Call of the Whales (4 page)

6

Dreaming of Whales

M
y dad got a book about bowhead whales out of the library and we studied it together during that next winter. My mother had gone all dreamy and distant – I mean, even dreamier than usual. She took no notice of us and our books, just lay about a lot on sofas and ate cornflakes with hot milk.

They are magnificent creatures, those bowheads, forty, fifty, sometimes as much as sixty feet long, and forty to fifty or sixty tons in weight. Enormous is too small a word to describe them.

I couldn’t get over the size of the whales. I kept looking at big things like a bus or a bungalow and saying to myself, ‘A bowhead whale is bigger than that.’ (And bowheads weren’t even the biggest whales. There are much bigger ones.) It freaked me out that an animal could be bigger than a house. Not just taller than a house, like a giraffe, but actually bigger, much bigger. Bigger than
two
houses. Longer than a
garden
. (Longer than our garden anyway.) It was like trying to imagine a world full of
Tyrannosaurus
Rex
, except that these creatures weren’t prehistoric. There
they were, in their hundreds, in their thousands, swimming their slow, undulating ways through the icy waters of the Bering Sea, swishing their enormously powerful tails, strong enough to make matchsticks of a boat. Right now, at this very minute, they were living and breathing and whooshing out their great V-shaped blows from their huge double blowholes, swimming and diving, lunging and plunging and waiting for spring. I couldn’t get over it.

I kept trying to imagine what it must feel like to be a whale, how gigantic and lumbering. I wondered how long it would take to turn around in the water, for example – would you have to reverse a bit and then swing around, like an articulated truck? Or how long it would take for a message to get from your tail to your brain. And how much you would have to eat to sustain such a humungous body. It overwhelmed me, the thought of it all. It was like trying to think about infinity or how many miles away other galaxies are. My dad said that if you really were a whale, you wouldn’t feel especially big. I thought that was daft, but he explained that from the point of view of an ant, say,
we
are enormous, but that we don’t
feel
enormous to ourselves. I sort of saw what he meant, but I couldn’t give up the idea that whales must know, must somehow have an inkling of how huge they are.

I read about how female whales made little families with their sisters and their young, and how the males joined them from time to time, but mostly hung about in gangs or lived solitary lives much of the year. I tried to imagine how they organised it all. I thought the females probably had a better deal, but then I tried to imagine a female whale giving birth in the freezing sea, bellowing with the effort of
it, and with her sisters and her nieces all coming around to help and give her whaley support, and I almost drowned in the hugeness of it all. I imagined the calf emerging and I wondered how big it would be. Bigger than a cow? Bigger than a racehorse? As big as a camel?

The thing about sea creatures is, it’s hard to believe they aren’t freezing to death out there in the depths, isn’t it? You try to imagine their lives, and all you can think of is the cold and the wet and the smell of seaweed and the taste of salt and the constant roll of the sea, and it all seems so difficult. It’s very hard to believe that they wouldn’t be more comfortable tucked up in a nice warm den somewhere, especially when you are thinking of mammals. Fish are different. You can accept fish, cold-blooded things, not minding the cold and the wet.

Dad got hold of a tape of whales ‘singing’. They weren’t bowheads. They were humpbacks. (The bowheads haven’t made an album, it seems. They need a manager, my dad joked, but he said they made pretty much the same types of sounds.) We listened to the whales screaming like enormous, angry violins, accompanied by the steady splodging sounds of their tails thrashing the water, their voices gradually rising to a prolonged, agonising hooting sound. It made the little hairs stand up on the back of my neck. It was like a sick mermaid wailing in a cave, I thought, and the songs repeated and repeated and then repeated with a little variation, and then back came an answering song, from miles away, miles and miles away over the wide, wide ocean, like another distraught violin, lost and languishing and longing for its friends.

7

Meeting Matulik

A
s the sea ice starts to melt in the spring in the high Arctic, the whale book said, it cracks apart and open leads are formed here and there. This gives the bowheads, trapped all winter by the ice, their chance to pass, shouldering their way through the breaking ice, on their annual migrations to their summer feeding and breeding grounds in the Beaufort Sea.

‘We’ll go in the spring,’ said my dad, ‘when the bowheads start to move. To the northern coast of Alaska.’

‘What about school?’ I said. It was out before I’d thought it through. I probably should have said nothing.

‘This is more important than school,’ said Dad airily. ‘You can miss a term. I’ll help you to catch up later.’

Sometimes my dad could be magnificent. This was one of those moments. We didn’t say anything to Mum about the whales. We just said we had to go early this year. She didn’t say much. She didn’t even argue that I shouldn’t be missing school. She seemed unusually uninterested in us, come to think of it. She just asked her usual vague snowsuit questions, and we said not to worry, we were well
equipped. She’d forgotten I had a fabulously warm sealskin parka, much better than any snowsuit available this side of the Arctic Circle.

Then she said, dreamily, ‘Well, as long as you’re back by September.’

I thought she meant for school.

