14 Arctic Adventure (9 page)

‘Well then,’ said Olrik, ‘if you know it’s so terrible why go down after it?’

‘Because it happens to be one of man’s best friends. People call it a whale but it isn’t. It is a big dolphin. And dolphins never attack men. They seem to think that we are their cousins.’

‘I’m no cousin of any killer,’ said Olrik.

Hal went on, ‘I wish I could introduce you to a killer whale.’

‘You want to get me murdered?’

‘Certainly not. But I know you’d be safe. I know he would like you.’

‘You’re right. He’d like me so well he’d eat me up.’

‘Not a chance. In all the zoos where they have dolphins they are the best performers. They can do no end of tricks. They are very easy to teach. The elephant is a fine animal and has a great brain. But the brain of a killer whale is seven times as large as the brain of an elephant.’

‘That doesn’t mean anything,’ said Olrik. ‘A big brain that thinks of nothing but mischief is not as good as a small brain that behaves itself.’

‘That is true, Olrik,’ said Hal. ‘But now H you will excuse us we’re off to see if the big brain can also behave itself.’

‘Well,’ said Olrik, ‘it’s been nice knowing you. I suppose I’ll never see you again, so here’s goodbye.’

‘Not a long goodbye,’ said Hal, ‘but just a short one. See you at lunch.’

It was now mid-summer, yet there was plenty of ice. They walked out on the drifting floes, jumping from one to another. If their jump was a bit short they would go into the sea long before they intended to. When they were far enough out to know that they were over deep water, they slid down into the sea.

The water was cold, but their rubber suits kept them as warm as toast.

They looked about with great care. It was not a killer whale that they were looking for just now, but a shark. The shark was no friend of man.

As bad luck would have it they glimpsed one which was coming their way. They shot up like two bolts of lightning and clambered up on to a floe.

Olrik, on the shore, was amused. ‘They’re running away from the killer whale already.’

He expected to see the snout of a killer whale rise above the surface. Instead he saw the jaws of a shark shoot out of the water, reach for the boys, sink again.

The floe that they were on was drifting with the current. Not until it had floated a quarter of a mile did the boys once more drop into the sea.

No shark was in sight, nor was a killer whale.

They could see a great object like a submarine coming their way. It had its huge mouth wide open. Hal guessed that it was a Greenland whale.

It was a whale with no teeth.

How can any animal get its food if it has no teeth?

There are two kinds of whales —those with teeth, and those without. The toothed whales include the beaked whale, the white whale, the goose-beaked whale, the sperm whale and others. On the other hand the whales without teeth are the humpback, the finback, the grey, the sei, the right and the blue. Largest of all is the blue whale, one hundred feet long, the largest animal in the world, equal in size to 150 oxen or twenty-five big elephants.

How do these monsters live? Simply by swimming along with their mouths open and taking in anything that gets in the way —the tiny living things called plankton, also crabs, lobsters, shrimps and what-not.

This might seem like small stuff for such a huge animal, but they succeed in putting away about a ton of food a day — and without taking one bite. What an easy way to live!

The Greenland whale, swimming along with eyes shut and mouth open, was as surprised as Roger was when the boy was scooped up by those great jaws. He could not be chewed because there were no teeth. He could not be swallowed because the throat of the animal was too small. He was just stuck. His feet dangled out of one side of the mouth and his hands out of the other. And if there was any bellowing to be done, Roger did it. But if you try to howl inside a whale’s mouth, you might as well save your breath. You cannot be heard.

The whale stopped. He was very much annoyed by this squirming thing in his mouth. He tried to get rid of it but it was stuck fast.

Hal sympathized with the whale, as well as with his brother. There was nothing he could do. He was unusually strong, and weighed more than his own father, but what chance did he have against this monster that weighed perhaps a hundred times as much?

He grabbed Roger’s feet to pull him out. He could not move him one inch. He went to the other side and took hold of Roger’s hands. These he pulled lustily but with no effect.

He looked around for help.

It came in the shape of a young killer whale, not more than fifteen feet long, who saw the two boys and came to the rescue. He thrust his head into the great mouth and closed his jaws on Roger. The sharp teeth were not too comfortable but they did not penetrate the heavy rubber suit. With a thrash of his tail the killer whale propelled himself backward and pulled Roger out of the jaws of death.

