Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes (5 page)

The lance was even a little longer than his boat! It had an arrow-like tip, sharp and strong. At the other end, a metal ring, an integral part of the lance, served to hold the rope which was securely tied to it. The wreck of a half-boat floated near. The boy’s parted lips began to smile. There was nothing to fear now. The lance was his, his weapon now. The half-boat, which his people had thought was magical, was nothing but part of a wreck. The whale had swum off. Or had it?

The boy gazed carefully around in a circle once, and then again. The waters looked calm. He took up his paddle, reached for the rope that lay over his boat’s side, and gave the wreck a tug. There were valuable metal pieces on the wreck, he had noticed. He would burn these off and keep them.

On the beach of the island, the boy was erect and silent, like a chief of the old days. A crowd of his people had been waiting for him, had swum out to pull his boat and the wreck on to the shore. The boy answered their excited questions calmly and briefly, like a man. He carried the lance straight up beside him, and would not let anyone touch it at first, then he did—smiling proudly as older men ran their thumbs along its tapered edge. The girl he liked was watching from a distance. She did not take her eyes from him, but when he had set out on the desperate voyage to the wreck, she had said she did not want him. Now things would be different. The whole world was different for the boy.

It had occurred to the boy to say that he had killed the whale in whose body the lance had been fastened, but he decided against this. He simply told of a whale that had been pulling the half-boat, the biggest whale he had ever seen or heard of, as long as their island. He had managed to seize the end of the lance, he said, as the whale swam by, and had tugged it from the whale’s flesh. This everyone believed. Everyone went and touched the wreck, as if to assure himself that it held no magic powers. Men lifted and let fall the metal ring that held the rope, listening to its clink against the metal in the wreck’s side.

The boy was even haughty for a while toward the girl he liked, pretending not to see her, though she was the main thing on his mind. He said that the whale was not only huge but stuck all over with lances and harpoons like a big pig stuck with spices for roasting. The whale was so big, no weapon would ever penetrate to its vital organs. Thus the boy enhanced his courage.

That still left the whale, and the story of the impregnable monster became known in the islands, and lookouts were sharper on the little fishing boats, the idea being to avoid the beast. The story reached the ears of professional whalers, who with their harpoon guns were not afraid, and who reckoned that, even if the whale were not so large as reported, it would still be worth capturing. One of these whalers pursued the whale one day, and the whale eluded the ship by diving under and behind one of the long tankers that was moving on an undeviating course.

The whale was heading north into seas that were cooler now and would become still cooler. Enough of the islands! He had a few more bone-tipped lances in him since he had shed the boat fragment. A lance near his left eye annoyed him, especially when he swam past vegetation that the lance touched. He was in a rather irritable and fighting mood all the time. This caused him to cruise some distance up a river one day by mistake.

He had swum fast for several seconds into the river’s broad estuary, not realizing that it was not part of the sea, until the sour and bitter taste, the vibrations caused by something heavy being thrown in near him, alerted him to the fact that he was going in a wrong direction, toward a likely impasse as well as human enemies. He could even hear the churn of machinery. He turned and dived lower, heading back the way he had come.

The water was foul, the river bed covered with jagged metal pieces, cylinders large and small, rotting ropes and chains. Boats above him tossed in the disturbance he made on the river’s surface, and men’s voices cried out. The whale shot forward with a great thrust of his tail, and something scratchy swept over his head, tweaked a lance, and stuck.

For a few seconds he felt resistance, but not enough to stop him, and he reached the open sea at last. But when he paused, he felt a weight on either side of him, tending to pull him downward. He could see several weights on either side, all attached to one another on a cord which lay across the back of his head. The whale swam backwards, but the weights stayed with him. The rope or chain was somehow caught in the lances that stuck in him. He nosed toward one weight, but did not touch it: it was shaped like the floating things that bordered the routes into rivers, but these were smaller. To rise for air was now not so quickly done and, if he wished to cruise near the surface for brit, the weights came with him reluctantly, and slowly sank again.

On one of the whale’s surfacings for air in the North Pacific, the sight of his high, white exhalation gave rise to a shout which the whale heard. He had come up rather close to a fishing boat, the kind with both sail and motor, the kind not to be feared. But the whale shot himself toward the boat for sport, to hear the men cry out again, and now their yelps sounded frightened. The whale realized that on either side of him the weights that he dragged made a wide fluttering on the water, as if he himself were larger. As he swerved, not touching the boat, he saw the more ominous shape of a whaler. It was probably heading for him, having sighted his blowing.

The fishing vessel had started its motor.

The whale headed for the larger vessel with a reckless lunge of mingled anger and pain. He knew that with his weights there would be no escape. Pain from the lances in him made him slow, the fast fishing vessel was going past him, so the whale passed its stern without touching it.

Seconds later, there was an explosion underwater that gave a sensation of pressure on the whale’s ears. Great splashes followed, objects fell into the sea, then came the sucking sound of a rush of water. The whale saw a hunk of the fishing vessel, one whole end of it, sinking downward, and he swam away.

Of that eight-man crew there were five survivors, so another story went out: there was a whale in the area with mines attached. Beware! As ever, one survivor said he had seen at least six mines, and the next man said ten. But they agreed that the mines were painted yellow, like some used years ago in the rivers of Korea and Viet Nam. All agreed that the whale had to be destroyed. But no single captain volunteered for the job.

It would take several boats, whalers with harpoon guns, to kill the whale safely. The whalers said they could do it, if ever enough of them got together in the same area as the whale. Three boats might do it, four certainly. But time passed, the whale was not seen where he had been seen, and the idea of a search was abandoned as unprofitable. Every man thought that some other ship would encounter the whale, not his.

