Call of the Whales (8 page)

We practically held our breaths, allowing the air to escape from our bodies only very slowly and quietly, desperate to make ourselves invisible, inaudible, not there. Occasionally a whale breached, its huge body suddenly ungainly out of the water, lumbering as a hippopotamus. One whale let out its giant blow so close that we were both drenched in the warm, salty, fishy mist
of its breath, and we could hear its soft whining calls, as if it was talking, complaining, to itself. But still we sat motionless in our boat, and waited for all the whales to swim by.

They kept coming, pod after pod of them, with short gaps in between, swishing and flickering, always avoiding the boat, though they swam very near to it. It was as if they were aware it was there, and they were swimming around the obstruction it caused on the surface. We could see the swift movements of their tails as they swam, displacing the water and propelling them forward, and occasionally we saw a whale nose an ice floe out of the way.

Still they came, and still we sat, and the sky started to get that flushed look I now knew was the beginning of the sunset. My shoulders ached, partly with the effort of paddling, but mostly with the effort of sitting still. My feet were like two overgrown ice cubes slithering about in the bilge-water on the floor of the boat. And still we sat and still the whales swam by.

At last, they passed on, but even after we ceased to see the great underwater shadows and to hear their whines and soft screeches, we sat still for a long time, just in case, in the air that seemed to reverberate with the whales’ yearning hoots even after they’d swum out of earshot.

Henry shifted beside me and expelled a long, sighing outbreath. He stretched then and picked up his paddle. I did the same, and soon we were moving to the shore again, our aching limbs urging the boat forward as the sky deepened.

‘Wasn’t that …’ I cast about for a word. ‘Scary’ came to mind, but although it had been scary, that wasn’t the word
I wanted. ‘… weird?’ I finished, though ‘weird’ wasn’t really the word I wanted either.

‘Weird,’ said Henry. ‘Almost … what’s that word? Mystical.’

A little shiver went through me when he said it. That was the word I’d wanted, but I’d probably have been embarrassed to say it even if I could have thought of it.

I nodded, but then the spell was broken and I laughed. It was all too much, and we needed to break the terrible tension.

‘Verrry myshticle,’ I said, exaggerating my Irish accent. ‘Verry, verry myshticle indeed. That was a very myshticle shower of whale blow, wasn’t it. Myshticle and mishty, ahh!’

Henry laughed too and his shoulders shook.

We laughed, but then we were only boys. We didn’t know how to talk about it, but we knew it was true. It
had
been mystical.

We paddled on for a bit, and then I said: ‘I wouldn’t blame them if they’d killed us.’

‘Who?’ asked Henry.

‘The whales.’

‘Why would they want to kill us?’

‘Because we killed one of them.’

‘Yes, but that was a hunt,’ said Henry. ‘We didn’t kill the whale out of anger.’

‘What difference does that make? You kill it, it’s dead.’

‘All the difference. If we were fighting the whales, if we were killing them for fun or because we wanted to get rid of them, then they would be angry. But when we hunt, we pray for the whale, we ask the whale to give itself up to feed the people. We release its spirit. There’s no need for
anger. That’s just how things are. The whales know that.’

He sounded very sure of himself, but I couldn’t agree. How could the whales know a thing like that? It didn’t make any sense. And I noticed that for all his talk, Henry had been just as anxious as I was not to disturb the whales when they swam near our boat. But I didn’t argue. I just kept paddling.

‘Like the bear in the story,’ Henry added.

‘What?’

‘The bear in the story. The story is about how the people and the animals help each other.’

Yes, but that’s a fairytale, I thought to myself, but I didn’t say so out loud.

We made much better progress with the umiaq now that there were two of us and pretty soon the ice shore seemed reachable. There were figures standing about on the ice, watching us. They seemed to be getting umiaqs ready to come out to meet us, but I think when they saw that we were making good progress, they held back. As we came closer, I saw that two of the people were my dad and Henry’s dad and they had a pair of binoculars that they kept passing from one to the other. When they could see us getting closer, they started punching each other encouragingly on the upper arms and hallooing and roaring and waving their arms at us.