We’d never been this far north before, and we’d never been in the Arctic at a time when there was still a little bit of night left over from the winter. I’d never seen the sun set up there before. It was like watching slow fireworks. Late, late in the evening, the high, bright, icy blue of the day seeped away into an apparently endless indigo twilight, and gradually the sky went pink and then pinker and pinker and it darkened to deep, deep orangey red, and then the colour faded and the light faded and everywhere was a sort of silver-lined navy, and that went on for a while, and that was the night, and then the sky pinkened up again and it was dawn.

Everywhere, the people were busy, busy. Every day the village helicopter flew out over the ice that stretched away across the sea, carrying some of the local men to inspect the ice, to see where the leads were breaking, because that was where the whales would be swimming. They hardly noticed us, there was so much to do.

Dad went straight to find a man called Matulik, as soon as we arrived. He was what they called a whaling captain in the village, and Dad had got his name from one of his colleagues as a good contact in Alaska.

‘Hmm,’ said Matulik, when Dad introduced himself, using the contact name he’d been given, by way of introduction. ‘Yes, I heard you’d be coming. What you want?’

Dad fluffed and bumbled and muttered something
non-committal.

‘A teacher?’ Matulik said.

‘Yes,’ said my dad. He lectured in anthropology, but he always used the word ‘teacher’ to explain himself, because people knew what that meant.

‘What you teach?’

‘I teach my students about the Eskimo way of life,’ my dad said carefully. ‘About your people’s traditions and stories and ways of relating to the world.’

‘Hmm,’ said Matulik. He smoked thin yellow cigarettes and his fingers were as yellow as the cigarette paper. I envied him his pungent little cigarettes, because they kept the mosquitoes away. I was scratching already, even though we’d only been here half an hour.

‘So you’re an expert on our way of life, then?’ Matulik continued.

‘Oh no,’ said Dad.

I knew he thought he was, so I was pretty surprised to hear him denying it.

‘No, no,’ he went on. ‘Not an expert.
You
are an expert, Matulik. You and your people, you are the experts. I am just learning.’

‘So what you want?’ Matulik asked again.

‘I want … my son and I,’ said Dad, beaming at me, ‘my son and I would like to come with you to the whaling camp.’

‘Uh-huh,’ said Matulik, and he took a deep drag on his cigarette. ‘For why?’

‘To learn,’ said my dad.

I’d never heard him sound so humble.

‘You environ-
ment
-alists?’ asked Matulik suspiciously.

‘No,’ said Dad stoutly.

I had never heard that word before. I could sort of work out what it meant, but the way Matulik said it, it sounded like it was a disgraceful thing to be.

‘You scientists?’

‘No.’

‘You oil people?’

Oil was a hot topic in those days in Alaska, with arguments raging between the US government and the native peoples about who owned the oil wells. They’ve sorted it all out now, more or less, and the local people managed to get a share of the wealth for themselves, but in those days it was a sore point. Oil was the last thing Dad wanted to be associated with.

‘
No
,’ he said emphatically, ‘not oil people, not business people, not from the government. We don’t belong to any organisation. We want nothing except to understand.’

‘Hmm,’ said Matulik. He still seemed a bit suspicious. He seemed like a man who had had bad experiences with strangers. ‘But for why you want to understand? There must be a reason.’

‘I’m interested in how peoples live,’ Dad said. ‘I’m interested in what makes societies work. I’m interested in what people tell their children, what they believe, how they explain the world to themselves, how they make sense of life … and death.’

‘Life and death, huh?’ said Matulik. ‘I see.’ But still he shook his head doubtfully.

He finished his cigarette and he stubbed it out carefully in an old cigarette box. Then he squashed the cigarette box in his small brown hand and pushed it into the depths of his pocket.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘You want life and death, next week,
when we got all the equipment ready, we break trail to the camp. You can come if you help. Him,’ he pointed at me, ‘he can be a boyer.’

‘We’ll help,’ said Dad, beaming. ‘Thank you, Matulik.’

‘Where you living?’ Matulik asked then.

We’d only just stepped off the plane.

‘Well …’ said Dad.

‘You talk to my wife. My son gone to Anchorage to work. You can have his room, that suit you?’

‘Gee …’ said Dad, not letting on how ecstatic he was at the thought of actually living in an Inupiat house.

‘OK,’ said Matulik, and walked off with a vague wave.

‘What’s a boyer?’ I asked.

‘A boy who helps at the whaling camp,’ said Dad. ‘It’s a great honour to be a boyer. It’s a sort of apprenticeship for joining the whaling crew. You’re very lucky.’

‘How do you mean, “helps”?’

‘Makes coffee. Gets snow to melt for water. Keeps the stove going. Watches out for polar bears.’

‘Polar bears!’

‘Uh-hmm,’ said Dad.

‘Dad! They’re
dangerous
.’

‘Oh, not usually,’ said Dad, airily. ‘They’re like all bears. They don’t bother you if you don’t bother them.’

