad and she does make the tastiest squid in FIVE settlements. Next to Creaky Rock, I love to visit Monty's Place. That is another settlement a little way off and Jana lives there. Jana is this total babe, she is very pretty and has the most graceful dive I know. My best friend Lance thinks she is a show off. Maybe she is, but she is so pretty. She is jet black not like my unattractive gray and has a smile a mile wide. The only person who seems to have any inkling of my crush is next door Toby's wife, Mrs. Toby. She is the nosiest fish I know and always pokes her nose in other people's lives. SOMEHOW next door Toby loves her very much. Well, each to his own I suppose.

Anyway, I have rambled on and on about a lot of things I never meant to babble out in the first place. *Stupid Xenius* If any of you ever tell anyone about my crush on Jana, I shall call you out for a sea duel.

We live off the coast of the Faroe islands near Denmark, we are supposed to be an autonomous province (aren't the words very long and funny, I learnt them recently). I don't know if it means if we are a country or not, but I don't think so, even though we have a flag and everything. I try to be intelligent like my dad but sometimes it so boring that I don't pay any attention in school. Focus Xenius. Anyway, why am I writing today? Why did I write all this? By now, you would have gotten a pretty good idea what our lives are like. We don't even migrate anywhere in the winter. Our lives ARE Faroe.

I love my life. I have everything I want right here with me and Jana just across the way. Some day I will ask her to marry me. But there are some things in our lives that confuse me. Like the islanders' tradition of whaling and hacking nearly a thousand of our kind every year. The frigid gray of the ocean turns a mucky sinister red and all day long, we who hide under rocks and crevices have to hear the cries of the ones who get caught and killed. At times like these I feel helpless and full of rage. On whaling days, we have to leave our homes and flee, hoping and praying that none we know get caught. And it is with our hearts in our mouths, that we watch Old Ma Boman take a head count when we get back to Creaky Rock. None of us have been harmed so far luckily but dad's friend from Monty's Place, Jana's uncle got killed last year. It terrified me as it was the first time, it was happening to someone I knew personally.

Once the whaling is over, we get back to Creaky Rock and resume our lives. We work, study, play, earn money, eat and have fun. But of late it is becoming difficult for me to accept it. There was a whaling expedition by the islanders last week and mom's friend from another settlement a little far from here got caught. Mom and dad have traveled there to be with their families and I have been left at Old Ma Boman's. I hate it. I miss mom and dad and the Nemo stories and I feel like crying. I wish I had a friend like Flounder or even Lance with me, but Lance is sick and cannot leave his house.

There are all these questions in me and the only one here to answer them are Old Ma Boman. I told her about how angry I feel because of the whaling. She gave me a sad smile and said something about it being the circle of life. I know it is a song from the Lion King, but as far as I know, there is nothing about whaling or a thousand dolphins dying in there. Old Ma Boman explains that it is not so. She says life is what it is. Survival of the fittest. She says what the islanders are doing to us, we do to the squids and other fishes. She says all living beings around the world do it and that we cannot begin to question one as we would have to question everything else and thus disrupt the order of life as we have known it so far. I have jotted down what Old Ma Boman said to me so that I might read it and understand but I am angry. Do squids feel this bad? Should I start eating weeds? But I love squid, yet I don't want them to die. I don't want to do to them what the islanders are doing to us. Old Ma Boman is right. Maybe I shouldn't question it. Maybe I should just accept things as they are and be thankful for living another beautiful day in this beautiful ocean. I am thrilled to be Faroese and I love this place, yet what do I do with all these thoughts? Maybe I don't know anything. I am just a stupid young dolphin. But I wonder? Does any one ever hunt the islanders and eat them? I must find out.