Call of the Whales (2 page)

1

The Unicorn Horn

I
grew up knowing for sure that unicorns existed. You’ve probably seen pictures of these fabulous creatures: white, horse-shaped, prancing, lowering their fine heads to show off their splendid barley-sugar-twisted horns, with their silken manes flowing in the breeze that is fanned up by their own swift flight. People have told you that unicorns were magical horses that lived in the once-upon-a-time. When you asked where you could find one, they’d say unicorns were extinct now, or that they’d only ever been imaginary beasts, like gryphons and dragons, and the only place to see one was in the coat of arms of the queen of England.

But I knew they were for real, and the way I knew was that we had a unicorn’s horn at home. My dad brought it back from one of his expeditions years back, before I was born. It was a magnificent giant spiralling ivory object, about five feet long – much longer than I was for most of my childhood. I have no idea how my dad got it home from the northern beach where he found it. He’d have had to lug it back to Dublin, via Copenhagen or Reykjavik or
Moscow and Heathrow. It wouldn’t have fitted in the overhead lockers in the aeroplane, and I couldn’t imagine that he would have packed it like a pair of skis and put it in the hold with the rest of the luggage, because it was hollow and quite fragile. If he tried to bring an object like that through customs today, he’d be arrested for importing ivory. But when I asked him how he’d managed it, he never answered. He just tapped the side of his nose with the side of his index finger and winked.

He said this was quite a small unicorn horn – that he’d seen specimens up to nine feet long. I couldn’t begin to imagine how big a horse would have to be to have a horn that long.

The other thing about unicorns I knew that other children didn’t know was that they were sea creatures. I knew this because my father said the horn we had at home had come from a beach and was all that was left of a sea unicorn. That made sense to me, because after all, the horses you read about in all the great stories – the fabulous white horse that Niamh and Oisín rode to Tír na nÓg, for example – were able to ride over the seas, and there was every chance that they were really sea unicorns.

To tell the truth, the horn in our sitting room looked a bit yellowish, like a gigantic, gnarled and twisted old tooth in a way. But I imagined it as the unicorn must have worn it, all bright and pearly white in its youth, gleaming blue-white like a baby-tooth, and maybe – I knew this was a bit of a cheat, really, that I was making this bit up – maybe the spiralling shape was traced with just a thin line of gold, like a seam of gold leaf running along the twisting length of the splendid horn.

When I was very young, and my father was obliged to
stay home from his travels in order to look after me, we would look at the unicorn horn, and my dad would tell me that one day we would travel together to the land where the unicorns ruled the waters. It was many, many years before I discovered what those words really meant. In the meantime, I allowed my imagination to run wild, conjuring up that land of sea unicorns my father visited, and of course I saw myself riding these magnificent creatures, and I was always wearing a long blue velvet cloak lined with stars of gold.

2

Arctic Summers

I
suppose I was only about eight or nine when my father first started taking me with him on his expeditions. We always seemed to arrive in a rickety little old propeller-powered plane, skimming in across the treeline – the point beyond which the winds are so harsh that no tree dares to grow unless it’s a dwarfed juniper or birch or willow that slinks sneakily across the rocks, hugging the ground. Over the scrubby tundra landscape we’d glide, coming in to land somewhere north of civilisation. From the plane you could see the whole hummocky flatness of the countryside spread out and rumpled like a badly made bed, the hillocky tundra plains ablaze in sudden masses of blue-spiked lupin, wild crocus, mountain avens, arctic poppy and saxifrage, and dotted with lakes and rivers. Occasional gigantic lumps of ice would still be hunched here and there, quietly dissolving in the long, lingering summer sun. The villages were huddled, higgledy-piggledy assortments of wooden houses, just dropped any old place, it seemed, facing all directions, with no discernible streets.

It all looked unkempt and makeshift and not the sort of place a boy like me would want to spend his summer holidays. Not a swimming pool in sight or a cinema, not even a playground or a nice clear surface for roller-blading. But hey, I was going camping with my dad and we were up above the Arctic Circle and
anything
could happen!

My father was an anthropologist. That’s ‘a posh word for nosy’, my mother used to say. (My mother was English. They talk like that, the English.) When I was a kid, I thought ‘anthropology’ had something to do with ‘apology’, because my father was always apologising for intruding into people’s lives. (He wasn’t nosy at all by nature, or not in the way my mother meant.) As soon as our plane landed, he’d put me sitting on the rucksacks beside the runway and he’d go and find somebody to apologise to. Depending on how well the apology went down, we could stay or we might have to move on to the next place.

