“Very interesting.”
“My ancestors have passed this information to each generation in stories,” Agvik said. “Seeing Siku now confirms his age.”
“Hmm. But how do you recognize him?”
“He has a mark like a dancing Eskimo on his chin. It’s a man—arm up‚ feet apart‚ and knees bent.”
“A recognizable mark?” asked Dr. Diaz.
“Yes, that was Siku. He comes about this time every year.”
Dr. Diaz looked at TJ‚ who was still shivering.
“Let’s go to my tent and get warm‚” he said. “We’ll have some food. This information you have is like finding the five-million-year-old prehuman Ardi skull. Amazing!” He smiled.
Agvik knew his whale was important. He felt good.
The fog lifted and there was Dr. Diaz’s tent‚ only a short walk away. They went inside‚ where a Coleman stove burned. TJ, still damp from the kayak, wasted no time warming his hands and backside. The first thing Dr. Diaz did was to radio to headquarters. He told the dispatcher to tell Agvik’s family that he and TJ were safe and with him. Then he made coffee and peanut butter sandwiches while talking enthusiastically about Siku.
“Since he has such a distinctive mark and since your family knows his birth date‚” he reasoned aloud‚ “we can be certain how old he is. We’ll send this information to the acoustics lab‚” Dr. Diaz said. “We’ll record his voice on the tape in the acoustic shed‚ and match it when he comes back each year. You did say he comes back every year‚ right?”
“He’ll be back‚” Agvik said with certainty. “He always comes back.” The boys walked back to their kayak.
Dr. Diaz sat back and pondered what he had just heard.
By 2048‚ it had been two hundred years since the first Yankee whale ship sailed into the Arctic. The western Arctic bowhead whale population had recovered its former numbers. The efforts of the Native communities to protect the whales and their habitat had been successful. The sea ice had retreated deep into the high Canadian Arctic in summer. Subarctic whale species like humpback‚ fin‚ and even blue whales now frequented the Chukchi and Beaufort seas.
The profitable years of oil development had diminished. Life in the Arctic communities still relied on a subsistence lifestyle . . . without whales‚ caribou‚ seals‚ fish‚ and the knowledge to hunt them‚ the village could not survive. Many dog teams were back in use. While still a thriving community, the pace of life had slowed down‚ and the village people walked the gravel roads of the village‚ visiting‚ talking‚ and sharing food.
Agvik Boyd‚ now fifty-nine years old‚ and his crew had become one of the most successful whaling captains in Barrow. He lived on the edge of the village with his family‚ where he kept a team of twenty dogs. A wind generator powered his house.
“Load that sled with the tent and camping gear‚ and tie down the umiaq to the other sled‚” called Agvik in a soft but commanding voice.
Emily‚ now a fit eighty-three-year-old‚ stood in the yard in her flower-patterned parka as the crew prepared to leave. Following a traditional ceremony‚ she was handing out candy and snacks to the villagers who had gathered to wish the whaling crews good luck and safety on the ice. She was an esteemed elder in the community and vital as a keeper of traditional knowledge. She knew the land‚ ice‚ weather‚ oral traditions‚ and traditional skills such as how to make the special waterproof stitches for the sealskin cover on the umiaq.
“Be safe‚ good luck‚ and may the Lord be with you‚” she said as the crew departed.
Pulling out of the village‚ they traveled out onto the shorefast ice to the north and out through the pressure ridges. It was mid-April and the ice was sharp white and blue. Pressure ridges formed mountains of ice that made travel difficult along the narrow trails. The trail was rough but intensely beautiful. The crew and dog team made their way steadily along the bumpy trail with their heavily laden sleds.
They reached the ice edge near the lead edge and set up the camp. The young boys erected the tent and windbreak and chipped out the aamuaq or ice ramp where the skin boat would be situated. It was set at the ice edge to launch at a moment’s notice. They took the whaling tools from the sled and precisely arranged them in the umiaq. Thin headstone-like ice blocks were set along the lead edge to obscure the hunting umiaq and camp from the whales’ view. After several hours of hard work‚ they were ready.
Now it was time to wait for the whales. There were over twenty-five thousand bowheads now‚ but the hunters wanted certain whales—the small whales that provided tender food and were easier to haul onto the ice and butcher. The whole community needed the food these animals provided.
“Look down the lead‚ about three miles out‚” said Agvik. His crew turned to see a huge blow.
