"Welcome to the Tide, yearlings."

A clangor of unbroken squeaks came in answer.

"I imagine most of you have doting cows who've already done the dirty work of explaining the purpose of our little foray into the shallows-I was a calf once myself, believe it or don't-so I'll keep my opening remarks concise."

Three downward thrusts of his tremendous fluke and Brutus arrived at the head of a makeshift pod twenty-eight juveniles strong.

"Simply put, here you will learn the tricks of our trade. You will familiarize yourself with the minutia of marine dominance, you will internalize the processes of predation, you will summit the mountain of tactical knowledge willed to you by a thousand pods for a thousand generations. That's why they call us apex, yearlings."

Brutus waited for the runt of the pod to return from the surface, her lungs lacking the volume to sustain her through his monologue, however purportedly brief.

"Here at the Tide, you will earn the name Killer Whale."

Some of the yearlings fell victim to an illusion designed for muddying the senses of adversary and prey, mistaking the instructor's oblong white patch for an eye, or a cloud of sediment, or some glint of sunlight which seemed entirely incapable of malice even as it swooped in from above. It was only as he strafed the audience at a distance of inches, examining all its members personally, that the genuine eye tucked beneath the diversion could be appreciated for all its scrutiny and all its criticism.

"Mine is a demanding role but a critical one, and I can only be as effective in it as you are in yours. So listen well and remember always. But first, surface, please, for a sip of air as full as you can manage and only descend with bloated bellies and open minds."

Brutus was content to see that that was indeed their state when the last of the yearlings returned.

"There is one matter to be addressed here that your parents, as mine, were compelled, as a matter of generational precedent, to forego explaining to the lot of you. Though it is true to say that our command of all this planet's saline ecosystems can best be attributed to our intelligence, and then to our capacity to propagate knowledge across time, it is equally fair to imagine that our physiology, in its own right, may well have been more than enough to achieve that status. What I mean to say is that-intellectually outfitted with nothing but the crudest instinct, an orca might still expect to live sixty years and gorge on as many tons of blubber. If you'd like an example, look at the gill-breathers."

Several juveniles screeched-orca laughter. It was no sin for their parents to radicalize them against the sharks, an element of culture that involved trading jokes at the so-named and much maligned gill-breathers' expense. Brutus allowed the laughter to meet its natural end, but there was no inflection of humor to be filtered from the clicks and pulses with which he succeeded it.

"Here you will learn to hunt with your minds, that is true. But surfing for seals or triggering tonic immobility in gill-breathers is not why you are here. You are here on the pretext of a single word-a dirty word, once. You are here to learn appeasement."

Brutus swung his snout in the direction of shore. Foam roiled thirty yards ahead, a physical manifestation of the terrestrial world's eternal handshake with the aquatic.

"Follow."

Tentatively, the juveniles did as they were told. Many knew to expect forced acts of bravery as part and parcel of their month at the Tide, but few knew they would be tested so soon. The first test revealed itself then when Brutus, all twenty five feet of muscle, blubber, and wisdom, partially beached himself on the bank. From that moment on, the behemoth would have to wait for the summit of waves to pass over his head to speak.

"Follow!"

At various speeds and to disparate degrees, the yearlings shimmied up the incline of sand. Air breathers, none were in any danger of suffocation. That fundamental reality did nothing to assuage a stirring panic induced by the marine equivalent of claustrophobia.

"Very good, yearlings. Do not worry yourselves beyond what is necessary --", an intermission in the waves, "-- I will not let you dry out. I've done this a time ----- or two."

Some were comforted, others deaf to anything but the peculiar sound of their neighbors' voices outside the fluid medium.

"The Tide, this bay, is fed year-round by sediment rich ----- waters flowing from far inland. Inland meaning beyond the waters edge. The sediments ----- facilitate enormous blooms of little organisms. Those organisms are the foundation of a hierarchy of life that gathers in abundance ----- here. Once, we sat atop that hierarchy. One day our replacement came. They came for the ----- abundance. And they came from inland."

