Call of the Whales (5 page)

9

A Decision

I
tackled my father later.

‘Dad, what’s all this about?’

‘What’s all what about?’

‘The quota. A quota for what?’

‘For whales. The people are only allowed to kill a certain number every year. It has to do with conserving the whales, so they don’t die out like they almost did in the last century from over-exploitation, only of course that was by European whalers.’

Conserving, exploitation … I hardly heard those words. Only one word leapt out at me from what my father said.

‘Kill! Dad, do they
kill
the whales?’

My wonderful bowhead whales! I must have known. I must have known, but I’d been fooling myself. We’d been using words like ‘whaling’ and ‘whale camp’, all along, even ‘taking whales’. But nobody’d actually used the word ‘kill’ before. Even so, surely I must have put two and two together. But I was so excited, so mesmerised by the splendour of these beasts that at last I was going to
see, I didn’t really allow myself to admit that this was all about hunting. About life and death, as my dad had said.

‘Well, of course they do. What do you think they go whaling for?’

It felt as if the floor of my world had shifted and a hole had opened under my feet.

‘Dad,’ I said softly, ‘I don’t think I want to go on the hunt.’

‘But we’ve come all this way! All the other boys are going. I thought you were so thrilled about it.’

I couldn’t tell him I’d had some sort of naïve idea that I was just going whale-watching, like some tourist. ‘Tourist’ was a word my dad used like a swear word. So I pretended it was just that I’d changed my mind.

‘Now that we’re here,’ I said, ‘I don’t think I could face it.’

Dad put a hand heavily on my shoulder.

‘Well, I can’t make you come if you don’t want to,’ he said. ‘I know how you feel about the bowheads …’

He couldn’t. He couldn’t possibly know how I felt about the bowheads. Nobody could, because I’d never told anyone. In my head, they had become magical beasts, wondrous, enchanted creatures, creatures so magnificent and huge and powerful and venerable that it would be verging on murder to kill them.

‘So think about it, OK?’ Dad was saying.

I hadn’t even been listening to whatever argument he was putting. The usual one about how whales aren’t really so specially intelligent after all, probably, but that didn’t matter to me, because my feelings about the bowheads were
feelings
– I had developed an emotional relationship with them, without ever having laid eyes on one of them,
and it had nothing to do with whether they were intelligent or not, although I was sure they were, anyway.

The floor seemed to shift under me again, and again I fell. And this time the problem was that I knew I wanted to go on the hunt. I knew it, because as soon as I thought about not going, disappointment rose in my throat with a bitter taste. I was utterly confused. I wanted desperately to go, and yet I didn’t want to have anything to do with whale-killing.

‘OK,’ I said, defeated. ‘I’ll think about it.’

But thinking about it didn’t help. I’d been reading, studying, thinking, dreaming about bowhead whales for months now. They seemed to live boisterously inside my head, almost as if I’d invented them all by myself. My whole winter had been an anticipation of this trip. The more I thought about them, the more I longed to see them at last, the more confused I got, and the more torn between wanting to see the whales and not wanting to have anything to do with killing them.

I tried common sense. I said to myself that if I just made coffee and scared away polar bears, I wasn’t really part of the killing team. I told myself that I’d come all this way, I was missing half a term at school, just for this, and I would be foolish to turn my back on it. I told myself that the whales were going to be killed anyway, whether or not I was part of it.

That was the trickiest bit to think about. If you can do nothing to prevent something you don’t agree with, if it’s going to happen anyway, well then, can you allow yourself to benefit from that thing? It was all so miserably confusing. In the end, I didn’t so much decide as succumb.

‘Made your mind up, son?’ Dad asked me later.

I shook my head, feeling sickened inside, as if my thoughts were headaches, chasing each other around my skull.

Dad sat down beside me.

‘OK,’ he said, drawing up his chair closer to the table where I sat with my head in my hands. ‘Let’s try to think this through. Let’s think for a minute about your sealskin parka.’

