by Jim Crumley
The narwhal is a kind of wolf of Arctic waters, if only in the sense that humanity has endowed it with bizarre legend and misunderstanding fuelled by ignorance of what it is and what it does. Stir into the brew of centuries the unicornish connotations of the tusk, and the narwhal has offered up one of the most fertile sources of legend-making ever to spew forth from some of the most irrational excesses of human imagination. It is comparatively recently that any reliable information at all began to emerge about where narwhals go and what they do in winter, and that has only been possible because of global warming, because the disappearance of Arctic sea ice has become as much of a threat to the very existence of the narwhal as it is to the polar bear.
Among the things we still don’t know is the origin of its name, and there seem to be almost as many theories out there as there are whales in the oceans. One of the oldest and most persistent centres around a theme of death, apparently because its pallid skin is thought to resemble that of a human corpse. Old ones have been known to turn quite white. In some circumpolar societies, its appearance was an omen, and thought to presage a human death; or it became symbolic of human death. Happily, I was still unaware of this when my own narwhal omen loomed above its mountaintop.
And then there is the question of the tusk. What is it for? It is, almost exclusively, the preserve of the males, but it is not a weapon. They don’t impale their prey on it (they catch fish, notably cod and halibut, in their mouths), they don’t wound rival males with it, or fend off attacks from their predators, the killer whales and the polar bears.
It is, in reality, a tooth, their only tooth. It is one continuous spiral and crammed with nerve ends, and it appears to pierce the upper lip on the left side of the narwhal’s head. Two males will sometimes cross tusks, like swords, but there is no clear evidence that it is a ritual pose with a purpose, or whether it is even a deliberate manoeuvre. One of the more persuasive possibilities is that in narwhal mating society, size matters, that the bigger the tusk, the more dominant the animal, the more impressed are the females. Some biologists make comparisons with a stag’s antlers. God knows why.
The narwhal is one of the smaller whales. It can grow to about sixteen feet, but its girth can be eight feet and it can weigh two tons. Add on ten feet of tusk and you have a considerable presence. They can also dive to improbable depths, although science differs with itself about just how deep. Half a mile, perhaps. Its unique underwater life, and especially its under-ice life, is where the waters really start to muddy.
But when one appeared in a Highland sky to adorn a winter sunset, the effect was magical. The tusk extended levelly across the sky, tapering, to end in a perfect point above the sunken sun, so that it was tipped with gold. The head of the narwhal cloud flamed briefly, while its underside beneath the tail echoed that shade more palely, a gentler flame. I had never seen a cloud like that before, so I took some photographs, unaware for the moment that right then and a few thousand miles to the north-west, one more symptom of global warming had just dumped a new and life-threatening crisis on the narwhal’s distinguished head, and then there was the coincidence of what followed. The particular nature of what a Highland winter has become, a disjointed series of the briefest fragments of snowy and frosty weather punctuating long and turgid swathes of mild grey gloom, and of which the winter of 2016–17 would prove to be the most convincing example yet, is global warming writ large and indelibly. Believe in it.
If you have been writing about nature for a living for thirty years, and studying it for rather longer, your perspective is arguably as valid as anyone’s. If you weigh the verdict of those sources you trust among the world’s biologists, ecologists and nature writers of, say, the last 200 years, then set that in the context of what you have seen and questioned for yourself, then there is only one reasonable conclusion. It is that global warming is no longer a disaster waiting to happen – it has begun, it is already happening, and it is travelling with terrifying speed towards the point beyond which it will not be reversible. Right now, I think that winter itself may be halfway towards extinction, that the wild year will soon be measurable in three seasons – a spring that lasts from February to May, summer from June to September, and autumn from October to January. There will be savours of those winters of memory from time to time, but they will be fragments that conjure up little more than nostalgia. We would get the storms, the fleeting shades of the season formerly known as winter, but no more seasons of sustained snow and ice, no more weeks at a time of a land locked up in sub-zero temperatures. In winter’s place there has emerged a troublesome species of climate chaos. And the idea of four seasons will be reduced to a piece of music by Vivaldi.