A runt in scale alone, the little female could claim to have had more exposure to fear during her short life than any other juvenile present. Where her peers outweighed her by every physical measure, she was unique in having developed a curiosity to outweigh her apprehension.

"How could they have come from ---- inland, Mr. Brutus? Wouldn't they get stuck?"

His eye gravitated toward hers, pinpointing it between the crests of successive waves.

"They never get stuck."

"What are they?"

"They are the apex of the terrestrial world, and ours if and when ----- they fancy it."

"What is ----- appeasement?"

Impressed with the diminutive calf's fearlessness but committed above all to communicating his message, Brutus took exceptional care in timing his response. The great bull, sand for his podium and intermittent surges of sea his microphone, spoke with incontestable clarity for the sake of every yearling, and for a future that would be theirs to nurture.

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"Do you see those marks on the ----- sky? Far inland, like great pillars of rock or chutes of coral rising from the sea bed?"

"I see them, Brutus. Are those appeasements?"

"No, little calf. Those are structures, you see, bits of the ----- world constructed, put together, by the inlanders. You can't know it from here, but some are of a height ----- that you wouldn't be able to swim so deep until your third year ----- at least."

"So it is like coral! Are the inlanders ----- like the funny little polyps my brothers told ----- me about?"

"In a way. In other ways they are like the sharks. In more ways ----- they are like us."

The runt shied away from that sentiment.

"How can something be like the sharks ----- and like us?"

"That, little calf, is an excellent question."

*****

To the great relief of all in attendance, Brutus ordered a retreat from the sand. Three times longer and immeasurably heavier than the most developed calf, the bull had grace enough to help maneuver several of his students off the slope. Scraped bellies aside, a sonic chorus of joviality accompanied Brutus through a twenty-foot berth of freedom in the direction of their next lesson.

That lesson was a silhouette, nestled on a ridge fifty feet below the silty precipice of a continent.

"Surface again, yearlings, for as long as you need. I know some of you don't have experience at depths beyond fifty feet-but remember, you're here to learn."

Brutus, humbled but practical, followed them up with a mind to top off his own oxygen supply. Throughout his more vital years, he'd embarked on dives five times that depth at least. At first it had been competition with his siblings and peers that made the underbelly of the sea so alluring. Soon he'd left them all behind; his competition reduced to sperm whales and sunlight. Where the sperm whales remained in a league all their own, by adulthood Brutus could proudly proclaim to have conquered the sun itself.

Now, leveling out at seventy feet and positioned at the head of a small armada of sheepish calves, he could only aspire to conquer the arthritis in his tail. He was still inwardly polishing the details of his lecture when the calf whose lungs would most probably govern its duration took the initiative for herself.

"Is that it, Mr. Brutus? Is that the appeasement?"

The runt dove an extra three feet for a clear path to her instructor's side. Unobstructed by the mass of yearlings, she had a clearer view of the wreck, and so a murkier understanding.

"No, yearling. It is the justification."

Like a woolly squirrel on a convenient breeze, Brutus caught the current with his pectoral fins and sailed from the path of his temporary brood. Sunlight did not tire with age so quickly as the bull, and with a youthful exuberance the rays descended to make sparkles of the ship. Soon all the metal would rust over, evidenced by the pestilence of jagged red already come to lay claim to swaths of deck, and then it was sure even the light would lose interest altogether.

"This is a ship, another object constructed, put together, by the inlanders. You may well have seen similar structures-like moving ice on the surface that whispers as it goes and leave trails of froth and bubbles. You may well have asked your cows and your bulls about the ice, and about the whispers, and I hope they told a story that brought you comfort. Whatever that story, be it pleasant or not, the truth is more absurd, and less pleasant, but pleasant lies belong in adolescence and absurd truths always present themselves with age."

A fat young male, discontent with Brutus' developing bond with the wide-eyed runt, chirped his input.

