Call of the Whales (11 page)

21

Hunting the Narwhal

W
e waited for Leon the next day, but he never arrived. Dad was disappointed, but he put a brave face on it. He said maybe it had something to do with the weather conditions, and that Leon would probably come the following day. But he didn’t. Nor the next day. By the end of a week, I’d given up on old Leon. Dad was tense – I could see he thought the whole expedition had been a bit of a failure – and in the end, he gave up on him too.

‘We’ll go soon,’ he said, noticing my restlessness. ‘Next week. Or maybe the week after.’ He sounded sort of wistful, like a child trying to negotiate a later bedtime, but not expecting to have much luck.

I didn’t say anything. It really was time to be thinking about getting home. The nights were drawing in, and the temperature was already starting to drop sharply at sunset. I had to get back to school, and besides, I missed Mum and the twins.

‘Leon leave a message for you, Mr Jim,’ Bebe said one morning, about the time we were thinking of leaving. Bebe was the woman who ran our hotel. It tickled Dad no
end the way she called him ‘Mr Jim’.

‘Leon?’ Dad’s eyes lit up. ‘What did he say?’

‘He say to tell you, they all goin’ to the narwhal hunt over to the fjord. He thought you might like to go watch.’

Dad’s excitement was obvious. He instantly forgave Leon for not having appeared to take us hunting.

‘This is it, son! The narwhal hunt!’

‘Narwhal?’ I said. ‘What’s a narwhal, Dad?’

‘You don’t know what a
narwhal
is?’ Dad looked shocked, as if I’d said I didn’t know that Paris was the capital of France or my five times tables.

‘Should I?’

‘The narwhal,’ said Dad, standing up from the breakfast table and pushing his chair in with a grand gesture of impatience, ‘is the u….’ Suddenly he dropped his grand tone, as if he thought I might think he was being silly. ‘Well, actually,’ he said, in a more ordinary tone of voice, ‘it’s a rather small whale. Unusual though, very unusual. Just wait and see.’

He was making it all very mysterious. I shrugged, but for some unnamed reason, an image of myself in a velvet cloak, lined with stars, floated through my mind.

‘Did he say he would come for us?’ Dad asked Bebe. ‘Leon, I mean.’

She shook her head. Dad’s face fell.

‘You want I ask my sister’s boy to take you over there?’ Bebe asked. ‘Leon say Michael can take you if you like.’

Dad practically whimpered with excitement. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘oh please do. And you,’ he said to me, ‘do I take it that you want to come?’

Poor Dad. He knew I wasn’t very keen on whale-hunting. But he desperately wanted me to come –
and to want to come. He was right. I didn’t like it, but after the bowhead hunt, I’d come to some sort of an arrangement in my head about it, an agreement with myself to tolerate it. I decided I’d go with him, this one last time, and I wouldn’t argue about it.

When Bebe’s nephew arrived, he had polar-bearskin trousers for us to wear. I looked at the shaggy things, and I looked at Dad, and I said: ‘Do I have to?’

‘You will be so glad of these trousers, you know. Polar-bearskin is the warmest fur in the world.’

Michael nodded. ‘Keep out the cold, keep out the wind, keep out the water.’ He was about my age, I think, but he had a wise air about him, like an old man.

‘But it looks like I’m wearing a sheepskin rug. I look like a caveman.’

‘It doesn’t matter what you look like,’ Dad said, ‘but what you actually look like is a Kalaallit hunter.’

So we bundled up in all the skins and furs Michael had brought us, and we waddled, like two walking haystacks, down the hotel steps. Tied up at the porch was a sled with a team of ten creamy white and dashingly handsome huskies. They looked all freshly brushed and as soon as they saw us emerging, they set up a whine of welcome. I went to pat their heads, but Michael shouted at me.

‘Don’t! These dogs aren’t pets. They wolves.’

‘Oh!’ I said, and pulled my hand back.

‘These are Leon’s dogs,’ he went on. ‘They good dogs, well trained, but they can turn nasty.’

‘Nasty?’

‘Yup. Leon attacked by a husky once out on the ice. The food ran out. The dog went mad with hunger. Leon still got the scar.’