The whale was still moving north on a pleasant current. It was the only thing pleasant in his existence now. He was alone and in nagging pain from his many slight wounds, and the mines nagged him also, dragging him from side to side. The chain clinked dully on his head, caught in some stub of a harpoon. All this made him hostile to any life he saw. His dives and his surfacings were slowed by the accursed weights, and on his journey north, he forgot that the weights on him had the power to ward off enemies, until he encountered a certain whaling ship. It had sighted his blow, and at once borne down on him.

Underwater, the whale made a slow arc that would bring him behind the vessel. Then he went on, northward. But the ship was just as near when the whale next came up for air. Without his weights, he thought he could have out-distanced it, been free of it! The ship with its white-frothed prow bore down, and the whale heard the clink of steel and the shouts of men aboard. In anger the whale slashed his tail and aimed for the black hull, but at the last moment he veered nervously left, just brushing the ship with his underbelly, and at once he dived deep.

He heard the dull crack of a harpoon gun.

Louder and deeper came an explosion on his right. The loosely dragging mine on his right had struck the hull of the ship. The timed bomb in the harpoon gun went off harmlessly somewhere to one side and beneath the whale.

The ship had a big rent in it below the water level. It quickly began to sink. Two lifeboats managed to float out, with men aboard, and they picked up other men who were yelling and flailing about in the sea.

The whale swam away from all the confusion, and went on northward. There was now a perceptible difference in weight between his right and left drags: a mine on his right side had disappeared, maybe two had.

The whale left a wake of horror stories, each hanging on the story that had gone before. The ship he had hit was Japanese. There were nine survivors out of a crew of twenty, so fast had the whaler gone down. Their radioman tapped out his message until he was drowned in mid-sentence:
STRUCK BY WHALE BEARING MINES. RAPIDLY SINKING LATITUDE
. . . . He had given his position first and had been repeating it with his SOS but, when rescue came, there was nothing to be found save the two lonely lifeboats and their nine. The local seas were alerted against the killer whale. The rescued sailors could not tell how many mines the whale had been carrying, whole chains of them on both sides of him at any rate.

Whalers were asked to destroy the whale at any cost, in their own interests. The whale would be slow because of the mines on him, but he was extremely dangerous, like an armed madman. It made a spectacular news story, even though there were no pictures.

Within twenty-four hours, a hunt was on, and whalers were using searchlights at night to scan the sea’s surface. The strategy of the Japanese and Russian vessels was to keep in touch by radio, to go about their usual business but, if the whale was sighted, to announce it to the other ships at once. Then they would encircle the whale and fire harpoon guns and also possibly detonate some of the mines.

The whale was next sighted two hundred nautical miles north of where the Japanese vessel had sunk. The time was 2 in the morning, the dead of night in November in the northern hemisphere, and there was no moon. But the converging ships, some at greater distance than others from their objective, made the seascape almost light, or at least as if flooded with moonlight, milky, grey. The port lights of the little ships weaved and bobbed like drops of blood in the eerie theater of battle, which covered hundreds of meters at first.

The whale was aware of the lights above him, of the churning noises of the ships’ motors which came gradually closer, louder in his ears. He was tired to the point of illogic and desperation. First one ship had pursued him, then a second, and now perhaps there were eight or nine. He was aware that they formed a ring around him. Nothing like this had ever happened before. He breathed while he could, in snatches, preparing himself for a dash to freedom. The circle of light was after all loose and some distance away. Here came the first ship, hard for him.

The whale dived with a flash of his tail in the air. Above and behind him a harpoon gun went off in the water. He swam straight on under and beyond the ring, but the weights hurt him, and finally he had to come up, had to exhale, marking his position, he knew.

And the ships came on quite fast, circling him easily, as if he had covered no distance at all. He would fight. The wind blew hard and cold, and the ships bobbed as they came cautiously toward him. The whale could actually see a harpoon gun swing on one ship, and he dived at once and headed for this vessel. Just at the point of ramming—which the whale would not have done because the ship had a metal hull—the whale swerved left.

Alongside and behind him the weights followed, and one struck the whaler’s side below the surface.

A gun-fired harpoon sped through the water above the whale’s back, and exploded a few seconds later. The whale rose briefly, seeking a gap through which to escape, but the ships were even closer together. The whale impulsively charged a ship’s side, and at the last moment dived under it. There followed another subaqueous boom that wounded a fin of the whale’s tail. In fact, the whale began to bleed from this and badly. The sudden pain made the whale veer left, back into the deadly circle. By accident, a mine among those on the whale’s left side struck a keel at its exact center, and tore a hole.

The men on the ships screamed and shouted like mad things. Harpoon guns went off as if fired at random. Two Russian and two Japanese ships were now sinking. The men only half understood one another, but their goal was in common, or had been, to kill the whale. But some commanding officers were now ready to halt the chase in favor of getting out lifeboats and saving their men by transferring them to vessels still afloat.

One man on a Russian ship saw the dread swath of ripples heading directly for his ship and cried out.

The whale was aiming with a painful slowness for the Russian vessel, dived under its hull, and one, maybe two explosions followed as soon as the whale had cleared the other side. This tipped the Russian whaler almost on its beam end, causing a harpoon gun to miss its aim, and the harpoon pierced the breast of a Japanese captain who stood boldly on his tossing deck thirty meters away. The distracted Russian sailor started the winch, and the remains of the Japanese captain were dragged overboard and hauled toward the Russian vessel which was beginning to sink.

“There’s
two
whales!” yelled a man in Russian.

“No!
NO!
” came a shrill Japanese voice in Russian. “Look! There he is again!”