Shark Drunk

by Morten Stroksnes

  —

  As I’m dragged farther down into the dark, I think that all hope is lost. How can I survive this pressure? My air should have run out long ago, but that doesn’t happen. When I finally find myself in pitch-darkness, the strangest creatures start glittering. Between the shadows of those who have drowned, terrifying illuminations appear. The current takes me through the water for dozens of miles, always downward, until I hear a violent roaring, like inside a waterfall. I think that I must be approaching the huge sea gullet that is connected to the earth’s core. The jet stream that is drawing me along the bottom seems to have carried me all the way to Moskstraumen, the maelstrom where the sea boils and churns more than anywhere else on earth. I am helplessly doomed.

  There is a tornado of water. On the inside the wall is black, smooth, and shiny, with objects swirling around: the remains of shipwrecks, planks and logs, furniture, splintered crates, barrels, staves, and shattered old lifeboats. I grab hold of a barrel and cling to it, because it seems to be on its way up through the vortex.

  I wake up on a rocky beach on the other side of Lofoten Point, near an abandoned fishing village. As I lie there, totally exhausted, I can still hear the clamor from Moskstraumen’s rumbling mouth. Except for what I’ve just described, I remember nothing from that undersea journey through the ocean’s navel.

  38

  When I get back to Aasjord Station after my underwater journey around Lofoten Point, Hugo and I quickly fall into the same negative rut. When he asks me whether I had a good dive, I nod affirmatively and tell him that Anniken says hello.

  Late in the afternoon, Hugo finally gets the outboard motor back. We take the boat out on Vestfjorden to test it—and to toss a new bucket of liver graks into the water. By now the old graks has been diluted to a homeopathic concentration in Vestfjorden and the ocean areas beyond. The motor has been given a new oil pan and should be in top condition. Hugo gives it more throttle as we leave the bay, and his worried expression switches to relief.

  We’ve passed the Skrova lighthouse and are level with Flæsa when we both notice something right in front of us. There is no mistaking what we’re looking at. No other creatures can swim with such speed, and the oval white patches are very visible. We’re in the middle of a group of killer whales, or orcas. Up ahead they are constantly breaching the surface with energetic leaps. Suddenly a calf appears right next to our boat. It sticks its head above the water, staring at us inquisitively with one eye. The calf is the same size as the boat, but two whales double its size are intently communicating with it. The whale’s skin is like thick black vinyl, just like our RIB. Maybe at first glance the calf thought the boat was a sea animal and it wanted to become better acquainted. The adult whales call the calf back to the group, which is heading east, into Vestfjorden.

  The orcas spurt up from the sea like plastic toys that have been held underwater in a bathtub. Then they dive back down as they continue moving forward at full speed, as if they have an appointment to keep and yet have enough time to play a little along the way. I’ve never seen any animal that is more impressive. Once, in the jungle in Africa, I had an experience that comes closest. A group of unruly chimpanzees came toward me through the overhead canopy, swinging from one tree to another, breaking branches and shrieking as they yelled rapid-fire messages to one another. Before anyone even had time to think, they were gone. The chimps sounded like a bunch of teenagers, racing past as they celebrated their high-school graduation. By comparison, the orcas are like Italian sports cars, but they’re very much alive and everything about them gives the impression that they own the sea.

  Five or six whales appear simultaneously and surround the boat. A few of them are very close. The group is heading in the direction of Tysfjord, and in the past, that was where the whales often went. Nine thousand years ago, during the Stone Age, people in Tysfjord made a rock carving that depicts a life-sized orca. For millennia the whales have been gorging on herring in Tysfjord every winter, but during the last few decades the herring haven’t shown up for the appointment.

  No two orcas have identical markings or dorsal fins; they are like fingerprints. The male has the larger dorsal fin, which sticks up nearly six feet from the body in a sharp triangle. The female’s dorsal fin is narrower. The top resembles a wave, rather like in traditional Japanese paintings. Orcas are among the fastest swimmers in the sea. Only the speed of sailfish, swordfish, and possibly some smaller whales in the dolphin family can compare. But the orca is much bigger and stronger.

  For fifteen minutes we follow the group, until the leader—most likely a female—suddenly signals to the others that they are done playing with us. All the whales dive at the same time and disappear. Hugo idles the motor, and we drift back in the same direction we came. We’re now many sea miles northeast of the Skrova lighthouse.

