anbanindex144024501154

A whale surfaces. Exhales. Foul air spumes thirty feet high. The droplets fall, winking with sunlight beneath the blue sky. The whale draws a fresh breath. It flows crisp and cool into his lungs before he slides back beneath the waves. He doesn’t dive, just lets himself slowly sink, using his flippers and fluke only for balance. This whale is old, tired. He hasn’t eaten in a while. He wants to rest. No other whales are around. He’d been swimming with a small pod but had fallen behind. That doesn’t seem to matter. The water is a clear and diffuse yellow here just beneath the surface. It glows warm from the sun and the whale wants to hang onto that warmth. But the effort required to do so is tremendous. He sinks a little further, his flippers stroking fitfully at the water. Yellow light turns green, then turquoise. The water cools a little. It’s like a vast liquid gem, flawed with bubbles and whorls of current. There are no fish, no krill. He is at the center of the turbulence. Then the ...

I read everything I could get my hands on as a kid, but my top three favorite genres were Science Fiction/Fantasy, Westerns, and Animal stories. My very first “favorite” book, which I read over and over and over, was Pagoo, by Holling Clancy Holling. There are no people in this tale; it’s the story of a Hermit Crab in search of a new shell. Most of the time, there were no, or very few, people in Jim Kjelgaard’s stories. Desert Dog was a well loved book for me. It tells the tale of a Greyhound abandoned in the desert who has to learn to survive. And then there was Kalak on the Ice, a story of a mother polar bear and her cubs. There were people in Walter Farley’s Black Stallion books, but the focus for me was always on the horse. And Farley also did the Island Stallion books, in the first of which we get to know the Island Stallion living on his own, with no people around. Of course, there was Call of the Wild and White Fang by Jack London, which I also loved. But I didn’t stop reading a...