Far Afield (30 page)

Jonathan gasped. The men on the beach and on the dock drew in a breath as well, and for a few moments everyone stood in silence watching the red streamers spread. Petur was poised at the side of his boat, dark-tipped spear in hand. Then the wounded whale crested again, and the glare of the gash in his side, so bright against his skin, broke whatever spell had stilled them all.

One of the men on shore waded out to sea holding an iron prong and hooked the whale on his second try. At this,
Heðin and Sigurd rushed down to the beach, bumping Jonathan along with them. The rope attached to the prong was already thick with hands, but they took the last three feet of it and joined the pulling. Jonathan stood staring. On the fjord, dozens of spears were being stabbed into the sea, jets of blood combining with the watery exhalations of the animals.

“You can’t stand there!” Sigurd yelled at him. “Get on the rope!” He was red in the face and looked furious. Jonathan took a few steps toward the crowd and faltered. Sigurd dropped his portion of rope and went to Jonathan’s side.

“It’s illegal just to watch.” He stood with his hands on his hips. “You must either help or get out of the way.”

A second whale had been hooked, and half the men were heaving on a new rope. This whale was bigger than the first and fought more. His tail smacked the water, jolting the boats around him and shooting up curtains of spray. He cried, too, with a powerful high voice that cut through the din of waves and yells.

Jonathan looked at Sigurd, who was silhouetted against the dark, churning sea and whose face, though shadowed, shone with an intensity Jonathan hadn’t seen there before. The lines around his mouth—the remnants of thirty-odd years of a shopkeeper’s smiles and frowns—had been transformed to sharp slashes in his flesh, so that his face seemed like a mask of itself. His eyes were open wide, showing white all around the blue, and they fixed Jonathan with a stare he could not duck. Then something shifted, and this new Sigurd relaxed enough to resemble the old, affectionate Sigurd; he put his hand on Jonathan’s shoulder. “This is why you came here, isn’t it?” he said. “So, come now.”

Heðin didn’t even grunt a greeting as Jonathan took a place beside him on the rope. They were still hauling in the first whale, and though he was weak from the spearing and didn’t resist, he was heavy: the heaviest thing Jonathan
had ever tried to move. Eight men pulling had brought him only twenty feet in from where he’d been hit. A spurt came out of his blowhole now and then, but otherwise he seemed to be playing dead, lolling in the water as if trying by his very density to thwart their efforts.

“Ooof.” Heðin sighed. To Sigurd he said, “Maybe we should leave him until later.”

Sigurd shook his head. “I think we can get him on the beach easier than the other one.”

Jonathan glanced over at the second rope. The men on it were having a hard time just holding their ground while the whale bucked and thrashed at the other end.

Sigurd leaned to Jonathan. “Once we get one on the beach, you see, the others follow.”

Jonathan’s view of the ocean was blocked by Heðin’s back. His hands were chilled and sore from the rope, and the sound of rubber boots grinding in cold, wet sand grated on his ears. The whole business of killing whales, which from the sidelines had seemed vicious and awful, was now nothing more than the usual hard work. Running after sheep, baiting barbed lines for fishing, unloading dank holds reeking of cod: everyday life in the Faroes was composed of hundreds of unpleasant tasks, and this was no different. Putting his back behind another big pull, Jonathan figured there was a benefit to this realization. If whale killing was just work, he could do it.

The resistance at the end of the rope changed its character all of a sudden, and a new noise, of scraping and dragging, began. Peering around Heðin’s shoulder, Jonathan saw the first few feet of whale emerging from the spume onto the sand. Then they were all pulling again, stumbling backward up the beach. At a yell from the men in front, Heðin and Sigurd dropped the rope, leaving only Jonathan grasping its oily, thick coils. He let it go and ran down to the shore behind the others.

Twice as long as a man, panting in huge heaves, and
with his gashed side rubbed raw from the dragging, the whale lay surrounded by people. In his distress he lifted his head up from the beach and moved it from side to side. His tapered, forked tail sketched a delicate tracery of pain in the sand. He was no longer making his thin cry, only pushing out ragged puffs. Jonathan was close enough to see his blowhole open and then contract. With a shock he understood that this was breathing—the whale breathed air just as men do. This was not a fish struggling for water, a haddock writhing on a deck to provoke in Jonathan an almost shameful pity, but a breathing, bleeding creature, trapped, terrified, more kin to him in its complexity than any lamb or ewe. Jonathan reached out his hand and placed it on the whale’s back, which was cool but radiated warmth and quivered under his palm. What comfort could he offer? He drew his hand away, defeated.

