Why Do We Save Whales? by Olgerd Volker

Why do we save whales?

Why do we have to drag their bodies back into the sea, if most of them die anyway? Most of us will die anyway, and there are not many of us left, so why care about those creatures, who seem to willingly throw themselves on the beach every now and then?

Nobody seems to know the answer. My father only says it's what his father did. But that's not enough for me. There must be a reason. What if they want to be stranded? The whales are mammals after all; they used to live on land once.

"As for me," my grandpa says, "it's more about why they went to the sea in the first place."

"So what do you suggest?" My mum is furious. "You think we should just smell their rot and wait until their bodies explode?"

The thought of whales' bodies exploding for no reason sound ridiculous to me. "Has anyone seen them explode?", I ask.

"Well, let's leave their bodies on the beach and find out! Contemplating hundreds of massive corpses every day will certainly help!"

"There are thousands of them in the water", I object, but there's no one to hear me.

I already have an answer, to be honest. More like an idea, actually. I need to prove it. And if nobody can help me with it, I must find the answer myself.

I go to the beach and undress. Grandpa says the sea is to cold for humans to swim, but I never had anywhere else to swim. Grandpa came from the old world with warm, small seas he calls "lakes" and long and narrow ones he calls "rivers". Here we have only the sea.

I climb the old metal rock, long and round, in which Grandpa once came here. He calls it "sabmarin" — I suppose my mum, whose name is "Sabine", was named after it. He also proudly describes it as a "nuclear one", but I don't know what it means. I only know now it's all rusty. It seems everything people do ends up in rust.

So I jump from the rock deep into the water. My father doesn't like me swimming. He says I'll grow myself a pair of gills if I don't quit doing it. But I feel I must.

I swim as far from the shore as I can. I know it's too cold, and I know the current drags me into the ocean. I know there's no coming back. Unless the whales. Unless they save us just as we save them.

I feel them moving in the water. I even see one of their fins above it. But nothing happens. After making a few more circles around me, they go away. Thay're not humans after all.

As the shore disappears from my sight, I finally know why we save whales.