A Whale For The Killing (12 page)

I was having breakfast early on Saturday morning when Jack phoned back with his doleful news. He did his best to sound optimistic.

“Look, if you’ve really got an eighty-ton whale on your hands, I’ll believe you. Evidently not many people will. But not to worry. You concentrate on keeping it alive and I’ll keep plugging until I find some way to get these silly bastards off their asses.”

Saturday had brought another raging blizzard and, since there was no possibility of visiting Aldridges Pond until the weather moderated, I was left to pace the house and consider ways to keep the whale alive. I also had to consider what my ultimate intentions were. Mere success in preserving her life could simply doom her to perpetual captivity in the confines of the Pond, with the likelihood that she would end up as the object of a money-grubbing attempt at exploitation as a tourist attraction. The prospect of saving her life only to deliver her over to the Banderlog was a revolting one. Nevertheless, I was tempted by selfish considerations to equivocate. It was something, after all, to be the nominal possessor of such a fantastic creature. No other human being had ever had a fin whale for a “pet.” And yet... and yet I could not refuse to see that to keep her captive would be to commit another kind of atrocity, almost as cruel as using her for target practice.

Ultimately I could find no way to evade the simple truth. My duty, obligation, purpose—whatever it might be called—did not lie with man; it lay solely with the trapped whale. Whatever I did on her behalf had to be directed toward setting her free. Only so could she be saved.

With this decision made, I had to face the problem of
how
to free her. From local charts, the weather records which I kept in my daily journal, and from the scraps of information I had already picked up from the Hann brothers and other people, I calculated that she had entered the south channel of Aldridges Pond when it carried a maximum depth of about eleven feet. A textbook on the
Cetacea
indicated (although there were no concrete data) that an adult finner, swimming at the surface, carries a draft of just about that much.

The tide tables told me it would be nearly a month before there would again be anything approaching sufficient depth in the channel to float her out to freedom. So that left me with slightly less than a month to plan her release. Considering the difficulties I could expect to encounter in trying to manoeuvre such a titanic beast safely through the narrow channel, a month might be none too long. However, for the moment I felt I could relegate the detailed planning of her escape to the back of my mind while I tried to deal with the immediate difficulties involved in simply keeping her alive.

The first thing, of course, was how to keep her fed. I knew, from my several years of watching finners at Burgeo, that the whale specialist in British Columbia had been talking through his academic hat when he told Jack that fin whales don’t eat herring; and I was sure he was just as far at sea when he claimed that a finner could survive comfortably for six months on its own blubber.

The blubber layer—which is an integral part of a whale’s skin—serves only in a secondary role for food storage. Whales developed oil-impregnated tissue primarily as insulation to protect them against the loss of body heat into the hungry conductivity of icy seas. While it is true that a starving whale will, perforce, burn its own blubber oil for fuel, this is a dead-end street in cold northern waters. As the blubber layer thins, ever greater quantities of fuel are required to compensate for the increasing rate of heat loss until, if no other source of food is found, the whale dies of a combination of starvation and exposure.*

* Whales make still another demand on their supplies of stored oil. Although they live surrounded by water, it is
salt water
—which is just as unusable to their metabolism as it is to ours. They have no direct access to
any
source of fresh water. To obtain the vital supplies they need, they must rely on what they can obtain from the body fluids of their prey, supplemented by the chemical breakdown of their oil reserves, which provides fresh water as a byproduct. Consequently, if a whale cannot feed, its entire freshwater requirements must be provided from the stored oils, particularly from blubber oil. A whale that is denied food is not only threatened with death by starvation and exposure, it is also doomed to die of thirst.

Since the temperature of the sea at Burgeo in February hovers around 31°F, just below the freezing point of fresh water, it seemed all too clear that, without a large and steady supply of food, the trapped whale must perish long before she could be freed.

Food meant herring. But the Hann brothers had told me that Aldridges Pond was rapidly emptying of the little fishes. Either the whale had already decimated the schools or they had fled before the demands of such a gargantuan appetite. It was unlikely that new schools would now enter the Pond of their own free will since there is nothing suicidal about the behaviour of a herring school. I would have to find a way to drive them in and pen them there; and at this juncture I had no idea how this could be done.