The Greenland whale made off with all speed because he was no friend of the killer whale.

The whale who was not a whale was apparently reluctant to leave. He rubbed his head dog-fashion against Roger and then, in order not to have any favourites, he gave Hal the same treatment. When they rose to the surface he was with them.

Their faithful friend, Olrik, had a truck and drag waiting for them. The young killer whale was hauled on to the drag and the boys got into the truck. Away they went to the airport.

‘We’ll have to hurry,’ Hal said. ‘No whale or dolphin is any good until he is in the water. His lungs are in his chest. The weight of his body presses down so hard that he cannot get enough air into his lungs and will suffocate. He may be dead before we can get him into a sky van. Those tanks we saw at the airport -could we have one put into the sky van at once?’

‘It’s in already,’ Olrik said. ‘I knew you’d need it. It’s twenty feet long, about five feet longer than the animal. And it’s full of water.’

‘Bless you, Olrik. I don’t know what I’d do without you,’ said Hal gratefully. The killer whale was still alive when it was put into the tank. It would never need to kill again. It would be fed as soon as it arrived at Long Island, and then it would be tanked to the zoo that had ordered it. There it would be happy, learning the various acts required of it more quickly than any other swimming animal because as the scientist Dr Lilly had said, ‘Dolphins learn as fast as humans.’

‘Now we are asked to get a narwhal,’ said Hal.

Roger’s forehead wrinkled. He thought he knew animals pretty well but he had never heard of this one. ‘What’s a narwhal?’

‘It’s one of the most peculiar animals on the face of the earth. It’s found only in the Arctic, so most people have never heard of it.’

‘What is it-a whale?’

‘No, it’s not a whale.’

‘A fish?’

‘No, it’s not a fish.’

‘Well then, what is it?’

‘It’s a narwhal.’

‘Don’t beat about the bush. What the dickens is a narwhal?’

‘Something like the unicorn.’

‘All right then, what’s a unicorn?’

‘Something that isn’t. It doesn’t exist and it never did. But people two thousand years ago believed in it. It was supposed to be a kind of horse, but the odd thing about it was that it was thought to have a horn protruding many feet in front of the head. So it was called a unicorn—uni meaning one and corn from the Latin cornu meaning horn. The explorers found a horn of solid ivory, the very best. Only animals produce ivory, therefore they decided that this must come from a real unicorn. They told the world that they had proof that the beast called a unicorn really existed. Actually it was the tooth of a narwhal. It was nine feet long.’

Roger said, ‘You can’t tell me that any animal has a tooth nine feet long.’

‘We’ll see, when we get one. A very peculiar thing about the narwhal is that it has only two teeth. The one on the right side is just a small tooth, the one on the left is nine feet long —sometimes ten.’

Roger shook his head. ‘I still don’t believe that there’s anything on earth like that. I’ve been in a lot of zoos and never saw one.’

‘Most zoo men don’t know anything about it. The New York Aquarium in Coney Island had a very small one. It was said to be the first narwhal that had ever been captured alive. It refused to eat fish. But it did like milk shakes. It gained twenty pounds in a week on milk shakes. That was in 1969. If it grew up it would be twenty feet long by this time. I have no idea whether it lived or not. But up here they come and go, sometimes a thousand of them at a time.’

‘So perhaps we won’t see one of them or we may see a thousand.’

‘That’s the way it goes,’ said Hal. ‘The Eskimos kill them for their meat, which is delicious. Olrik told me that the Eskimos once killed a thousand narwhals. They left the meat on an ice floe and a gale came along and swept it out to sea. The meat was lost to the bears.’

‘Are the horns any good?’

‘They are ground into powder and sold to the Chinese, who think they are wonderful medicine. And tourists who come to Greenland like to take home a foot or two of horn with a carving on it done by some talented Eskimo artist. A fine carving on pure ivory brings quite a lot of money.’

Olrik came to tell them, ‘Now’s your chance to get a narwhal. They haven’t come in thousands as they sometimes do, but there are at least a hundred offshore.’

