Wrenched + short story

More backstory art for Gunnar, whom wasn't taken from Iceland in the most professional or stress-free manner.

Might write a short story of this at a later date.



EDIT: short story now included

EDIT: Pt. 2 can be found here: fav.me/d6dkrvf

"At the time of her demise, six-year-old Gunnar didn't think there was anything else that could possibly trump the pain of losing his mother. He knew she had held to life as well as she could, for as long as she could. In a way, he suspected, watching her spirit endure even as her physical body wasted away, beset by an illness neither them nor the tentative cousins they traveled with could combat, had made the experience all the more agonizing. They seldom moved more than a few miles a day during those drawn-out weeks. Hunting was out of the question, though their erstwhile relatives tried to feed them as best they could manage. Though his own weight was decreasing, a side effect of staying so glued to her side, Gunnar couldn't bring himself to leave her for more than minutes at a time. Eating was the farthest thing from his mind. They hugged the shallow waters close to shore, weathering what squalls blew in sheltered coves.

She finally expired one morning, long before the sun came up. It was several hours time before the morning lit and confirmed for Gunnar's eyes what his ears already told him. To see her emaciated body floating so lifelessly at the surface, he found he couldn't cry, for what more would that do - only stare. The emotional torment of loitering so long at her proverbial bedside ultimately culminated in a disbelieving sense of numbness. It was simply impossible. How could she be gone, just like that?

He paid his relatives little heed. Returning from a nightly forage, their grief was more evident, as they vocalized mournfully and took turns nudging and nuzzling their departed cousin's form. Gunnar still stuck close to her side, ignoring them, but also trying to ignore how the ever-present warmth of her body - given several hours to dissipate - was all but gone. Of them all, she was his closest link to the group. There were no grandmothers or aunts for him to latch onto here. There were only bulls of varying ages, none as young as him, whose own mothers and sisters were long gone. Within hours, those four gave up on encouraging the shell shocked youngster to follow them out to sea, and left as swiftly as his mother had that morning.

Finally, some twenty-four hours after the fact, Gunnar managed to pry his mind and body away from fawning over his mother's withered corpse. He finally wrenched his attention from her to a passing fish, which he fruitlessly chased in an effort to flee from the morbid scene. Even as he lost sight of his newfound prey, he kept swimming east, with the shore on his left, without looking back. He was truly emotionally spent now. Any more glances would only prolong his suffering, and he knew without being told that his mother, even in her worst hours, wouldn't have wanted him to perish along with her.

His long-term goals were simple. There were neighboring pods who also traversed these waters. Perhaps he could find one of them. Maybe reconnect with his wayward cousins at a later time.

But in the meantime, he needed food first.

Heartsick as he was, he took the easiest choice he could think of: to live on small fry. Herring fishermen always had strays escape their nets. Catching those stragglers as they fled their schools was the only tactic he could achieve some success with. To some degree, it worked, eliminating the chance he would starve to death, and he gradually loss at nervousness he had ever had around the noisy, smoke-belching monstrosities the humans called boats. He quickly came to recognize two to three of the local vessels by their colors and the way their engines sounded.

As with his relatives, he paid little mind to what distress his presence caused the fishermen. Sometimes, when he surfaced close to study them, they pointed and chattered among themselves. Gunnar didn't see what trouble his company could be viewed as. They were both after the same thing: survival. So long as he stayed out of the nets and let the humans take their greater share of fish, he figured the arrangement was fair and workable.

Complications only arose on those days when loneliness finally got the better of him, and he swam closer than ever before, trying to find some form of companionship and amusement to stave off woe of his situation a little longer. He pulled on stray lines, pushed bouys around, took captured fish and tried to toss them into the net before its top closed. Anything that was novel was worth a try, and none of the humans seemed to openly loathe his antics. Some even made their strange guffawing sounds of laughter when he spyhopped and whistled in an attempt to inspire some kind of misplaced communication.

During those times, Gunnar kept his distance from the shore and the painful memories it typically stirred in him. He came to mentally map out of the favored headings of 'his' chosen boats, and spent the hours in between playing with anything from seabirds to floating driftwood. Never did he think following the fishermen all the way back into the fjords was a venture worth taking. Only once, when the weather turned decidedly foul that evening, did the youngster find shelter under a boat's hull and dog her the full length of her journey home. Finally out of the wind, as he surfaced amid the salt-encrusted pilings of a dock, he decided then and there that the humans and their boats were his ticket to an easy existence.

Still logging in the miserable wake of losing his mother, it sounded like paradise found. Going alone and trying to vainly reconnect with a passing pod became the furthest plan from his mind.

It was also around that time Gunnar's dynamic with the humans began to change significantly. While his company at sea was tolerated and evidently somewhat enjoyable, lingering here among the more congested boat traffic didn't seem so carefree. He found himself dodging small watercraft and their sharp propellers on a daily basis, taking cover under the larger docks, scratching himself against anchor lines. But the spills of offloaded fish, those not good enough for the humans to take onto land with them, were worth the risk, and brought his weight back up to almost normal.