All I could think of was the big warning sign by the polar-bear enclosure at Dublin Zoo.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Dad. ‘There’ll be lots of boyers. They’ll know what to do. You’ll have a fine time.’

Sometimes Dad could be magnificent. Sometimes he could be plain irresponsible. I wasn’t sure which he was being just then.

8

The Man in City Shoes

T
he busyness continued for days. Everywhere you looked, people were packing things and checking things and getting things ready. There was a buzz about the place, and the children were in a state of high excitement. They were too excited even to stare much at me, which is what they usually did.

Then one morning a helicopter landed, right in front of Matulik’s house. It wasn’t the village helicopter. It was a government one, I think, or something official-looking anyway, green with brown markings – not very good camouflage colouring for this blue-and-white landscape.

A man wearing polished city shoes, a suit and a puffy anorak jumped out, his hair standing up like a shocked hedgehog in the whirl of the choppers.

‘Matulik?’ he bellowed, over the roar of the machine.

Matulik came out of the house, his hands clamped to his ears against the noise.

‘Send it away!’ he shouted, taking one hand off his head and gesturing wildly at the helicopter.

The city-dressed man gestured to the pilot, and the
helicopter lifted and whippa-chunk, whippa-chunk, whippa-chunked away.

As soon as the noise dropped to a level where people could hear, the city man spoke to Matulik.

‘The whale run this year has been unusually heavy,’ he said, without greeting.

‘Uh-huh?’ said Matulik, his hands on his hips now.

‘The next two villages down the coast have already caught more than their quota.’

‘And?’

‘Well, that means you can’t go whaling this year. You people have already taken more than you’re allowed. Don’t you
talk
to each other? Can’t you work it out between you?’

Matulik said nothing, just nodded and shook his head, nodded and shook in turn, his mouth twisted in an ungiving grimace.

‘Well?’ said the man.

‘I got a telephone,’ said Matulik in the end.

‘
What
?’ said the man.

‘You coulda phoned me.’

‘Oh,’ said the man. ‘I didn’t have your number.’

‘How many gallons of fuel you use to come tell me this?’ asked Matulik, waving in the direction the helicopter had gone.

The man didn’t reply. He slid his thinly shod foot along the ice underfoot and said nothing.

‘You don’ seem to me to be too concerned about the en
vir
onment,’ said Matulik, ‘if you can ride up here in a chopper to tell me a message you coulda telled me by phone.’

‘I told you,’ said the man. ‘I didn’t know you had a
phone. I don’t have your number.’

‘Well, next time, why don’ you check the phone book?’ said Matulik, and turned back towards his house.

‘Do I take it that you’ll cancel the hunt from this village?’ called the man.

‘Take what you like,’ said Matulik. ‘And take yourself outta here pretty damn fast.’

He didn’t look back. He walked right into his house again and shut the door.

I didn’t see any of this. I was over the other side of the village working with some of the boyers from the other crews to get our tents ready for the camp. I heard the helicopter, but I thought it was the one the villagers used for checking the ice. It was only when I got back to Matulik’s house for lunch that Dad filled me in on what had happened. He was brimming with excitement.

We sat with Matulik and Matulik’s wife Leah for lunch in their kitchen. It wasn’t as interesting as Turaq’s kitchen – the curtains matched in that boring way – but I liked it anyway. It had a familiar feeling about it, even though we’d only been there a few days.

Matulik was still quivering with rage about the visit from the government man or whoever he was.

‘You people,’ he said to my dad, ‘don’ you got no manners? Comin’ here like that, shouting orders to me.’

‘Well…’ said Dad.

I could see he wanted to assure Matulik it had nothing to do with us, but he didn’t want to say anything that would make things worse.

‘Sorry,’ said Matulik then. ‘I know it’s nothing to do with you. You’re not from the government, right? Or the International Whaling Commission.’

‘We’re not even from the same
continent
as your government,’ said Dad vehemently.

There was a silence for a while, except for the sound of knives and forks and people chewing quietly.

‘So, what are you going to do?’ Dad asked.

‘Nothing,’ said Matulik.

‘You mean, you won’t go out on the ice?’

‘No, I mean do nothing different.’

‘But the quota. What happens if you exceed the quota?’

‘We don’t exceed the quota. We never do. We agreed to the quota, we think it’s right not to take too many whales – we’ve always known that.

‘But we fix up the quotas between ourselves, see. We don’t need a man in city shoes come in a helicopter to tell us. If the other villages have taken extra whales, they tell the folks at the main whaling centre, a few miles up along the coast, and they fix it so nobody takes any whales in the fall, that’s all. It’s not a
spring
quota, it’s a year quota. We can even it out over the year, simple. We know how to manage these things.’

‘I see,’ said Dad. ‘Well, that’s good.’

‘You people!’ Matulik said, but he was saying it to himself, almost like a curse.

I didn’t know then about all the conflict there’d been between people like us and people like Matulik, over whaling, over sealing, over trading, over prices for produce, over land. I hadn’t a clue, really.