People were moving back from the whale’s head, parting to make room for a barrel-chested old man Jonathan had noticed standing up on the jetty before the whale was speared. “That’s Klæmint, the sheriff,” Sigurd whispered. “Now, watch.”

Klæmint stood with a leg on either side of the whale, pressing his calves against the head, and drew from his belt a knife even longer and more wicked looking than the ones Sigurd had supplied. Then he bent down, clamping the animal between his knees, pressed his left hand just below the blowhole, and with one quick stroke sliced the neck open. Black popped back to reveal the dense, pale inches of blubber, and then blood welled up. Klæmint made another swipe across the neck; this time the bone cracked. The whale’s tail fluttered once. Blood seeped into his still-open eye, which didn’t blink.

Jonathan passed a hand over his face and felt his fingers cold against his cheeks.

“That’s how you do it,” Sigurd said. “You cut the spinal cord. Quick, you see, so they don’t suffer.”

Blood dripped down the whale’s head. The gash in his side had begun to clot before he died; half-coagulated lumps lay dark against the red. The obsidian gleam of his skin was fading already and marred by sand and small wounds. Jonathan could bear neither to look at all this nor to look away, so he kept turning his head aside and then finding himself staring, darting from the lacerated body to the rigid, reddened eye.

Then Klæmint made a cut in the whale’s belly, and in a cloud of steam the guts slid onto the sand.

Jonathan looked out to sea, where dozens of whales milled and circled in rose-tinted water. The boats were closing in, oars thudding on fins and tails as the chase funneled toward the beach. Was he going to have to watch a hundred dark eyes blinded, a hundred smooth dark cheeks laid to rest on beds of sand? He put his hand on Sigurd’s arm. “I don’t know if I can do this,” he said, and braced himself for Sigurd’s scorn or insistence. Heðin, who’d overheard, turned away. But Sigurd drew Jonathan a few feet back from the crowd, where they could speak in private.

“We will eat all winter from this, do you understand?” He gave Jonathan a hard look, then continued, more gently, “We kill fish and birds and sheep. It’s no different.”

“They’re so big,” Jonathan said.

Sigurd nodded. “And they’re smart, too. They can get away from us, you know, out on the water. And often they do. But when they don’t—” He fell silent. “They come to us,” he said abruptly. “They come up to us. Look.”

All along the curve of the shore whales were hurling themselves out of the ocean and onto the land. The big one, who’d fought hard against the rope, had been hauled in finally and lay heaving near the first, dead one. The pod seemed to be trying to surround him, this fighter, to make a living shield about him. Those who could not get close to him beached themselves anyhow, a huge black infantry following their general into enemy territory. Waves and
waves of whales broke over each other, until they lined the beach two and three deep. Some lay in the foam letting the tide shift their long, slim bodies back and forth, as if hesitant to say goodbye to their element. All of them were calling their strange thin sound that had no character but was just a tone and that seemed too delicate for such large beasts.

“But they’re not coming up so that you can kill them,” Jonathan said. It was obvious to him that the whales were rallying around their leader.

Sigurd grunted. “Yah, but we do. They won’t go back, you see.”

“What do you mean?”

“Once they’re up they won’t go back. I knew a man once who tried to get one to go back. It came up alone, after a big
grind
had come a few days before. He felt sorry for it, like you do, and he roped it to his boat and towed it out. It came right back.” He shrugged. “So. We kill them.” He looked at Jonathan again. “You’ll kill one. You’ll feel better then.”

“I don’t think it’s that simple,” said Jonathan. “And after all, this is your business, not mine.”

“You don’t need to eat?” Sigurd shook his head. “It’s not like the sheep, you know. Other people divide it. It’s just one cut, maybe two.”

“You said you hated killing the sheep.” Jonathan was pleased to have remembered this.

Sigurd shifted from foot to foot and cleared his throat. “You don’t hunt sheep.” He looked down the beach at the ranks of whales. “Hunting is good.” His expression and stance changed as he said this, streamlined to the intensity of the Sigurd who’d yelled at Jonathan earlier.