Which brings me back to the plight of the narwhal. The narwhal is an Arctic specialist. Unlike many whale species, it doesn’t migrate to warmer waters, but remains in Arctic waters all year where it can live under the sea ice. At the time the narwhal-shaped cloud appeared in the Trossachs sky, and quite unknown to me then, narwhal on the north coast of Canada’s Baffin Island were having a specific problem. That problem was killer whales. But the reason they were having a problem with killer whales at all is global warming. In February 2017, the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans published the findings of their study of the narwhal’s particular problem. The presence of killer whales, said the study, “is intimidating the narwhal into drastically altered behaviour. It’s another symptom of how climate change is remaking the delicate northern environment.”
Most narwhal “overwinter” (if I am right about the near future, we are going to have to find a new verb for that idea soon) for up to five months under sea ice around Baffin Bay and Davis Strait. But 5,000 of them spend the summer in Admiralty Inlet on the north coast of Baffin Island and 500 miles north of the Arctic Circle. There, they have been accustomed to enjoy the protection of sea ice. Crucially, as far as the narwhal are concerned, killer whales don’t like sea ice, so their presence in these, the narwhal’s calving grounds, had always been limited. But the rapid decline of the summer sea ice means that the narwhal are much more accessible. So the killer whales have started to arrive in greater numbers, arrive earlier and stay longer.
“Inlet” is a deceptive word in the circumstances, inviting thoughts of tranquillity and landscape intimacy. Admiralty Inlet is huge – almost 200 miles long and thirty wide. Historically, the narwhal hunted between two and six miles offshore. But now, whenever the killers are present anywhere at all in the inlet, the narwhal “cower” (the revealing word used by the Canadian study) within 500 yards of the shore. They have a unique system of communication between groups which spreads the word of the killers’ presence several miles out to sea, so they cower inshore, and they become easy pickings in what had always been one of the richest and safest of hunting grounds. One of the study report’s authors said that “the narwhal are scared to death”. Then he offered this chilling thought:
Most traditional science views changes from the bottom up – the food supply changes and it ripples its way up the food chain. A few of us believe the changes can happen from the top down and be just as significant.
As in nature, so in politics: changes can happen from the top down and be just as significant, witness the behaviour of the Trump administration in Washington.
It is hard to overstate the significance of Arctic sea ice in terms of nature’s own ideas about what constitutes a healthy planet. The ice’s underside is densely coated with algae, the essential original source of a chain reaction that reverberates out into the oceanic world. These feed zooplankton, unimaginably large clouds of which drift through the upper layers of the sea. They are, in turn, devoured in unimaginably large quantities by fish like cod. The fish feed seabirds and narwhal, and the ringed seals that feed the polar bears and (once the bears have had their fill) the Arctic foxes. Ice binds all this together. Ice-thirled seals, like the ringed seals, are not comfortable hauled out on a beach; they are vulnerable there. But out on the ice they can rest up direct
ly above their feeding grounds. And ice is where they have their pups. And ice is also how the bears reach the seals.
Narwhal seem to be able to read the ice like no other creature in the Arctic Ocean. When a “lead” (a channel of temporarily open water in an ice field) is about to close, trapping them under an extent of ice too long for them to travel on a single breath, they sense the advent of the change and they leave. This kind of specialised sensitivity to their ice world is also communicated around different groups of narwhal by methods that are still not completely understood. Scientists have talked of tape recordings of narwhal being “saturated” with the tumult of their acoustic emissions.
Such intuitive genius is not lost on this Scottish nature writer, observing in some detail the nature of this winter of 2016–17 in his own part of the world and finding it bestrewn with admittedly smaller symptoms of the chaotic phenomenon that is climate change. But it bears repeating what John Muir knew 120 years ago when he was writing My First Summer in the Sierra:
When we try to pick out anything by itself we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.