‘I’m wearing it,’ I said warily, half-aware where this argument was going to lead.

‘Somebody had to kill a seal – several seals – to make it.’

‘Yes,’ I said. I had been right about where this argument was going.

I thought about seals, their sleek bodies, their innocent whiskery faces, their silly honking noises, the way they play on the rocks.

‘I suppose nylon jackets could be just as good,’ I said at last, reluctantly, though I knew from experience that it wasn’t true.

‘Well,’ said Dad, ‘that may or may not be true. But you know, nylon comes from oil.’

‘Yes,’ I said, wearily, ‘which has to be mined from the earth, which creates environmental pollution and destroys communities.’

Damn! I thought.

‘Plus it’s a non-renewable resource. We get nothing for nothing in this world, you know.’

I shook my head. ‘It’s not the
same
,’ I said.

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘It’s not. Animals are different. They’re like us.’

He was changing sides! He saw it my way!

‘That’s it,’ I said excitedly. ‘That’s the problem, Dad. They have
feelings
.’

‘And then, apart from the skins,’ Dad went on, ‘there’s the meat, which is probably even more valuable. Vegetarianism isn’t really an option in the Arctic, you know. Not too many vegetable gardens around here. Meat is what you eat up here, or you die.’

He wasn’t changing sides after all. He was just being reasonable. I looked around at the bleak snow-covered landscape, and I could see for myself he was right.

‘But …’ I said.

‘And where do you get meat in a place like this?’ Dad went on. I wished he would stop, but he kept on, relentlessly pursuing his argument. ‘Not too many chicken farms round here either.’

‘But …’ I said again, lamely, casting about for some argument to throw at him, to stop him in his tracks.

‘And it’s not just us that live off dead animals,’ he said. ‘All of nature does. The whales themselves live off other sea creatures.’

‘Plankton,’ I said dully.

‘Yes, bowheads eat plankton, but other whales eat fish. Octopus. Herring. It’s how life works. We live off each other. The best we can do is to do it with a minimum of cruelty.’

His arguments were unanswerable.

‘Shut up, Dad,’ I said, covering my ears. ‘Just shut
up
!’

I hate when the other person is right, and you know they’re right, and still you feel you were right all along too. It makes me feel woozy.

Give him his due, Dad did shut up. He closed his
mouth firmly, in a thin line, and let me think.

I put my head in my hands again, covering my ears. The thoughts were crowding in on me, getting mixed up with the feelings. I could feel tears starting, but I didn’t want to cry, not about whales, not in front of Dad.

‘In the past …’ I said, after a bit, trying to work out what I thought.

‘No,’ said Dad, before I’d even got to the end of my sentence.

I wanted to biff Dad one, the way he was droning on with his clever arguments, interrupting me before I even got started, but we didn’t go in for violence in my family, so I just kicked the leg of the table instead. Hard. My toe ached for ages afterwards.

‘It doesn’t matter whether it’s the past or the present,’ Dad was saying. ‘The arctic people don’t
have
to hunt for a living any more, but does that make their way of life suddenly wrong? So there are other meats, other oils, other materials – all of which have to be imported and paid for, by the way, all of which are bound up in their own moral issues too – but does that mean that the people should suddenly drop their way of life, change everything they have ever known and start living on fish fingers and wearing polyester?’

I was listening, but I felt glum inside, mixed up and sad and headachy and confused. I banged my fist on the table in frustration and anger.

‘And anyway,’ Dad went on, laying his hand over my clenched fist to stop me banging it, ‘what about the fish? How do you think they feel about having their fingers chopped off?’

‘Oh Dad! That is such a
stupid
joke.’

I could feel tears spurting now from my eyes. Tears of anger, I told myself, pulling my fist out from under Dad’s restraining hand and using it to dab fiercely at my wet face.

‘Look, I’m trying to make the point,’ Dad said, more gently now that he saw how upset I was, ‘that everything we put in our mouths comes out of the earth or out of the sea, no matter how processed it is, no matter how far we try to remove ourselves from the way it was produced.’