Equally pressing was the matter of protecting her from the sportsmen. The fact that the Mountie would now try to prevent them from using firearms was no guarantee they would leave her alone. On the contrary, Danny Green had already intimated that they might go to considerable lengths to do her further hurt, if only to spite me for having been instrumental in stopping their target practice. There was a considerable stock of dynamite in Burgeo and it was all too readily accessible. I only hoped this thought would not occur to them but I had no confidence it would not.

Food, protection and a workable plan to free her at the next spring tide—the
next
tide, not some other—these were her needs, which I had made my problems. It was increasingly clear that I could not do it all alone. I would
have
to find help from the outside.

Before noon on Saturday, I had again returned to the black djinn of the telephone. This time I decided to appeal directly to the angels. After two hours of wrestling with the intervening demons of air, I managed, by a miracle it seemed, to reach the Minister of Fisheries for Newfoundland, on whom, in law at least, the responsibility for the whale rested. I gave him the best pitch I could muster, but my shouted explanations and pleadings brought no tangible result except a hoarseness which was to become chronic in the days ahead. The government of Newfoundland, I was told, had better things to do than concern itself with the preservation of a lone fin whale.

Several other calls to both provincial and federal bureaucrats proved equally fruitless. Apparently nobody in authority had any interest in assuming responsibility for the whale or in providing assistance to me in my self-appointed task. I suspect that many of the men I spoke to thought I was a little mad.

Although my previous experiences with Burgeo’s resident politicians had given me no grounds to expect help from that quarter, I was driven by my failures elsewhere to turn to our own mayor; but he was absent in St. John’s. I thereupon tracked down his deputy, who was the male member of the doctor team. He was a “soft-centred” sort of man, physically graceful in a willowy kind of way, and with a willow’s capacity to bend easily before the wind. Although a neutralist by nature, his response to my request for help was distinctly hostile. Not only did he firmly reject the idea that the whale was any of his, or the town council’s, business, he was equally emphatic that it was none of mine. His wife, who was also a council member, not only confirmed his judgement but stated her opinion that the Burgeo people had every right to kill the whale by any method they might choose. Furthermore, she said, the carcass could be put to very good use... as dog food. (It may have been pure coincidence that the doctors owned those two immense and perpetually hungry Newfoundland dogs.)

Darkness had fallen by this time, and the house shook and shuddered in a snow-filled gale. The devils of self-doubt began to stalk me. Perhaps I
was
a little mad—deluded anyway—in thinking I might save the whale. Perhaps the battle was already lost. Perhaps I
had
no business meddling in a tragedy which was essentially a natural one... but then I saw again the whale herself, as we had watched her slipping through the green void beneath Curt Bungay’s boat. That vision routed the devils instantly. That lost leviathan was one of the last of a disappearing race, and I knew she had to be saved if only because contact with her, though it lasted no more than a few brief weeks, might narrow the immense psychic gap between our two species; might alter, in at least some degree, the remote and awesome image which whales have always projected onto the inner human eye. And if, through this opportunity for intimate contact, that image could be changed enough to let men, to
force
men, to see these secret and mysterious beings with the compassion we have always denied them, it might help bring an end to the relentless slaughter of their kind.

This thought, combined with the effect of the rejections from those whose help I had thus far sought, began to make me fighting mad. I decided that if those who ought to have displayed some interest in the whale refused to do so, I would make them. And, by God, I thought I knew how to do just that.

“Claire,” I told my wife, “I’m going to give the story to the press. The
whole
story. About the shooting. There’ll be plenty of people who’ll react to that. They’ll surely make enough fuss, raise enough hell, to force someone out there to act. Burgeo won’t like it. It could get damned unpleasant around here. What do you say?”

Claire was very much in love with Burgeo. This was where she had made her first home as a married woman. She understood the delicate nature of our acceptance in the place and she had a woman’s shrewd ability to see the possible implications of this decision. Her voice, in reply, seemed very small against the cacophony of the storm.

“If you must... oh, Farley, I don’t want that whale to die either... but you’ll be hurting Burgeo... the people you like won’t understand... but I guess... I guess it’s what you have to do.”

The phone rang and I went to it, and it was a reprieve. The operator in Hermitage, her voice barely audible over the babbling static, slowly read me a telegram. It was from Dr. David Sergeant, a biologist with the federal Department of Fisheries. Sergeant is a maverick and the possessor of a truly open and questing mind. He had taken it on himself to rouse his fellow scientists to action.