‘A hundred is more than we need,’ said Hal. ‘Just one will do.’

‘Well it won’t be easy to get one. They swim like lightning. But if anybody can get one I know you can. I’m so sure of that that I’ll have a truck and a drag ready when you come ashore with it.’

Hal and Roger went out in their two rented kayaks. Olrik was right — there were a hundred or more narwhals having a grand time leaping over each other, poking each other playfully with their horns, shooting down to the bottom to scratch up halibut. Those that were at rest stood upright in the water, their horns standing straight up above the surface so they looked like dozens of posts, all about nine feet high. Suddenly the posts would disappear and the water would-boil with the antics of these lively animals. They treated the kayaks like new playthings. They bumped them into the air and they actually slid across the front deck and the rear deck but never touched the boy who occupied the hole in the middle.

Hal tried repeatedly to catch one with his lasso but it only slid on to the horn and was shaken off again.

Roger did better, without trying. A rollicking narwhal plunged his horn through the sealskin sides of the kayak so far that it came out of the other side. It barely missed Roger himself. It tore a hole big enough to let the water in, and the kayak with Roger inside it began to sink. Once locked into a kayak it is very difficult to escape. The narwhal also was trying to get out, but without success.

Hal brought his kayak up beside Roger’s. ‘Break loose,’ he said, ‘and scramble out of there fast.’

Roger was already up to his neck in water. Hal threw his lasso over the boy’s head and hauled him out.

‘Lie flat on the deck behind me,’ he said.

Roger had never been noosed before but he was glad to be rescued from a watery grave. He grabbed the gunwale of the sinking kayak and held on with all his strength. The narwhal had given up struggling to get free. Hal paddled toward shore and Roger never let go of the kayak and its horny passenger.

Olrik was ready with truck and drag. ‘That’s a new way to catch a narwhal,’ he said.

Hal paid the kayak owner a little extra for repairs to his boat. A patch of sealskin over each hole would quickly restore the boat to its proper condition. The narwhal was transported to the airport.

The news travelled fast through the city of Thule and the paper the next morning praised Hal and especially Roger for doing what had never been done before in Greenland. It was easy to take a narwhal dead, but a fifteen-year-old boy had taken one alive.

‘It’s all nonsense,’ said Roger. ‘I didn’t catch him. He caught himself.’

‘Somebody wants to tell you something very important.’

‘That sounds like Olrik,’ said Hal. ‘If your name is Olrik, come in. If your name is Zeb, don’t.’

Olrik came in. He said, ‘Have you heard about the sea serpent?’

‘No,’ said Hal. ‘The last time I heard about a sea serpent was when I was eight years old. My father told me there was no such thing.’

‘Then it probably isn’t a sea serpent. But it’s Something very strange. The whole town is worried about it; Women are weeping because they have lost their children. Men are sharpening up their harpoons to kill the Something.’

‘What is this Something like?’

‘It’s like a snake. It reaches up out of the water and grabs whatever it can find on a floe. It takes a seal, or a baby walrus, or a seagull. That wasn’t so bad, but when this Something began to take down boys and girls and even grown-ups who had come to watch, everybody got excited and they want you to do something about it.’

‘It must have powerful jaws’, said Hal, ‘to pull men and women as well as children down into the sea.

‘It has no jaws, no fangs, no mouth, no eyes. In fact, it has no head. Where its head should be, it has a hand. It’s a very powerful hand and even when it closes on a strong man he can’t resist it. Down he goes into the ocean.’

‘A snake that has a hand where its head, should be,’ said Hal. ‘Sounds pretty fantastic.’

‘Come and see for yourself,’ said Olrik.

‘We sure will. We can’t tell much by looking at it from a floe. We’ll have to get on our diving suits and go down. Perhaps it’s something that a zoo would like to have.’

The Eskimos on the ice floes watching this strange Something were glad to see Hal and Roger. They were astonished when they saw that the boys carried no weapons, no harpoons, nothing but a coil of rope.

‘Don’t go down there,’ someone shouted. ‘You’ll get killed.’

‘He may be right,’ Hal said. ‘No need for both of us to go down. You stay here.’

Hal sank into the sea. Roger waited until his brother was well out of sight, then he joined him.