‘Shut up,’ I said again, through clenched teeth.

I couldn’t bear the way his logic and his arguments were sweeping over me, washing away my thoughts before I’d even formed them.

‘OK,’ said Dad, sitting back on his chair. ‘Think about it for a while, son, but remember, we break trail tomorrow and I need to know if you are going to come with us or if you are going to stay at home with Leah.’

Matulik’s wife wasn’t going because she had arthritis and needed to keep warm.

‘I don’t want to think about it any more,’ I said. ‘Thinking is doing my head in. I’ll come, OK? OK? I’ll come!’

I didn’t really want to go, but I couldn’t imagine spending several days in a half-empty village trying to make small talk with Leah and the other old people, who would be staying at home to mind the youngest children, and a few other people who would have to stay in the village to keep the shop open and the generator running. Everyone else, all the village whaling crews, along with their wives and the older girls and boys, would have gone to the camp. That’s really why I went in the end, because I couldn’t decide to stay away. I wasn’t proud of my
decision, though.

10

Whaling

T
he next day, almost the whole village got ready to break trail to the place they were going to set up the whaling camp, near where the leads were in the ice. The ice doesn’t break up conveniently close to the land. It’s often twenty or thirty miles out to sea that the leads form, and the whaling crews have to travel out on the sea ice to wherever it is. Helicopters are very useful for spotting the best places, but there isn’t room in a chopper for the whole crew, so they have to follow along on foot or by snowmobile, carrying all the camping and whaling equipment.

They call it breaking trail, and I began to see why. You do literally have to break a path for yourself across the ice. The pack ice is not all nice and flat and smooth. Very often big mounds of ice form, great towering, fabulous, glittering, crystalline banks of ice, like hard, sharp hills, and you have to break a way through these ice formations to create a path for the sleds and snowmobiles to get through. Breaking trail is hard work.

We were lucky. It was only a ten-mile journey to the place that had been chosen for the camp, and we were able to travel most of the way by snowmobile. It only took about a day to get from the village to the camping ground near where the ice had started to open up and make a channel through which the whales were already beginning to swim. Poor creatures, I thought, wishing I could warn them about their fate.

We struck camp that first night, the different crews spreading out along the ice, each crew forming its own little settlement, but all close by. As soon as we got the stuff unloaded to set up the camp, the girls and women started lighting camping stoves and getting food ready. Everyone was starving after the journey, and soon the delicious smell of fish cooking filled the air.

That was when I met Henry. He was about my own age or a little younger, short and thin and bouncy and very excited about being a boyer. He showed me how to cut a hole in the ice to make a sheltered place for the Primus stove.

‘See, you put the ice you cut out of the hole around it like this, to make a little wall,’ he explained – he was the chattiest Eskimo I ever met – ‘to break the wind, and you put the stove in the hole, so it’s sheltered.’

I nodded and watched as he lit the stove and set the coffee pot on it.

‘Why can’t girls be boyers?’ I asked, mainly because I didn’t want to think about the hunt.

Henry looked up from the blue flame of the stove and stared at me out of dark, puzzled eyes.

‘Girls are girls,’ he said eventually. ‘Boys are boys. Only boys can be boyers.’

I didn’t get it, so I asked again, why.

‘Because,’ said Henry, as if suddenly realising this for the first time, ‘boys will grow up to be whalers, maybe even whaling captains.’

‘And not girls?’

He looked at me as if I was totally mad.

‘No,’ he said, ‘girls will be women,’ as if that was something I couldn’t work out for myself.

‘And women can’t be whalers?’

He laughed.

‘How could they be?’ he asked. ‘They have their own work to do. If the women did the men’s work, who would do the women’s work?’

It seemed to have an undeniable logic to him. I didn’t argue. I was the outsider, after all, and I didn’t understand. In fact, as I now realise, the women play a very important role in the whaling – it’s just that no one
thinks
of them as whalers.

