Fire!!!
If I kept up with these underwater breath holding contests I was going to get lungs of steel!
It felt like it had been ten minutes instead of the two my watch's luminescent dial recorded to have passed by. Thirty seconds later the whales stopped just below the surface of the water, as we all felt the rhythmic action of the waves.
I glanced at Keturah and she nodded. This was as far as the whales would take us.
Glancing down to the sea floor I could see that they had taken us in pretty far. There was no more than ten to fifteen feet of water below us.
I let go of Dimbo's tusk and floated up to the surface with Keturah. Thirty some others floated away from their whales and up to the surface with us.
I felt the swish of the underwater movements that signaled that the whales were leaving without ever having surfaced except that is for Dimbo, who still waited below for Keturah. We were about three hundred feet out from the beach. Treading water I glanced at Keturah and was taken aback momentarily by the raw emotion being expressed on her face.
"Hey! It's alright!" I exclaimed trying to calm her.
She latched on to me with one hand desperately and said, "Please come back to me!"
"I will!" I said in firm response to ease her fears.
I really didn't have the authority to either know, much less claim that I would return, but above all I wanted to allay her fears at all costs.
She surged out of the water briefly to give me a salty kiss, a kiss that didn't last nearly long enough before she let go and sank beneath the waves to her trusted whale companion. Dimbo would take her back out to where the entire fleet of the Whale People were congregated together in the fog bank waiting for the signal.
The swim to shore went quickly and like some special forces team we slid out of the surf and sprinted across the beach to the cover of the forest. We paused just back from the forest's edge to catch our breath. Once done I motioned to a man, who had been a slave up until a year ago, when he had escaped, to take the lead.
Three of the thirty of us were as black as I was. The rest of them verged from brown cream to white, but we all appeared black as the whiter ones had been rubbed down with a black tar resin.
We were on a mission to save a people who were oppressed. Color had nothing to do with it.