We speak a long time about spirits, the sea turtle spirits that ride in like the turtles are their kuda, their horses, onto the beach while the turtles lay. And how they kacau you, pushing people into holes, pinching you poking you. Or maybe these are discussions we had at another time, because we meet again in Kuching a week later. The whale story perhaps isn’t about spirits surely, or about revealing a super-natural aspect, nor about a story of shipwreck or anything else. At least some of these subjects are openly told. A personal story then, but there have been plenty of those too. Surely someone will talk about the whale. But is it important? Or is the refusal an indication there there is something more important? What is it I am aiming to do? At the very least, understand the area and what nature is in this context. Nature has already broken itself down but lets hang onto the obvious: we have a forest, a broken forest, we have this community, we have people that go to sea, we have tourists that come in, we have a national park, we have a recent history of extraction and conflict. We have gibbons and pigs and hunters and crocodiles and turtles. We have everything that A has told me about M with some admiration, these many stories that go unspoken and that I don’t need to write about here. In these denials who is being protected, and who needs it? Is the fleshy cetacean whale more significant than M’s absent story about the whale? M isn’t, at least openly, demanding continuity of whales, though I don’t press him on this.