Nowadays, most arctic people live in houses like the rest of us, and have central heating and spaghetti hoops and hospitals and Coca-Cola vending machines, but in those days there were still places where the people lived a more traditional way of life. Naturally enough, the local people were often a bit suspicious of an Irishman landing among them with a tape recorder and a notebook, but my dad always said I brought him luck when I went with him. When people saw that he had a kid along, they thought he must be OK. They took their kids places with them and taught them stuff, and they thought of it as the right thing to do, so having me with him certainly helped – pardon the pun – to break the ice for my dad. The people usually said it was all right for us to set up camp and live in their villages and for my dad to do his work of observing and
listening and writing about the way they lived, even if they thought it a bit odd.

So we’d set up our tent in the lee of an old wall or an aeroplane hangar – any sheltered place we could find. Then we’d heat up some baked beans on a camping stove – it always seemed to be baked beans on that first night, easy to carry, I suppose – and pump up our air-mattresses, and after we’d eaten and washed up, we’d snuggle up in our tent and lie awake, watching the shadows created by movements outside rippling over the nylon tent roof.

For the people whose winter is an endless night, the endless days of summer have to be lived to dropping point. Even the children played way past midnight in those few weeks of high summer when the sun never left the sky.

I’d lie there behind the thin tent walls listening to the children’s voices laughing behind rocks or whooping from the roofs of huts and outbuildings. I couldn’t sleep while they played, and they played, it seemed to me, endlessly. When exhaustion finally overcame them at one or two or even three o’clock in the morning, their older brothers or uncles or dads or cousins came and carried them heavily home to sleep in rooms darkened by drawn curtains, while outside the birds still sang and the poor confused owls hunted in broad daylight.

It was a strange, upside-down sort of a life for a lad from Drumcondra. And even after the children had finally gone home to bed, I would still lie for ages listening to life being noisily, brightly lived just feet away from our tent in the small hours of the morning, and the strangeness of it all stirred up a small earthquake of excitement in my stomach.

Looking back, all those trips we took, all that moose
jerky and fish we ate, all those freezing places we landed, all those endless summer days – a lot of it has merged into one undifferentiated memory. My father’s research took him all over the Arctic – to Alaska, to the Yukon in Canada, to Labrador, to Greenland, to Siberia, anywhere that there lived peoples of the Eskimo races. Once you’re in the north, and especially the further north you go, you lose the sense of which country you’re in anyway. The Arctic is its own country in a way and has its own weathers and customs and practices.

But as I say, it all blurs a bit for me now, and I couldn’t tell you an Inuk from an Inupiaq to save my life, though maybe the differences were clear at the time. Nor can I speak a word of those amazing languages my father used to practise late at night in our tent, reading by the light of the midnight sun from a heavy hard-backed book and testing out sounds in Yup´ik or Inupiaq. But I do remember particular incidents and people, and the friendships forged in wild northern places still glow for me like bright beads of experience in the murky shadows of my childhood past.

3

Meeting Turaq

I
don’t remember their names, those boys and girls I found dabbling in mud-patches behind hut-houses or lying on their stomachs on icy banks and watching seals following their noses up the food-rich channels between the breaking ice, except that they had strange, sharp names for a strange, sharp part of the world. But I do remember Turaq.

‘Where you from?’ he asked, the first time we met.

I think it was Canada, the Yukon, though I really couldn’t be sure. I couldn’t tell you the year, either, though I imagine I was about ten or eleven. But the details I remember with great clarity.

He didn’t say hello. He had broken away from a group of younger children who were playing some sort of game I didn’t understand.

‘Ireland,’ I said, pointing in a direction I imagined to be south. It sounded to me as if this boy didn’t speak much English, so I spoke carefully and used the minimum number of words to explain myself. ‘Long way away.
Europe.’

‘Ah.’ He nodded and smiled, and then he went back to join his friends.

He was shorter than me, but Inuit are shorter anyway, and I reckoned he was about my age or maybe a bit older. He didn’t play much, but he seemed to be in charge of about three smaller children. He spent a lot of his time picking them up and swinging them in the air and helping them to catch up with bigger children in the games.

The local children played oddly, it seemed to me. I’d never really seen kids play together in that way before. Where I came from, kids played
against
each other. Play was a sort of continuing battle, everyone wanting to win, everyone wanting to be king of the castle. Those were the rules I understood. I didn’t know how to play their way, and I watched and watched, trying to get the hang of it, but I never did really work out how the rules of Inuit games went.

After a bit, Turaq came over to me again. I thought maybe he was going to ask me to join the game, but that didn’t seem to occur to him. He said nothing for a time, just stood beside me and watched the younger children. Then he asked: ‘You fish?’

Well, I’d fished in the Royal Canal, and I’d even fished once or twice for mackerel on Dún Laoghaire pier, but I knew that wasn’t what Turaq was talking about. Around here, fishing was a serious business. It wasn’t something you did on a Saturday afternoon between lunch and the match. It had to do with food. So I shook my head.

‘Tomorrow,’ Turaq said, ‘you come fishing?’

I shook my head again. I didn’t have the equipment, for a start.

‘You come,’ he said, and he went off and gathered up his three young charges.