  —

  Hugo hasn’t seen orcas in Vestfjorden since 2002, and he’s practically beaming with joy at their return. He once told me that if he had to choose what animal he’d like to be, it would have to be an orca. The eagle and the orca. Those are his animals. I remind him of this, then ask whether he wouldn’t get tired of eating herring and mackerel. Hugo laughs and asks me what animal I’d like to be. I don’t answer because it feels like the best ones are already taken.

  —

  We chat as we sit in the boat, which is riding on the choppy waves. Currents on the way out of and into Vestfjorden collide and have to figure out how to coexist, which can’t happen without creating breakers and roiling waters.

  Hugo tells me a story. No, actually it’s more like he confesses to a shameful secret. In Steigen in the 1970s, young men fueled by testosterone would go out to shoot orcas with shotguns. They even bragged about it, Hugo says scornfully. This sounds undeniably primitive, but at that time the orca was blamed for the collapse of the herring stock. For all we know, some of the orcas in the group we saw may remember those incomprehensible encounters with people, because—like humans—they possess both intelligence and memory. The orca has the largest brain of all sea mammals except for the sperm whale, which, as we know, has the largest brain of all known creatures, both living and extinct. The orca’s brain can weigh as much as fifteen pounds. It teaches its young to hunt, and every group is able to pass on particular customs from one generation to the next. Each clan has its own dialect, which is different in tone and frequency so they’re able to recognize one another and separate their own from other, possibly hostile groups.

  Orcas and humans have a life cycle that is very similar. The females, who often lead the group, become fertile when they’re about fifteen years old. Until they reach their forties, they have at most five or six young. But they live until close to eighty.

  “Do you know how the orca got its name?” Hugo asks. (In Norwegian it’s called a spekkhogger, or “blubber-hacker.”) “It can attack a blue whale, the world’s biggest creature, which can weigh up to two hundred tons. Two of them grab the whale’s flippers in their teeth. A third one bites into the soft part under the jaw. Then the rest of the group start to tear off the blubber from the blue whale,” Hugo goes on. He adds that not even the great white shark has a chance against orcas.

  Orcas hunt in groups, making use of cunning methods. They release big air bubbles under shoals of herring, or they take up a vertical position in the water and use their tails to create powerful, coordinated currents that render the herring disoriented and helpless. Orcas have also been filmed working together to make big waves that wash seals off ice floes.

  In Steigen, Hugo has a pair of orca teeth. If you hold one in your hand, it’s hard to let it go. It’s as smooth as a conch shell and fills your clenched fist with its heft. Hugo tells me that when orcas set to work in a shoal of herring, thousands of herring heads are left floating in the sea. It’s as if they’ve been sliced off with a razorblade, and it’s not easy to comprehend how the orcas manage to do that.

  An adult orca has hardly any natural enemies. But Hugo has read tha
t it doesn’t feel safe around pilot whales.

  “The pilot whale will go after the young of both orcas and sperm whales. If a group of male pilot whales comes into the fjord, the orcas take off.”

  People in some parts of Nordland call the orca staurkval, or “stake whale,” presumably because the huge dorsal fin looks rather like a stake. If so, it would have to be seen at great speed, and from the front. If you see the fin from a small boat, you should hang on tight, because orcas have been known to sink boats. Hugo tells me that a few years back, an orca started behaving very aggressively toward an eighteen-foot plastic boat right outside Skrova, almost at the same spot where we are right now.

  What made it act like that? I wonder. Hugo is sure that stress and difficult circumstances can make an animal snap. For instance, he says, who would blame the orcas that live in the pens at Sea World in the United States for becoming aggressive and vengeful? These enormous predators, meant to roam freely in the open seas, get kidnapped and placed in a big pool. From then on they’re trained to perform various stunts for a paying audience while dreadful pop music thunders between the tile-lined walls. As a reward for doing what the trainers/prison guards want, the whales get a bucket of herring. At night they’re parked in small cubicles where they can hardly move, as if they were boats, while water is sprayed over their backs so they won’t dry out. The tall dorsal fin no longer stands upright but begins to droop like a withered plant. The fact that intelligent creatures who are tortured in this way develop a desire to kill—which they have succeeded in doing a number of times—is not one of the mysteries of the universe.