HAVE CONTACTED SEVERAL EMINENT BIOLOGISTS NEW ENGLAND THEY VERY EXCITED YOUR WHALE SUGGEST YOU BEGIN SYSTEMATIC OBSERVATIONS IMMEDIATELY PENDING THEIR ARRIVAL AT EARLIEST POSSIBLE DATE STOP PHONE CIRCUITS BURGEO IMPOSSIBLE BUT WILL TRY AGAIN TOMORROW GOOD LUCK.

It was a small enough glimmer of light, but on that dark Saturday it persuaded me that help would come. As we prepared to go to bed, Claire and I were further cheered by a radio forecast which promised an end to the storm and a fine Sunday coming.

If I had guessed what that Sunday would bring, I think I would have prayed for a hurricane.

BURGEO WINTER WEATHER OFTEN SEEMED to consist of six days of storm followed by a seventh when all was forgiven, and the seventh day was almost always a Sunday. I once discussed this interesting phenomenon with the Anglican minister but he decently refused to take any credit for it.

Sunday, January 29, was no exception. It almost seemed as if spring had come. The sun flared in a cloudless sky; there was not a breath of wind; the sea was still and the temperature soared.

Early in the morning Onie Stickland and I went off to Aldridges in his dory. We took grub and a tea kettle since I expected to spend the entire day observing the whale and noting her behaviour for the record. I hoped Onie and I would be alone with her, but there were already a number of boats moored to the rocks at the outer end of the channel when we arrived, and two or three dozen people were clustered on the ridge overlooking the Pond. I saw with relief that nobody was carrying a rifle.

We joined the watchers, among whom were several fishermen I knew, and found them seemingly content just to stand and watch the slow, steady circling of the whale. I used the opportunity to spread some propaganda about Burgeo’s good luck in being host to such a beast, and how its continued well-being would help in drawing the attention of faraway government officials to a community which had been resolutely neglected for many years.

The men listened politely but they were sceptical. It was hard for them to believe that anyone outside Burgeo would be much interested in a whale. Nevertheless, there did seem to be a feeling that the whale should not be further tormented.

“They’s no call for that sort of foolishness,” said Harvey Ingram, a lanky, sharp-featured fisherman, originally from Red Island. “Lave it be, says I. ’Tis doing harm to none.”

Some of the others nodded in agreement and I began to wonder whether—if no help came from outside—it might be possible to rouse sufficient interest in the whale, yes, and sympathy for her, so we could take care of her ourselves.

“Poor creature has trouble enough,” said one of the men who fished The Ha Ha. But then he took me down again by adding:

“Pond was full of herring first day she come in. Now we sees hardly none at all. When we first see the whale, ’twas some fat, some sleek. Now it looks poorly. Getting razor-backed, I’d say.”

We were interrupted by the arrival, in a flurry of spray and whining power, of a big outboard speedboat, purchased through the catalogue by one of the young men who spent their summers on the Great Lakes freighters. He was accompanied by several of his pals, all of them sporting colourful nylon windbreakers of the sort that are almost uniforms for the habitués of small-town poolrooms on the mainland. They came ashore, but stood apart from our soberly dressed group, talking among themselves in tones deliberately pitched high enough to reach our ears.

“We’d a had it kilt by now,” said one narrow-faced youth, with a sidelong glance in my direction, “only for someone putting the Mountie onto we!”

“And that’s the truth!” replied one of his companions. “Them people from away better ’tend their own business. Got no call to interfere with we.” He spat in the snow to emphasize his remark.

“What we standing here for?” another asked loudly. “We’s not afeared of any goddamn whale. Let’s take a run onto the Pond. Might be some sport into it yet.”

They ambled back to their powerboat, and when the youths had clambered aboard, one of the men standing near me said quietly:

“Don’t pay no heed, Skipper. They’s muck floats up in every place. Floats to the top and stinks, but don’t mean nothin.’”

It was kindly said, and I appreciated it.

By this time a steady stream of boats was converging on the Pond from Short Reach, The Harbour, and from further west. There were power dories, skiffs, longliners and even a few rowboats with youngsters at the oars. Burgeo was making the most of the fine weather to come and see its whale.

The majority of the newcomers seemed content to moor their boats with the growing armada out in the entrance cove, but several came through the channel into the Pond, following the lead of the mail-order speedboat. At first the boats which entered the Pond kept close to shore, leaving the open water to the whale. Their occupants were obviously awed by the immense bulk of the creature, and were timid about approaching anywhere near her. But by noon, by which time some thirty boats, bearing at least a hundred people, had arrived, the mood began to change.