“Wow‚ that’s a big whale‚ you can see it forever.”
“Too big to harvest‚” said Agvik.
They watched as the whale approached closer to the camp along the lead edge. The whale had the scars‚ white peduncle‚ and completely white flukes showing great age.
Then Agvik became riveted. He knew this whale.
The great whale came close to the crew‚ right at the lead edge. He spy hopped and exposed its head. There‚ Agvik saw the white shape of an Eskimo dancer.
Agvik froze‚ it was Siku. He had not seen him since he was a young man.
He is still alive‚ he said to himself.
The great whale was now sixty-five feet in length and swam in front of the crew’s umiaq.
“He is giving himself‚” Agvik said to himself.
Their eyes met; something deep and primeval passed between them.
The huge exhalations of the whale were almost deafening. He blew in place‚ not moving; it sprouted seven times in a slow pace with fifteen seconds between blows. Agvik leaned into the skin boat and took out the harpoon and shoulder gun.
The whale sounded briefly and then rose to the surface again in the same position. Water rushed off its back like a surfacing submarine. He was only ten feet from the ice.
Agvik raised the harpoon and then put it down. He nodded at the old whale. Siku blew once more.
“Go‚ Siku‚” Agvik spoke quietly. “Watch over us and your whales. We are one.”
Later that day, the news went out over the radio that Agvik’s crew had caught a small plump whale. It was one of the small bowheads that they called ingutuks [ING-gu-tuk] that were the most prized, delicious, and tender. A chorus of cheers and hallelujah chants came from town over the radio. There would be a Nalukataq [NAL-ou-ka-tuk] or “spring whaling” festival that summer where the blanket toss is performed, and the whale is shared. There would be plenty of food for the community. Some would be shared at Nalukataq, and some would be saved for Thanksgiving and Christmas feasts. It would be a good winter in the Arctic.
A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
Ice Whale is Jean Craighead George’s last novel. It was not quite finished when she died last year, so it was completed with the help of two of her children, Twig George, a writer and teacher, and Craig George, a biologist who is an expert on bowhead whales. This book is set in northern Alaska, the same as her classic Julie of the Wolves.
Craig George, who lives in Barrow, Alaska, thinks this book about whales was born around the time he was finishing up his PhD dissertation. He says: “I spent three weeks at Mom’s place writing in the winter of 2008. She was very taken by my chapter on age estimation and the possibility of two-hundred-year-old bowheads.”
Siku, the ice whale of the title, does live for two hundred years, outlasting generations of humans, some who seek to kill him, others to save him—and outlasting the writer who created him as a character. At the time of her death, the book was substantially finished; it had already gone through several revisions. There was no question in the mind of anyone involved, least of all mine, that we would
finish the book. Craig George was already fully involved in the project when his mother died; he had been a reader and commentator on the early drafts. I am sure she would have gratefully acknowledged his enormous contributions to this book. I am grateful as well.
We seamed together the plot sections, smoothed the time line, and corrected some of the geography and science, but it is Jean’s voice, lyrical and wondrous when writing about the natural world, that comes through so unmistakably. Simply, Jean George is incomparable.
Lucia Monfried
NOVEMBER 2013
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book was completed after our mother, Jean George, died in May, 2012. We would like to thank the following people for their help, ideas, and support finishing the text: Lucia Monfried, Cyd Hanns, Gay Sheffield, John Bockstoce, George Noongwook, and T. Luke George. Also many thanks to the amazing Book Club of the Park School: Arenal, Alexa, Isabel, Sarah, Reed, Noam, and Isabelle. Without their wise comments and enthusiasm, this book might never have been completed.
I (Craig) would like to thank the Inupiat and Yup’ik whaling community for teaching me about the sea ice, bowheads, and Arctic life.
We especially thank our mother, Jean, for sharing her love of the natural world and leaving us with this complex “homework assignment,” which pulled us together after she died.
Craig George and Twig George
BARROW, ALASKA, AND COCKEYSVILLE, MARYLAND, 2013
AFTERWORD
Each spring, over sixteen thousand bowhead whales, or Agviq [Ah-gah-vik] in Inupiat Eskimo, will navigate through fragmentary lanes, called leads, in the sea ice to the Canadian Arctic. There they will feed through the short Arctic summer. The combination of sunlight and nutrients brews a soup of zooplankton on which the bowheads feed. In autumn the herd will begin a feeding migration back to the Bering Sea to winter, as the Arctic Ocean begins to freeze and shut down. The graceful shy bowheads conduct their remarkable annual migratory cycle each year, seeking food and giving birth wary of predators.