It always seemed to smell of oil up north – diesel and seal oil, axle grease and engines. Modern life had hit the Arctic even then, and in the villages there were television sets and pool tables, deep-fat fryers and pickup trucks, but still every luxury was eked out at a cost, and everywhere was the oily stench of effort. Here at the camp, with snowmobiles parked around the edges of the settlement and everywhere bottled gas and oil-fired stoves, the greasy, oily, fumy reek, tinged with fish and sea, was even more intense than usual, a hard-working, basic smell that I will for ever associate with the Arctic.

When the tents were all up and the food was cooked, we sat around on anything we could find that was not ice to eat our supper. My dad and I sat in a snowmobile,
which gave us some protection from the bitter arctic wind as well as from the freezing surface of the ice. They call it spring when the ice starts to break, but it’s nothing like spring where I come from. No daffodils or tulips, that’s for sure. It’s just slightly less wintry, and the eternal night starts to move towards eternal day.

The whole crew ate together and laughed and told stories and danced, right through the long, slow sunset. You’d never think they were on a killing mission. It all seemed as innocent as a boy scouts’ picnic.

Then, just as the air was turning that eerie silvery-navy colour that counted as night up there in the spring time, Matulik stood up and waved his arms for silence. Everyone stopped what they were doing and listened. We listened and listened in the deep blue air, our noses freezing, and the skin on our faces prickling with the cold. I pulled my sealskin parka around me, thinking of Turaq, wondering if he’d ever been a boyer with a whaling crew. I hoped he was OK, wherever he was.

And then we heard it. I seemed to feel it right inside my body, rather than just hear it, the way you can feel the percussion section in an orchestra if you sit close up. The steady rumble of movement in the water, the occasional splosh in the night and the grunts and clicks of concentration made by the bowhead whales pushing their way through the ice fields in the sea, just as we had pushed our way earlier through the piled up ice to get here. The bowhead is powerful enough to break its way through the hard-packed ice – I knew this from my pored-over library book – as long as it is not more than a foot or two thick, using its broad snout. We could hear loud creaks and tearing sounds as the ice was rent apart by
the incessant onward progress of the whales. They weren’t singing, as I’d half-expected they would be, just making their way warily and steadily under and through the ice, heading for the open seas.

At the sound of the whales, people moved on silent feet to douse the fires and to gather up their equipment. Usually the crews go whaling in the day time, when they are rested and can see what they are doing. But that evening the sound of the whales breaking into their suppertime revelry on the very first evening at camp had invigorated the whaling crews and they were suddenly all set for the hunt.

The women and girls withdrew like shadows into the tents. The boyers knotted together and the older lads gave whispered orders, telling us where to station ourselves to keep lookout. The men, meanwhile, were gathering up their equipment, all in this weird semi-silent near-darkness.

‘Why has everything gone so quiet?’ I asked Henry, who was on lookout with me near the edge of our camp.

‘So as not to frighten the whales,’ said Henry. ‘We have to take them by surprise.’

The idea of not frightening the whales had a hollow ring to me. Don’t alarm them – that way you can kill them easier.

Then there was a murmur from the men, a low, rhythmic sound in a strange language. It reminded me of the old people at home praying the rosary.

‘What’s that?’ I asked Henry. ‘What are they doing?’

‘Speaking to the soul of the whale.’

‘
What
?’

Henry sighed. ‘Look, the whale is going to give itself up
to the people. That is something very … umm … solemn.’

I stared at him, but he couldn’t see the expression of complete puzzlement on my face in the dark. How come they could think the whale had a soul and still want to hunt it? I couldn’t work it out. It all seemed wrong to me, wrong and wretched.

We sat and watched the men of our crew, visible, even though they were hundreds of yards away, as silent silhouettes against the blue-dark sky and the eerie gleam of the moonlit ice. They were dragging their skin-covered umiaq to the water’s edge. They lowered it with a soft plop into the water and got noiselessly into it, each man swaying for a moment as he found his balance and then hunkering down and making room for the next crew member. The whaling equipment was already on board and ready to be used. I felt sick at the thought of it, the huge, heavy harpoon with its deadly spike, and the rifle looming in wait, in case the harpoon didn’t succeed.