‘Ouch!’ I said. ‘But how come you don’t use snowmobiles or scooters?’

‘Ach,’ said Michael, ‘snowmobiles break down. Your snowmobile breaks down, you’re out on the ice, what you do? Walk home? Dogs don’t break down.’

‘That’s right,’ said Dad, looking pleased as punch. ‘Dogs don’t break down.’

They just go mad and attack you, I thought, but I didn’t say so. I just kept a wary eye on the dogs as I climbed onto the sled.

Suddenly, almost before we had settled, Michael had whisked up the dogs’ attention with a shouted command, and we were off, skimming over the ice, like the Snow Queen, watching the cloudy mists of the dogs’ breath rising up in the still air before us.

The dogs raced and raced, scooping up snow to drink as they ran, without pausing. Pretty soon, we had left the village miles behind, and still we skimmed over the ice, for miles and miles into the icy wilderness. Our faces froze, but our bodies were warm under our skins and furs, and even our feet felt pinky-warm in their layers of socks.

There seemed to be more of this landscape than you could possibly imagine. It stretched out for ever. The sky, dove grey with clouds today, was low over the ice. You felt you could almost reach out and touch it, and that it would be soft and warm, though of course, even if you could reach it, it would be cold and misty.

After what seemed like hours, Michael called something to the huskies and they stopped, quite suddenly. While the dogs lay panting on the snow, Michael untangled the sealskin lines that tied them to the sled. The dogs didn’t
take any notice. They lay quietly, huddled into groups for warmth.

‘Need to rest the dogs,’ Michael said, by way of explanation, and then he started to make conversation. ‘You go to school?’

‘Yes.’ I said. ‘Two more years. Then college.’

It felt a bit weird to be discussing my education out here in the middle of the icy landscape, but of course to Michael, this was all perfectly normal.

‘You want to be a doctor,’ he said.

It wasn’t a question. He said it as if it was a fact, the only possible reason for wanting to go to college.

‘Not a doctor,’ I said.

‘You want to be a
teacher
?’ he said incredulously.

‘No,’ I said, ‘not a teacher.’

Funny that I ended up teaching after all, though what I meant was that I didn’t want to teach in a school. University’s different.

‘Well, what then?’ asked Michael.

‘A … a …’ I began, hoping something would occur to me. ‘I don’t know,’ I concluded lamely.

‘You want to go to college, you don’t know what you want to be.’ Michael clearly thought I was a bit of a twit.

‘I want to study,’ I said defensively.

‘What you want to study?’

‘History,’ I said.

I was surprised to hear myself say it, but I was even more surprised to discover I meant it. I didn’t know what you could
be
if you studied history, but I knew I wanted to do it anyway.

‘Wars,’ he said dismissively. ‘History all wars.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘history’s all stories.’

‘You don’t want to be an anthropologist?’ Dad said in a mock-disappointed tone.

I knew I was supposed to step back in horror at the idea and say under no circumstances or something exaggerated, but I didn’t feel like playing that game.

‘Not an anthropologist,’ I said, ‘but it’s close, isn’t it, Dad?’

‘Oh, that’s too profound for me,’ Dad said, but he looked pretty pleased all the same.

‘What do you want to be, Michael?’ I asked. ‘A hunter?’

I don’t know why I assumed that. No reason why he couldn’t be whatever he liked.

‘No. I want a job. I want money. I want to move to someplace where things happen.’

I laughed at the idea that nothing happened here, but it was a hollow laugh. I knew exactly what he meant. Maybe it had something to do with being fifteen.

The dogs must have been rested by then, because Michael picked up the reins and we were off again.

I poked Dad in the side as we sped along.

‘What?’ he asked.

‘Just hello,’ I said.

‘Just hello yourself,’ he said and smiled at me.

‘That sky looks like snow,’ Dad called to Michael.

Michael shook his head. ‘Naw,’ he said, ‘snow unusual here.’

I looked around incredulously at the vast snowy landscape and I laughed.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘I can see that.’

‘Oh, this take years. It don’t snow much, but it build up.’

‘It certainly does,’ I said.

