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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 rhythlanced 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 o 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 underwaterwithout ever having surfaced except that is for Dimbo, who still waited below for Keturah We were about three hundred feet out frolanced at Keturah and was taken abackexpressed on her face

"Hey! It's alright!" I exclai 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 h 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 froe to catch our breath Once done I o, when he had escaped, to take the lead

Three of the thirty of us were as black as I was The rest of theed from brown cream to white, but we all appeared black as the whiter ones had been rubbed doith a black tar resin

We were on ato do with it