‘How on earth did you manage an umiaq on your own?’ asked Dad, as he put out his hand to help me ashore.

‘I have … absolutely … no idea,’ I said, putting my foot on ‘dry land’. The words came out like washing from a wringer, all stretched and squeezed. It seemed to hurt my chest to talk.

That’s the last thing I remember, my dad’s hand under
my elbow and my feet touching the pack ice. My dad said I collapsed at his feet. Exhaustion, he said. I don’t think so. I think it was sheer relief.

15

The Whale Feast

I
don’t remember the next bit, because I was out of it, but Dad and Henry told me what happened. I went all floppy, Dad said, so they had to give me brandy – they forced it between my lips – and make a stretcher out of whale bones and sleeping bags and put me on it and drag me back over the ice, semi-conscious and hallucinating, on a sled. But I recovered pretty quickly once I got warmed up and got something to eat and drink.

Now I was sitting up in bed, wriggling my toes in a pair of deliciously warm furry socks Leah had made me put on.

‘Dad,’ I said, ‘Mum …’

‘… doesn’t need to hear about this, right?’

‘Right. It would only …’

‘… worry her, I know.’

It didn’t strike me at the time, but Dad was just as quick to hide my adventures from Mum as I was. Maybe he thought she’d think he wasn’t looking after me properly.

‘Well,’ Dad said then, ‘I think Turaq would be proud of you.’

‘Turaq?’ I said groggily.

‘Turaq. Remember Turaq?’

‘Of course I remember Turaq. The guy with the parka. Said nothing much. Saved my life.’

‘That’s right,’ said Dad. ‘Like you saved Henry’s.’

I thought for a while about that. It sounded very grand.

‘Did I?’

‘Of course you did.’ Dad beamed at me and gave me a quick hug, quick enough so I couldn’t squirm out of it. ‘You saved his life, and you risked your own life to do it. You were very brave.’

Brave? Me? Brave? Maybe I was, I thought, maybe I had saved Henry’s life. Yes, I suppose I must have. You did hear stories about hunters being taken out to sea on break-off ice floes and never being heard of again. I was glad that hadn’t happened to Henry. I liked him.

‘So it’s like what Turaq’s grandma said,’ I said.

‘Exactly,’ Dad agreed.

Henry told us later what had happened. He’d gone walking close to the edge of the ice and he’d got engrossed in watching some whales out to sea, and before he knew it, the section of the ice he was standing on broke away and floated off out across the water. He thought at first he might leap off and make it to the shore, but suddenly the channel between him and the shore widened, and he had no chance of jumping. He thought about swimming, but he figured water would be dangerously cold. He knew how quickly hypothermia could set in. So, while he dithered about what to do, the ice floe got caught in a current and picked up speed, and before he knew it, he was practically out to the open sea.

‘I don’ know,’ Henry said in his droll way when he
called by to visit.
‘I’m
the one got stranded on the ice floe and
you’re
the one gettin’ all the attention. What you gotta do to get noticed round here? – Oh, I know. Collapse.’

‘No,’ I said indignantly. ‘You’ve got to be a hero.’

‘Oh, so you a hero, then?’

‘Of course I am,’ I said. ‘Tiger Tyke the Life-Saver, that’s me!’

‘Well, I suppose I have to admit you did save my life. You can call that being a hero if you like. Some people think the village’d be better off without dreamers like me.’

‘Are you fishing for compliments?’ I asked, ‘or are you just running yourself down to make out I’m not a hero?’

‘Umm,’ said Henry. ‘I’m not sure. But if it makes you feel better, thanks for saving my life.’

‘You don’t sound very sincere,’ I said.

‘What you want, I gotta lick your mukluks?’

‘No. Just make me a nice cup of tea, maybe.’

‘You and your tea! You’re a tea-addict, you know that? But OK, life-saver, only then you get up. We’re going to have the whale feast soon. You can’t miss that.’