"I have seen one, and they do whisper! Mum says they are little islands. She said great birds live on top, much too big to fly, and so they spin their tails along the surface to push their islands around. She says they're whispering to the fish, saying nice things, making promises, teasing them up to the surface. Fish aren't smart like we are, you see, and when they follow the whispers they get gulped right up."

Chatter among his neighbors imbued some measure of indignation into the male who had presented the argument. Brutus recognized that indignation intrinsically, and well knew the danger of deluding ones' self in its name.

"Do you see any big bird down here, yearling?"

"No-he probably swam to another island when his began to sink. What good is a sinking island?"

"Do you see any trees? Or sand? Or hermit crabs or coconuts?"

"No, Mr. Brutus."

"And there is a good reason for it, yearling. That is no island. There is no giant bird, and your mother was only doing you a kindness. This is a ship. The whispers you hear are the sound of metal, very sharp rocks, dicing the surface with speed enough to slice your beak clean off your face. Inside a ship like that there are no birds, there are inlanders, there is man. When he wants fish, he needn't bother whispering. And he is smarter than you are, yearling."

The discomfort generated by Brutus' tone and his harsh truth was compounded by the universal want for air. Several of the calves had already begun to fidget, and all eyes were cast lustfully upward.

"Forget the air until you've heard what I have to say, or you can expect to fear the surface forever. Appeasement, pacification, diplomacy, caution, weakness. Whatever you call it, appeasement is our policy. Know too, yearlings, that it was not always our policy. The inlanders could not swim so deftly, once. They could not make deep dives or see as we see, sense as we sense. A single inlander, a lone man, does not weigh what your dorsal fin weighs. His teeth are dull and his lungs are small and his fins are narrow and unsubstantial. To us, in those ways, he is like a slug. But with time he developed a shell no tooth can crack, and venom no time can dilute. He has forged a prosthetic shell to match us in speed, depth, and lethality here, this hostile deep we considered ours alone to govern. And he needs no prosthetic for his mind."

Most of the yearlings had begun to ascend in subtle, vertical lurches. They were as a caged crocodile set free, lingering on the mudbank with a mind for one last parting nibble at the pig carcass that first had enticed him in.

"If one of you surfaces early, we will all come back and do it again. Endure the pain now, and fixate yourselves on this metal inlander shell, and learn to associate the two while you've got the chance. Appeasement is this. Pain and humiliation for the sake of our very existence. When you see their ships, their floating islands, steer well clear. If they insist upon approaching you, take great care not to crush them with your weight. Make no hostile move toward them. Appeasement has graced us with a valuable reputation among mankind-no man has ever been killed by an orca in the wild-and they have rewarded us for that tenderness.

"They attribute our restraint to intelligence; to recognition. They are correct in it. But they can only arrive at those conclusions-those attributions which insulate us from becoming entangled in the tendrils of their superiority, after a certain measure of familiarity. It is that demand for familiarity that necessitates the final tenet of appeasement."

Sediment engrossed the hull of the ship that served as Brutus' backdrop as he watched the yearlings ascend despite him. Only the runt remained, the desire to breathe compressed to a triviality beneath the desire to know. Brutus regarded her curiously and proudly, forgetting, for a moment, the rusted crane laid across the stern of the wreck, the skeleton shaped like his tangled hopelessly in the canvas that once dangled from it, and the pain in his tail. He spoke for the benefit of the entire pod, but the runt would hear him clearest.

"Every ten years or so, a brave member of our species strands herself on a beach where man will be sure to notice her. And, one day soon, she's gone. No sharks, no bones, no death; just plucked from the sea like a scale off a fish's back. Whatever they do with her, wherever they take her, we can only guess. That is why we must learn bravery here at the Tide. That is the nature of appeasement."

Brutus flicked his fluke once, setting off on a leisure race with his own bubbles; perhaps the only competition still worth the effort. The runt lingered for a parting glance, and her instructor's message bounced back at her from the rusted skeleton of the island that once floated. A whisper of truth, and not a pleasant one.

"Appeasement, yearling, means sacrifice."