We know that too, of course, but we forget we know it, or we choose to ignore that we know it, and then the facts get in the way and we remember again, when it’s too late. Satellite records from America’s National Snow and Ice Data Center showed that in February 2017, the extent of Arctic sea ice averaged 5.51 million square miles, “the lowest February extent in the 38-year satellite record”, and 15,400 square miles less than 2016. The summer sea ice of 2016 reached a “statistical tie” for the second lowest Arctic sea ice minimum at 1.6 million square miles, and only 290,000 square miles more than the record low point in 2012. If these numbers sound comfortingly large to you, then consider this: in the first thirty-eight years of these records, two million square miles of midwinter sea ice simply disappeared – two million and counting. And how far away can we possibly be before the Arctic summer sea ice disappears altogether? And, because “when we try to pick out anything by itself we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe”, it stands to reason that the consequences will be far-reaching.
Some more numbers for you to consider, courtesy of my Alaskan friend, the writer and teacher Nancy Lord, in her book Early Warming (Counterpoint, 2011):
I know these numbers: White sea ice reflects about eighty per cent of the sun’s heat, blue water absorbs ninety per cent.
And these: Twenty years ago, eighty per cent of Arctic ice was at least ten years old; in 2007 only three per cent was that old.
And this fact: The Arctic has been ice-free in summer before, but, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, scientists have confidence that the last time was 125,000 years ago . . .
The melting of the polar ice sheets may be seen as a kind of global shorthand for climate change at work, but I can perhaps be forgiven for wondering what nature was up to when it grafted a narwhal onto a Trossachs skyline.
Chapter Seven
Solstice
The year dwined towards midwinter. The sun had been a fleeting, pale-faced stranger in the hills, the snow when it came was deep and wet high up, but the temperature never stayed low enough for long enough to stabilise it, so it leaked water by the ton into dark gullies wrapped in long, skinny and restless fragments of cloud that drifted and reshaped and disintegrated before a cold, clammy, listless wind. One morning, the mountainside was striped with white-foaming burns, hoarse and loud-mouthed. They charged down the gullies, rain hissed on the bent and broken tea-stained leaves of withered ferns and heather. In forty-eight hours, all that had eased down to a dripping, listless day of uneasy calm.
There is rowan up there on that Glen Dochart mountainside which cleaves to a buttress, a skinny little runt of a tree going nowhere, especially not upwards. Yet it has clawed sustenance there for thirty years that I know of, and quite possibly for twice that long. Whoever came up with the adage “you can’t get blood out of a stone”, never reckoned with the raw tenacity of a mountainside rowan. I have seen a golden eagle pluck a sprig from it in its green portion of the year, for all that it is fully a mile from the rowan’s buttress to the eagle eyrie buttress.
And there I sat, holding a one-sided ceilidh with the rowan, huddled under an overhang, hands clamped on the cup of my flask, drinking two-handed while the coffee still steamed, and happed in ridiculously expensive waterproofs and boots; and still the sodden air found a way inside the jacket’s neck and hood the way spiders and slaters suddenly turn up mysteriously in your bath, as I explained it to the rowan. You can dress for weather like this, but that does not necessarily mean you can keep it out.
But sometimes it is simply part of the job, and the bizarre truth is that I was enjoying myself. There is a perverse satisfaction sitting on a familiar mountainside when most of the views are down and none of them are long, as secure on my chosen cleft of rock as that rowan, friend of the wind and the rain and fellow traveller of the snows, and intimate companion of the mountain itself.
“Intimate” is the essential word for a nature writer. It’s why I work a particular landscape the way an eagle works a territory. And intimacy with a landscape, with how nature works in that landscape, is gleaned from a day like this as much as from a blue, shirt-sleeve day of late spring clarity and endless sightlines, of ring ousel song and a litter of orchids in long summer grass. I need them all, and I need to know how they are connected. My Alaskan writer-friend Nancy Lord wrote in a beautiful book of essays called Rock, Water, Wild – An Alaskan Life (University of Nebraska Press, 2009), “I learned to pay attention, the most essential writer’s work”. I read that and I thought: “Comrade!” So there I sat in the dripping snowscape, conversing with a rock-rooted rowan and paying attention, and I felt well attuned to the hour and the day, waiting for something to turn up, and five red deer hinds and three calves had just filed out of a slaister of screes and boulders a hundred feet below me, out into what on a better day you might call “the open”.