There was now a big crowd around the south and southwest shore of the Pond. In full awareness of this audience, and fortified by lots of beer, a number of young men (and some not so young) now felt ready to show their mettle. The powerful boat which had been the first to enter suddenly accelerated to full speed and roared directly across the Pond only a few yards behind the whale as she submerged. Some of the people standing along the shore raised a kind of ragged cheer, and within minutes the atmosphere had completely—and frighteningly—altered.

More and more boats started up their engines and nosed into the Pond. Five or six of the fastest left the security of the shores and darted out into the middle. The reverberation of many engines began to merge into a sustained roar, a baleful and ferocious sound, intensified by the echoes from the surrounding cliffs. The leading powerboat became more daring and snarled across the whale’s wake at close to twenty knots, dragging a high rooster-tail of spray.

The whale was now no longer moving leisurely in great circles, coming up to breathe at intervals of five or ten minutes. She had begun to swim much faster and more erratically as she attempted to avoid the several boats which were chivvying her. The swirls of water from her flukes became much more agitated as she veered sharply from side to side. She was no longer able to clear her lungs with the usual two or three blows after every dive, but barely had time to suck in a single breath before being driven down again. Her hurried surfacings consequently became more and more frequent even as the sportsmen, gathering courage because the whale showed no sign of retaliation, grew braver and braver. Two of the fastest boats began to circle her at full throttle, like a pair of malevolent water beetles.

Meanwhile, something rather terrible was taking place in the emotions of many of the watchers ringing the Pond. The mood of passive curiosity had dissipated, to be replaced by one of hungry anticipation. Looking into the faces around me, I recognized the same avid air of expectation which contorts the faces of a prizefight audience into primal masks.

At this juncture the blue hull of the RCMP launch appeared in the entrance cove. Onie and I jumped aboard the dory and intercepted her. I pleaded with Constable Murdoch for help.

“Some of these people have gone wild! They’re going to drive the whale ashore if they don’t drown her first. You have to put a stop to it... order them out of the Pond!”

The constable shook his head apologetically.

“Sorry. I can’t do that. They aren’t breaking any law, you know. I can’t do anything unless the local authorities ask me to. But we’ll take the launch inside and anchor in the middle of the Pond. Maybe that’ll discourage them a bit.”

He was a nice young man but out of his element and determined not to do anything which wasn’t “in the book.” He was well within his rights; and I certainly overstepped mine when, in my distress, I intimated that he was acting like a coward. He made no reply, but quietly told Danny to take the police boat in.

Onie and I followed them through the channel, then we turned along the southwest shore, where I hailed several men in boats, pleading with them to leave the whale alone. Some made no response. One of them, a middle-aged merchant, gave me a derisive grin and deliberately accelerated his engine to drown out my voice. Even the elder fishermen standing on shore now seemed more embarrassed by my attitude than sympathetic. I was slow to realize it but the people gathered at Aldridges Pond had sensed that a moment of high drama was approaching and, if it was to be a tragic drama, so much the better.

Having discovered that there was nothing to fear either from the whale or from the police, the speedboat sportsmen began to make concerted efforts to herd the great beast into the shallow easterly portion of the Pond. Three boats succeeded in cornering her in a small bight, and when she turned violently to avoid them, she grounded half her length on a shelf of rock.

There followed a stupendous flurry of white water as her immense flukes lifted clear and beat upon the surface. She reared forward, raising her whole head into view, then turned on her side so that one huge flipper pointed skyward. I had my binoculars on her and for a moment could see all of her lower belly, and the certain proof that she was female. Then slowly and, it seemed, painfully, she rolled clear of the rock.

As she slid free, there was a hubbub from the crowd on shore, a sound amounting almost to a roar, that was audible even over the snarl of engines. It held a note of insensate fury that seemed to inflame the boatmen to even more vicious attacks upon the now panic-stricken whale.

Making no attempt to submerge, she fled straight across the Pond in the direction of the eastern shallows, where there were, at that moment, no boats or people. The speedboats raced close beside her, preventing her from changing course. She seemed to make a supreme effort to outrun them and then, with horrifying suddenness, she hit the muddy shoals and drove over them until she was aground for her whole length.