The whale feast happened after the whaling crews all came home and the meat was distributed, first among the villagers in general, and then among the crew that took the whale. Every family got enough so they had meat to put in the ice for eating in the winter when food was scarcer. But not all the meat was stored for later. Some of it was eaten fresh, at the whale feast, which was held in Matulik’s house, because it was Matulik’s crew that caught the whale. I was still feeling bad about the poor bowhead whale, and I’d rather not have gone to the whale feast, but I didn’t really have a choice. It was pretty
unavoidable, given that we were living in Matulik’s house.

I have to admit that I did try just a little of the meat at the feast, but I didn’t like it. The local people all thought it was the most delicious thing they’d ever eaten. They ate every bit of it, even the blubber. I felt ill looking at the greyish-yellowish wobbly stuff. They laughed at me for not liking it, but I was kind of glad that I didn’t enjoy it. I felt it was more principled of me not to like whale meat, considering how I felt about the whales.

16

The Story of Sedna

D
ad got talking to Henry. He’d found out that Henry was well known in the village for his stories. Henry’s grandfather had told him some of the old tales and a lot about the old way of life, before he died, and he’d told Henry it was up to him to remember, so that the next generation of people would still have the stories. To me it was pretty obvious why the grandfather had told the stories to Henry – because he was the biggest chatterbox this side of the Arctic Circle, and so it was a good bet that he’d pass the stories on.

Dad said the stories Henry had were already known to anthropologists, but he said he was still interested in hearing Henry’s versions of them and talking to him about what he thought the stories meant. So when Henry said, one day after the whale feast, that he wanted to tell me the most important story about whales and whaling, I asked if I could call Dad.

It was evening time, and I’d already gone to bed when Henry called round, but I wasn’t asleep. So Henry sat at

the foot of my bed and said he’d tell me his story, since I was all tucked in for the night.

Henry was delighted when I said I wanted Dad to hear the story too, though he pretended not to be. He said, ‘Aw, if you have to,’ when I asked, but I could see that his mouth had turned up at the ends. He couldn’t hide it. So I yelled for Dad, and Dad came in and sat on his bed, which was a campbed and lower down than mine – I had the proper bed, belonging to Matulik’s son – and we both listened.

‘Once there was a beautiful girl called Sedna,’ said Henry. ‘She lived with her father, and she was old enough to be married, but she didn’t fancy any of the young men who came to woo her. She thought she was too beautiful for them. She was waiting for an exceptionally handsome young lover to come and claim her, but he never came.’

I giggled at this bit, and Henry glowered, so I sobered up and listened.

‘Time and time again she turned down the men who came to her camp wishing to marry her. In the end, her father got tired of her choosiness. It was time she had a husband. They were running out of food, and if she didn’t find a husband to take care of her, they were going to die of hunger. So he decided that he would make her marry the next man who came looking for her. Sedna just brushed her beautiful long, midnight-black hair and ignored her father.

‘Soon her father saw a man approaching their camp. He was dressed in fabulous, wealthy-looking furs, with his rich, furry hood drawn right up around his face. Here was just the man for his daughter, Sedna’s father thought, so he offered Sedna to the wealthy-looking man.

‘“She is beautiful,” he assured him, “and she is a good worker. She can cook and sew and she will make a good wife.”

‘Sedna did not want to marry the stranger, but her father put her aboard the stranger’s kayak and off they went to the stranger’s country.

‘Soon they arrived at a barren island. There was no house or hut to live in, not even a tent, just bare rocks and a cliff. Sedna’s new husband stood in front of her and, letting out an evil laugh, he pulled down his hood to reveal his face. It was not a man at all, but a giant raven in disguise.

‘Sedna screamed in terror and tried to run away from him, but the raven dragged her to a ledge on a cliff, where she was going to have to live like a bird. There was nothing on the hard, cold rocky ledge but a few feathers and a few tufts of hair. This was where she was supposed to make her home.

‘There was nothing to eat, so the raven went in search of food. After a day and a night, he came back to Sedna on her rocky outcrop and dropped a raw fish into her lap.

‘Sedna cried and cried and called for her father, and through the howling arctic winds Sedna’s father heard his daughter’s cries. He realised that he had made a mistake and he decided he had better come and rescue her. So he loaded up his kayak and paddled for days through the frigid arctic waters to the island, where Sedna stood waiting for him on the shore.