My dad didn’t go in the boat with them. As an unskilled outsider, he would only have been a liability on the boat full of highly experienced whalers. He went instead and stood as close to the edge of the ice as he dared, and watched in the moonlight.

All along the edge of the ice, as far as we could see, umiaqs were lowered into the water, men slithered into the boats and swayed and steadied themselves. There were about five or six crews in all, I think, spread out along the ice, each with its own umiaq, each umiaq loaded with its own instruments of death.

Anticipation hung breathlessly in the darkening air as the paddles plashed, turning streaks of silver out of the waters. The sound of the paddles carried on the cold, still air to
where we squatted, watching, and the umiaqs slid off over the sea. We boyers glanced occasionally over our shoulders in a gesture of lookout, but really we were concentrating on what was happening just at the edge of our vision.

I was itching for a sight of the whales – poor, doomed creatures – but I daren’t leave my post. Everyone had a job to do, and everyone in the crew depended on everyone else doing their job. Nobody had explained that to me, but I seemed to know it. I suppose I picked it up from the behaviour of the other boyers. They all did their tasks with such a grave air that I knew without thinking about it that we were vital, in our small way, to the success of the hunt. I didn’t like that thought, but still, I had to play my part. I’d made my decision, I was there, I couldn’t back out of it now.

I hunkered on the mat I’d brought with me from our tent to save my knees from contact with the icy floor and screwed up my eyes, desperate to see what was going on, wishing it wasn’t going to happen, and yet bursting for it to be over with. I could hear the whales’ low grunts and whistles, and I could picture their inky bodies, huge shadows in the icy seas. An occasional fount of whale-blow rose up on the horizon, silver-splashed in the moonlight, as a whale broke the surface for a breather, but mainly they moved quietly, under the surface, as if they knew we were watching and waiting.

Then suddenly, out of the stillness, a harpoon flew up with a heavy
whump
through the air. We could see – or imagined we could see – the cold arc of its lightning path against the sky, and then it hit its target with a solid thump, and immediately there was an explosion, an almighty crack in the murmurous silence of the night, like
a train hitting a stone wall.

‘What’s that?’ I whispered to Henry. ‘What’s that noise?’ At least, I thought I was whispering, but I must have shouted to be heard over the terrible crash of the explosion.

The water was thrashing and boiling now with the stricken whale’s sudden struggle, and his bellow roared over the water like a thunderbolt on wheels.

‘The harpoon has a charge in it,’ Henry said. ‘It explodes when it hits the whale.’

‘Oh my God!’ I wailed. ‘They
bomb
it!’

‘It’s so that the whale dies more quickly,’ Henry explained. ‘It’s to prevent too much pain.’

The whale’s dying call boomed out over the squealing rush of the other whales, bereaved, bewildered and panicking. I closed my eyes, and tried to stop my ears, torn between pity for the poor harpooned beast and terror that he would pull the whole fragile umiaq and crew down with him into the icy water in a last desperate dive for freedom. My heart felt squeezed in my chest as I heard, even through the fingers stuck hard in my ears, the whale’s cry fading on the night air. I felt my heart expand then, as if daring to get pumping again only when the whale’s last moment came. I opened my eyes and unstopped my ears, thankful at least not to have to hear the whale roaring in pain and contorting and twitching in the water.

Silence descended and hung for moments in the semi-darkness.

‘Who got it?’ I whispered to Henry then, meaning which of the crews.

‘We did!’ he said aloud, jubilation in his voice.

I wanted to kick him, to punch his grinning face in. I
wanted to stamp my feet and pull my hood over my face and wail for the dead creature. But I just sat there and stared. Then, with shaking fingers, I struck a match and relit the stove we were in charge of. I warmed my fingers at the small flame and tried to think of nothing, nothing at all.