The Pond erupted in pandemonium. Running and yelling people leapt into boats of all shapes and sizes and these began converging on the stranded animal. I recognized the doctor team—the deputy mayor of Burgeo and his councillor wife—aboard one small longliner. I told Onie to lay the dory alongside them and I scrambled over the longliner’s rail while she was still underway. By this time I was so enraged as to be almost inarticulate. Furiously I
ordered
the deputy mayor to tell the constable to clear the Pond.

He was a man with a very small endowment of personal dignity. I had outraged what dignity he did possess. He pursed his soft, red lips and replied:

“What would be the use of that? The whale is going to die anyway. Why should I interfere?” He turned his back and busied himself recording the whale’s “last moments” with his expensive movie camera.

The exchange had been overheard, for the boats were now packed tightly into the cul-de-sac and people were scrambling from boat to boat, or along the shore itself, to gain a better view. There was a murmur of approval for the doctor and then someone yelled, gloatingly:

“Dat whale is finished, byes! It be ashore for certain now! Good riddance is what I says!”

Indeed, the whale’s case looked hopeless. She was aground in less than twelve feet of water; and the whole incredible length of her, from the small of the tail almost to her nose, was exposed to view. The tide was on the ebb and if she remained where she was for even as little as half an hour, she would be doomed to die where she lay. Yet she was not struggling. Now that no boats were tormenting her, she seemed to ignore the human beings who fringed the shore not twenty feet away. I had the sickening conviction that she had given up; that the struggle for survival had become too much.

My anguish was so profound that when I saw three men step out into the shallows and begin heaving rocks at her half-submerged head, I went berserk. Scrambling to the top of the longliner’s deckhouse, I screamed imprecations at them. Faces turned toward me and, having temporarily focused attention on myself, I launched into a wild tirade.

This was a
female
whale, I cried. She might be and probably was pregnant. This attack on her was a monstrous, despicable act of cruelty. If, I threatened, everyone did not instantly get the hell out of Aldridges Pond and leave the whale be, I would make it my business to blacken Burgeo’s name from one end of Canada to the other.

Calming down a little, I went on to promise that if the whale survived she would make Burgeo famous. “You’ll get your damned highway!” I remember yelling. “Television and all the rest of it...” God knows what else I might have said or promised if the whale had not herself intervened.

Somebody shouted in surprise; and we all looked. She was moving.

She was turning—infinitely slowly—sculling with her flippers and gently agitating her flukes. We Lilliputians watched silent and incredulous as the vast Gulliver inched around until she was facing out into the Pond. Then slowly, slowly, almost imperceptibly, she drifted off the shoals and slid from sight beneath the glittering surface.

I now realize that she had not been in danger of stranding herself permanently. On the contrary, she had taken the one course open to her and had deliberately sought out the shallows, where she could quite literally catch her breath, free from the harassment of the motorboats. But, at the time, her escape from what appeared to be mortal danger almost seemed to savour of the miraculous. Also, as if by another miracle, it radically altered the attitude of the crowd, suddenly subduing the mood of feverish excitement. People began to climb quietly back into their boats. One by one the boats moved off toward the south channel, and within twenty minutes Aldridges Pond was empty of all human beings except Onie and me.

It was an extraordinary exodus. Nobody seemed to be speaking to anybody else... and not one word was said to me. Some people averted their eyes as they passed our dory. I do not think this was because of any guilt they may have felt—and many of them
did
feel guilty—it was because
I
had shamed
them,
as a group, as a community, as a people... and had done so publicly. The stranger in their midst had spoken his heart and displayed his rage and scorn. We could no longer pretend we understood each other. We had become strangers, one to the other.

My journal notes, written late that night, reflect my bewilderment and my sense of loss.

“... they are essentially good people. I know that, but what sickens me is their simple failure to resist the impulse of savagery... they seem to be just as capable of being utterly loathsome as the bastards from the cities with their high-powered rifles and telescopic sights and their mindless compulsion to slaughter everything alive, from squirrels to elephants... I admired them so much because I saw them as a natural people, living in at least some degree of harmony with the natural world. Now they seem nauseatingly anxious to renounce all that and throw themselves into the stinking quagmire of our society which has perverted everything natural within itself, and is now busy destroying everything natural outside itself. How can they be so bloody stupid? How could I have been so bloody stupid?”