The discussion was over, Jonathan could see that. He could see also that Sigurd was itching to get to work on the whales, that his continued presence was a mark of his affection; even in his hunter incarnation, Sigurd had time for Jonathan and his worries. Had made time, rather, for now
he took a few steps toward the shore, where the slaughter was beginning. Then he turned back, put a thick arm around Jonathan’s waist, and pulled him bodily down the beach.

Sigurd was stronger than he looked, and surprise weakened Jonathan’s resistance. Within minutes they were wading among the flailing bodies. Jonathan felt his heart pounding in time with the crash of the surf and the blood singing in his ears with the calls of the whales. Whales, men, children were everywhere, all spattered with sea-foam flecks. They had to walk farther into the sea to avoid getting hit by thrashing tails. Then Sigurd pushed him up, to where the press wasn’t so thick and the animals lay unattended in a single line.

“Here,” Sigurd said, straddling a medium-sized whale who had beached somewhat apart from the others, “this is a good one. Come here.” Jonathan approached, slowly but without stopping, as if a rope drew him. Sigurd moved off the whale and waited for Jonathan to take his place.

This whale was silent and still, and Jonathan managed to fit himself around it. Again that sensation of heat seeping through the chill surface; his blue jeans were wet from the whale’s wet skin, but his legs were warmed by contact with the huge, warm body. “Clamp him,” Sigurd said, and Jonathan pressed his knees against the dense flanks. At this the whale began to wriggle and twist. The power was unlike anything Jonathan had ever felt, much stronger than a horse and more impersonal. A horse knows a man, bucks a man off because it refuses to be ridden; this animal had never known subjugation or fear. And Jonathan was to show him both? He loosed his legs somewhat. He began to slide backward toward the tail, which was thumping on the sand.

“Don’t let go!” Sigurd yelled. “Watch out!”

Jonathan put his hands on the whale’s forehead to steady himself.

“You have to do it now.” Sigurd had drawn his knife and was brandishing it at Jonathan. “He’ll hurt you with his tail. Get your knife out.” But as soon as Jonathan lifted his hands to his belt, he started sliding again. “Stop,” said Sigurd. “Use mine.” He extended it to Jonathan.

Jonathan clasped the knife: a cold handshake with bone and steel. Between his legs, the whale’s muscles rippled and tensed; he had to put his knife hand back on the whale’s head for balance, and in doing this he nicked an opening in the neck: the glimmer of pearly blubber, and then, slowly, beads of blood seeping up through the tear in the black sheath of skin. Jonathan gulped. A hopeless shock, as if he’d shattered a precious object, gripped him at this inadvertent wounding.

“You have to do it now,” Sigurd repeated.

“I don’t know how,” Jonathan said.

“You saw it.” Sigurd was firm. “Put your hand below the blowhole and make a long cut across the spine. And do it hard. You want to do it quickly, no more than two cuts.”

Jonathan looked at Sigurd, implacable in his boots and his Viking stance, legs apart on the wet sand. Then he looked down at the whale’s neck, as big as two men’s torsos, as black and glittering as December midnight, and raised his arm.

How easy it was! How smoothly the knife bit through the skin and into the creamy blubber. It sailed across the neck, trailing its wake of blood, and at the slightest pressure from Jonathan plumbed deeper into the whale, so that the ping of metal on bone rang in the air. Jonathan felt the body beneath him jolt and subside, almost deflate. He pulled the knife out and then, drawn by that red arc he’d engraved in the skin, plunged the blade back in for the second cut.

“No!” Sigurd took a step toward him. “No more. He’s dead.”

But Jonathan could not stop himself from finishing
what he’d begun, and when he stepped down onto the sand, what lay dead at his feet was far larger and weightier than a whale.

He held his bloody hand out to Sigurd. “Here’s your knife.”

“I think you should keep it.” Sigurd looked Jonathan over and nodded. “Yes. You keep that knife. But give me yours.”

Jonathan shifted Sigurd’s knife from one sticky hand to the other and wiped his palm against his thigh before pulling the clean knife from his belt, but the blood was hard to get off and the hilt he offered Sigurd was tacky. Sigurd dipped it in the ocean and dried it carefully on his sweater. Jonathan did the same with his knife, then kneeled to clean his hands. He had to rub sand between his fingers to loosen the caked blood. The tide was rising, slowly swamping his boots and lapping at the dead tail, swaying it back and forth.