The bowhead whale is a large member of the “right whale” family (called Balaenidae), which inhabits the ice-covered seas of the Arctic and sub-Arctic Seas. They can exceed 60 feet (19 m) in body length and 80 tons in body mass, but far larger specimens have been reported by Eskimos and Yankee whalemen in the 1800s.
Remarkably, bowheads begin life in the ice leads along the northwest coast of Alaska. They are the only baleen whale that gives birth in the sub-freezing Arctic waters, and the only one that never leaves the Arctic waters, wintering in the darkness and unimaginable cold of the North Bering Sea. As such, the bowhead has a number of important adaptations: the thickest blubber, greatest longevity, longest baleen, low body core temperatures, and large head-to-body length ratios. All are designed to allow it to live under these extreme conditions. In the words of the Arctic biologist John Burns, “What seems harsh to us, is not harsh for the Arctic animals adapted to live there.”
Its baleen is one of its most unusual and important features. Arguably, it is their huge baleen rack that allows the bowhead to thrive in the Arctic seas where food can be very hard to find. Bowheads have about 640 baleen plates in their mouth, divided between two equal-sized racks. Yankee whalers reported baleen to 15 feet in length. The blubber of the bowhead is the thickest of any whale at well over a foot thick in some individuals and comprises up to 50 percent of the body weight.
Another unique thing that sets bowheads apart from other whales is that they are hunted for food by several coastal native communities in Alaska, Russia, and Canada. It is probably true that these Native societies evolved around hunting bowheads and using their products for food, fuel, and building materials. Hunting enormous animals like the bowhead whale requires social coordination, sophisticated tools, and complex hunting strategies. The Inupiat and Yup’ik Eskimos of North America and eastern Asia have hunted bowheads for at least the last two thousand years. Currently in Alaska about forty whales are harvested annually among eleven villages with Barrow taking the most whales.
Yet another unique characteristic of the bowhead, and a major subject of this book, is how long bowheads live. According to the Inupiat, they live “two human lifetimes.” According to the scientific research we’ve conducted with the hunters, lifespans of an astonishing two hundred years are possible.
The knowledge these animals accumulate over two centuries is obviously immense. While no one knows exactly how or what they think, the Inupiat have a strong spiritual connection with the bowhead. It is a mutual exchange. Their belief is a whale only offers itself to a worthy hunter; in exchange the whale earns respect, protection, and an ice cellar with a bed of fresh clean snow as its final resting place. From the western science perspective, their sea ice navigation skills, collective memory of the thousands of places they’ve successfully found food, and predator avoidance strategies are the kinds of information that bowheads store away. Physiologists also tell us that processing the complex natural sound and communication with other whales may be one of the main functions of their large brains, which are about twice the size of a human brain. While relatively small for an animal that size, their brain retains years of experience and information critical for survival.
Bowheads are able to reproduce to the age of 150 years. A female may give birth to over forty calves in her long life but probably not many survive their early years.
My mother’s book captures the severe beauty of the Arctic, follows the bowhead—one of Earth’s greatest creatures—and lets us live with the remarkable people who inhabit this land and harvest the whales. She truly loved Barrow and its people. She would visit often and talk in the schools, encouraging young writers. The story is not based on actual events, although it is set in real places and pulls on some of the customs of the indigenous people. At its core, it is her story about the unique and ageless relationship between the Eskimo people and the bowhead whale. It is also about the Arctic’s uncertain future.
While some find it ironic, it should be no surprise that no one has fought harder to protect the bowhead and its habitat than the Inupiat and Yup’ik Eskimo whalers. We should all applaud their dedication and hope that their relationship with the bowhead will persist another two thousand years. While they’ve continued to hunt, bowheads have nearly recovered to their former population size and now number seventeen thousand strong in the western Arctic alone. Now science shows us that the main threat to the survival of whales is no longer commercial whaling; instead it is the cumulative sum of shipping, pollution, climate change, commercial fishing, offshore oil development, other human activities, and even, to a small degree, whale watching. As the Inupiat say, agvikseoksagatagichi (Keep on whaling).”
John Craighead “Craig” George Ph.D.
BARROW, ALASKA
2013
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