Humans besides the raingear-clad fishermen also seemed endeared to him. What started as a few stray schoolchildren soon became small crowds at a time, to which he would jump and vocalize with no reservation whatsoever. He drew the line where those few who dared try enter the water with him usually received a disapproving splash to the face for their trouble, and he would race away, well out of their swimming range. He would not expose himself to that close of contact.

Yet. Eventually, four months of this ticked by. Gunnar was happy enough, getting his easy meals and showing the adoring public his attention where possible. The company of other orcas, among which he had lived and thrived on for the first six years of his life, had been everything if not transplanted.

He still spent time at sea. Eventually, boats different from the craggy silhouettes of the fishermens' appeared. Their humans wore different clothes, plush and brightly colored. They pointed and chattered when he swam close, too. Stranger still, they pointed at him with little black, handheld devices that made loud clicking sounds. To the best of his ability, Gunnar spyhopped and clicked back, excited. It was a noise as close to his own vocalizations as any of the humans had yet imparted on him. But to his disappointment, they reacted differently, skirting backwards and waving with angry motions of their hands when he did that.

Left behind in the prop wash of their hastily-departing boats, Gunnar felt his first pricklings of unease, and spent the next few days in solitude, pondering the implications. The fishermen didn't wave him off when he took their bycatch. The 'clicking' humans did when all he had done was try to imitate them. What did that signify?

Nevertheless, he stuck to his adopted plan. The fish were still plentiful, and the local crowds still came. Only in the latter weeks of the fourth month did he belatedly note how those crowds ominously became fewer and fewer. And one cloudy and foreboding afternoon, he finally cursed himself for turning a blind eye to what that meant.

One of his boats had just made its routine offload. He had watched as the lines were cast off and followed dutifully as she chugged slowly away from the dock. Moving in the southeastward direction of the fjord's mouth, as they had done together so many times before, the routine sounds and sights were dramatically interrupted by the revving of a small outboard motor. Gunnar slowed and spyhopped in alarm, catching sight of the little steel-hulled craft speeding right toward him. Sucking in a deep breath, he dove to take shelter under his fishing boat.

Loud clacks sounded when he drew too close. Surfacing again, blowing a flustered, misty breath, he caught a glimpse of a small splash, the origin point of a small, concentrated stream of white as a bullet pierced the water in front of his face. Crying out, he veered away. That was as strange a sign as he needed to know his fishing boat wasn't an option for cover here.

He bolted for the fjord's western shore. It was shallow there, and most boats could not follow him there. The smaller launch followed him, though, and was soon joined by two more wooden-hulled boats. Before he realized it, Gunnar had effectively boxed himself in against a steep, volcanic wall. Two walls of net were drawn from the sterns of each boat, cutting off his escape, while the two grim-faced humans commanding the launch circled him tightly. Eventually, Gunnar's panicked cries quieted to clicking whimpers, and he milled around the surface, uneasy. It was just as what he felt when his mother passed - no amount of crying would make her come back, anymore than it would dissuade his 'attackers' from calling off their hunt.

Gradually, the two wooden boats maneuvered closer. The launch took a position between their bows. Gunnar kept his back to the nets, staring around wildly. He spotted a few familiar faces watching from the decks of the wooden boats, and felt a vague sense of betrayal. Wailing, he lashed at the water with his flukes, turning a tight circle to strain against the nets and try to push his way through them. Confinement was the last thing he would have expected them to subject him to.

Lassos were also a foreign concept. Never had he experienced anything like a tightening sensation around his limbs. One was looped and cinched up at the base of his left pectoral fin. Eventually, as thrashing to free himself tired him, he felt another drift over and pull tight around his peduncle. Both combined pulled him, still kicking and twisting, to one of the boat's barnacle-flecked flanks.

From either side, black-wetsuit-skinned humans dropped into the water around him. He froze in alarm as he felt the first touches of their multi-digited hands on his skin, tense as they pressed in around him, stroking and speaking nonsensical words, among themselves and (seemingly) to him. Held by their arms and the ropes, Gunnar only put up a final, hapless struggle, quivering in dismay, peering morosely through the tangle of limbs and nets at the dark, empty waters beyond the nets. He barely took note of the sling that was eased into the water at their side.

He remembered, vaguely, back to the first little signs his mother had shown of illness, he hadn't worried, either. It was many weeks before her dwindling energy finally wrenched her away from him. Nor hadn't he thought to worry about the little changes in the humans' behavior. So many weeks of giving himself over to the humans and not troubling himself with the consequences had finally wrenched away something he had counted just as preciously as he had her, and the last thing he had expected to lose: his freedom."