When we arrived at the fjord, Michael stopped the sled at a good distance from the water, so as not to disturb the hunt, and we left the dogs huddled up together for another rest. We crouched in the cover of a huge lump of ice like a small cliff to watch the hunters from a distance.

The kayaks were already out on the water. It was completely different from the bowhead hunt we’d seen all those years ago, no whaling crews, just individual hunters in their individual little boats. The hunters sat still, waiting for a sighting of a narwhal. The trick was to keep very quiet so as to be able to surprise the creature. If the narwhal had any warning, it would probably escape and that would be the end of hunting for all the hunters for that day.

We spotted Leon on the water. He sat hunched with his face peering out of his parka like an old walnut, not making a sound, not a ripple on the water. He didn’t look like a tourist guide today. He looked like a man with a job to do.

We watched and waited, and watched and waited for what seemed like hours, our limbs stiffening and freezing as we crouched uncomfortably.

Then, entirely without warning, in a single movement, Leon threw his harpoon. It sliced the air and hit its target almost at the same time. I tensed for the explosion, but it didn’t happen. Instead, Leon made a swift movement with his lance. I couldn’t see the narwhal, as it was shielded from my view by Leon’s body, but I knew by the way he wielded the lance and the way the movement stopped so swiftly that he had killed it with a single stabbing motion. I was glad about that. I couldn’t have borne it if the creature had bellowed in pain and thrashed
the water and had a long, slow death.

When the younger men had helped Leon to manoeuvre the narwhal to shore, I managed to get glimpses of it between the moving bodies on the shoreline. It was the strangest-looking creature. It looked like a very large, bloated dolphin, streaked with its own blood, awkward and sodden in death, not magnificent at all, as the bowhead had been. The oddest thing was that, as far as I could see from where we stood – our view was intermittent, constantly being blocked by the movements of the hunters – Leon’s spear seemed to be stuck right through the head of the narwhal, so that it looked as if it had grown an unwieldy tusk, as long as its own body, or longer. It looked a bit like an overweight swordfish.

‘The meat has to be shared,’ Michael explained, ‘but the hunter who kill the narwhal, he get the tusk.’

‘Oh, so it is a tusk then,’ I said.

‘Of course it’s a tusk,’ said Dad. ‘It’s a narwhal. Surely you know now what I mean about the narwhal being an unusual whale? I mean it’s the tusked whale.’

‘Dad, I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said, as we watched while Leon cut the tusk from the narwhal’s forehead. ‘You talk as if I should know everything there is to know about narwhals, but I’ve never even heard the word before today.’

‘But the tusk,’ said Dad. ‘The tusk. We’ve had that tusk for ever. You must remember the tusk.’

‘What tusk?’ I asked.

‘In the sitting room at home,’ Dad said. ‘The one you used to pretend was a unicorn horn when you were small. The one you told Tom and Tessa about before we came away, remember, when you were being a unicorn?’

‘What do you mean, I used to
pretend
it was a unicorn horn? It
is
a unicorn horn. You always said it was.’

‘Taig,’ said Dad, ‘you are fifteen years old. You know the dreadful truth about Santa Claus. Surely you don’t think that the narwhal tusk we have at home is a unicorn horn!’

‘But of course I do!’ I exclaimed. ‘Did, I mean, until this minute. You
said
so Dad, you always said so.’

I could feel hot, shameful tears gathering behind my eyes as I realised my error. All those years, I’d believed in unicorns, and I’d believed it, not out of some childish naïveté, but because I had scientific proof on the wall of my own sitting room at home. I’d never questioned it, never had a reason to question it.

But now, here in front of me was Leon brandishing a narwhal tusk that he had just hacked off a fat, stubby, dead and undignified whale. The tusk oozed blood. It looked nothing like a unicorn horn. It looked like a big, ugly, gnarled, overgrown tooth with the bloody roots attached. It did spiral, like a unicorn horn, but there was certainly no seam of gold running up through it. This great clump of a thing had never graced the head of a fabulous white horse that flew over the sea. As I watched Leon hacking at the roots of the narwhal tusk with his knife to free it of blood and meat, I could see with another eye my star-lined velvet cloak floating off over the sea and disappearing beyond the horizon.