‘Sedna was relieved to see her father, and she immediately jumped into his kayak and off they paddled, back towards home. But while they were out on the sea, Sedna spotted a black speck far off in the distance. She
knew at once that it was the raven and that he was coming to get her.

‘Sure enough, the raven got closer and closer and they could see his angry beak snapping. He swooped down on the kayak bobbing on the ocean, and Sedna’s father struck out at him, using his paddle, but the big angry black bird dodged his blows and pecked and snapped at them.

‘Then the raven flew with a swoop over the kayak and flapped his wings menacingly, calling up a storm, and almost immediately the wind began to blow viciously and the rain and hail lashed down on Sedna and her father, out at sea in the little kayak. The sea raged around them and tossed the fragile boat on the waves.

‘Sedna’s father was seized with a terrible fear of the storm and he cast about, looking for some way to appease it. All he could think of doing was to return his daughter to her raven husband, so he grabbed Sedna and threw her overboard into the boiling, raging, icy ocean.

‘But the storm did not cease, and Sedna was tossed in the stormy waves, her screams disappearing in the roar of the ocean. She was freezing now, and desperate to get back into the kayak, before she went completely numb in the frigid waters.

‘She managed to swim back to the kayak and put her hand on the side of the boat, to pull herself back on board, but her father, terrified by the raging storm, thought that if he let her back into the boat she would only make the storm continue or get worse, so he grabbed the paddle and began to beat Sedna’s grasping fingers. Sedna hung on desperately, screaming for her father to stop and let her into the boat, but still he hit her on the hands until at last her frozen fingers broke and fell off the side of the boat
and into the water, and as they sank through the water to the bottom of the ocean, Sedna’s fingers turned into seals.

‘Still Sedna swam beside her father’s kayak and again she reached out and clung to the side of the boat, but again her father grabbed the paddle and began beating at her hands. This time, Sedna’s frozen hands broke off at her wrists and started to fall to the bottom of the sea. As they drifted down, down, down through the water, they turned into whales.

‘Now Sedna had no fingers and no hands, so she couldn’t find any way to get into the kayak, and her strength was sapped. She gave up the fight and began to sink.

‘But she did not drown. She just spiralled down to the seabed and became the goddess of the sea. Her companions now are the seals and the whales that were created from her living fingers and hands. They live with her on the ocean bed.

‘Sedna is still enraged at how her father treated her, and every now and then this fury erupts into violent storms at sea. Because of this power of hers, hunters must treat Sedna with respect, lest she unleash her anger on them and overturn their boats.

‘When she is particularly angry, the shamans must swim down to the ocean bed to where Sedna sits, combing her hair that is now tangled by the sea. The shamans comb out her tangles for her and soothe her into a better mood. When she is calm, Sedna releases the sea mammals so that the people have food from the bounty of the sea. And that is why the sea yields up seals and whales and walruses in plenty for the people to eat.’

There was silence in the room when he finished.

‘Well,’ said Dad, after a while, ‘you certainly are some storyteller, Henry.’

‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘Cool story.’

‘Yeah,’ said Henry. ‘Freezing story!’

We laughed but then Dad got all serious and started to explain about how stories are not just stories but are how we explain the world to ourselves.

‘Dad,’ I said, ‘you sound like an anthropologist.’

‘A what?’ said Henry.

‘An anthropologist,’ I said, ‘you know, a story stealer.’

‘What?’ squeaked Henry, looking all worried.

‘Don’t mind him, Henry,’ said Dad. ‘He’s just teasing you. Anthropologists study stories, they don’t steal them. It doesn’t hurt the story. You still have the story. We can’t steal it from you.’

‘OK,’ said Henry. ‘Anyway, I just told it so Tyke would understand about the whale hunt. Sedna gives us the whales and the seals and the sea creatures for food, so it’s all right if we take them for food, as long as we don’t take them in anger or for money.’

It didn’t make me like it any better to think of the whale being killed, but I was beginning to see what Henry meant.