I hadn’t seen them coming. But there again, on such a day with no long sightlines in any direction, unplanned encounters like this one were very much part of the plan. Sometimes, just being there is all that matters, and you let the day take care of itself.
The deer were as unaware of me as I had been of them until a few seconds ago, but right now they were movement and I was stillness, so for the moment I had an edge. With luck, and if no unkindly wind sprung up, things might stay that way for a while.
They walked slowly and in single file, a trail-breaking matriarch with three younger animals directly behind her, then the calves and a grey-faced old veteran bringing up the rear. The snow was old, wet and deep, and I had stumbled knee-deep more than once on my way up. But I noticed the matriarch had chosen a contour where the snow was no more than three or four inches deep. So there is the kind of intimacy that I feel for this mountainside, and then there is the intimacy a mature red deer hind brings to bear on every living, breathing moment, so that it extends to the way the snow lies on any particular slope, the ledges where it deepens beyond what is comfortable, and the flat-topped bluffs and buttresses where the work of a particular wind from a particular airt over a particular number of days thins the snow to a workable shallowness. She reads and understands her mountain the way you or I might read and understand this page of this book. She is fluent in its language.
She angled up the near flank of a buttress directly below me, and where I had expected to see her struggle in deep drifts, she had found a runnel of water that oozed from the base of the buttress, and she stepped elegantly up there on almost bare rock. The younger hinds had stopped at the base and watched her for a few seconds. If I was inclined towards anthropomorphism, I would say that when they followed they did so with admiration and gratitude – but I don’t care too much for anthropomorphism, so I will concede only that the gratitude and admiration were all mine.
On the top of the buttress she stopped and began pawing the snow until she bared a few squ
are inches of mountain grasses, mosses and lichens, then she lowered her head to eat. The others went to work after the same fashion. The snow there was no more than two inches deep.
But where was the old one? She had not made the climb up the flank of the buttress. I took a long look down what I could see of their tracks back to the boulderfield, and of the wide slope below. So I was not looking at the deer at the precise moment when her grey head would have appeared from below and beyond the far side of the buttress. When I did look back at the deer she was already there, pawing the snow and feeding with the rest. Much later, once they had taken all that they could from the meagre offerings of the buttress-top (in a moment I was handed a vivid new definition of the expression “slim pickings”, and these were on the skinny side of slim), I dropped below the buttress to look at the old one’s tracks.
They were not hard to find. She had passed beneath the buttress and contoured about fifty yards beyond it, to where a venerable stalker’s path zigged and zagged easy gradients into the slope, and where days-old boot prints had stamped the snow into a red deer walkway as flat and firm as bare rock. Intimacy, you see? That’s what it looks like through her eyes.
I have a notion of my own that the hind which led the way up there had learned about the bite of old grass under the snow above the buttress from the old grey-faced one. When the deer finally moved on, they descended by the old one’s route and resumed their original contour line and disappeared by degrees into the gloom. If they had registered my presence at all, they gave no hint of it.
I moved off downhill, for I didn’t much care for the look of the sky in the north-east, and took easy slopes above the gully of a burn that slithered quietly away to the distant river. I was still thinking about the deer and what it must be like to carry that kind of map of the mountain in your head, when I heard voices from below, thin and high-pitched and just about carrying above the voice of the burn. From the edge of the gully the source was obvious at once – snow buntings again, a flock of about thirty, every one of them clinging to the swaying tops of the bleached hill grass that grew thickly in a sheltered corner of the bank of the burn, every one of them plundering seeds, and flickering palely in short flights from one grass stem to another, the air as vibrant with the white flash of wings and tails as with their voices.