  In 2011, a group of activists tried to sue Sea World in San Diego, on the basis that whales have rights. The court dismissed the case. But in 2014, things went better for an orangutan in a zoo in Argentina. A court was asked to consider whether the orangutan named Sandra (age twenty-eight) was a thing or a person, which would then have consequences for how she could be treated. The fact that the orangutan was not defined as an animal had to do with the relevant interpretation of the law and the lawsuit. The orangutan was clearly not a thing. But not exactly a person, either. According to the Argentine newspaper La Nación, the court decided that she, or it, should be classified as a “nonhuman person.” Even though she was not human, she possessed intelligence and an emotional life. The court concluded that if she was allowed to live in better conditions, she would clearly be happier. So the orangutan did have fundamental rights.

  —

  The experience with the orcas has undoubtedly raised our morale, and Vestfjorden seems once again an amazing place for adventures and fantasies. The sun has already set behind the Lofoten Wall. In the sky a lavender light has appeared, enameled green at the bottom. A salty new moon is rising between Skrova and Lillemolla.

  Maybe this is what makes Hugo tell me about an experience he had the last time he was in Barcelona. His kids wanted to give him a surprise, so they paid for their father to go up in a hot-air balloon.

  “We rose slowly over the city. It was early in the morning, but the city was awake, with all its sounds. At first we heard people talking, even music coming from the windows. When those sounds faded, we heard cars and traffic, the sound of machines, sirens, birds singing, all sorts of things. As we rose higher, more and more sounds got filtered out. Finally, when we got above the cloud cover, there was only one sound left. Do you know what the last sound was I heard as I looked down at the clouds over the city until it was totally quiet and the only thing left was the wind?”

  I think for a couple of seconds, then shake my head.

  “It was the sound of dogs,” says Hugo. “Not barking or baying, but dogs communicating with each other over long distances.”

  —

  We almost forget to throw the bucket of graks into the water outside Flæsa. It’s still light enough to triangulate our position (using the Skrova lighthouse, the stone marker on Flæsa, and Steigberget, at the top of the Helldalsisen glacier). Even though it’s snowing over Steigberget, we can still glimpse the mountain, so we know—with less than an impressive degree of precision—where we’re going to start fishing tomorrow.

  39

  But where can wisdom be found?

  Where does understanding dwell?

  …

  it cannot be found in the land of the living.

  The deep says, “It is not in me”;

  the sea says, “It is not with me.”27

  Only a few long swells roll in from the sea. It’s overcast, but the cloud cover is high and stable for as far as we can see to the west. The waves are long and heavy. Small round clouds shine like objects made of polished steel. Everything is looking good for a nice day at the Greenland shark banks near the Skrova lighthouse.

  For bait we have some whale meat left over from the skrei party. We’ve left it out so it has spoiled. I fasten a big chunk of the meat on the hook and throw it overboard. The chain swiftly goes all the way to the bottom as Hugo’s new Japanese reel sings. Because this time we’re using a rod and reel, it should all be much easier now.

  Hugo is wearing the special vest with suspenders. In the front, near his abdomen, the vest has a sort of shield made of thick plastic, with a hole in which to stick the fishing rod. This will make it possible for him to use his whole body, if necessary, to pull in the shark. The equipment is sticking several feet out from his groin, almost straight up in the air.

  The fishing rod is also attached to the reel with strong metal clamps. If the rod goes overboard, the fisherman will go with it into the sea. This thought occurs to both of us, and it reminds Hugo of an incident in the 1980s. On a beautiful spring day, his family was out on the water on board a large fishing boat. Hugo got in a rowboat to go over to a small island to gather seagull eggs. There was only one place to go ashore, in a narrow bay. Because of the conditions on the seabed, the water always rushed in so that you were practically hurled ashore. The way back had to be carefully calculated, because he would have to surf the same violent undertow on the way out of the bay.

  Hugo collected some gull eggs and got back in the rowboat, but he mis-timed the undertow as he headed back. The boat capsized. Just before Hugo hit the water, he heard his brother yelling: “There he goes!” The undertow pulled Hugo down into the sea, where he was tumbled around like a rag doll. He was drawn down to the bottom. Knowing a collision was imminent, he stretched out his arms in front of him, and the barnacles on the rocks shredded his hands. After impact he was immediately hurled back up through the water column like a projectile. Hugo managed to get hold of the rowboat. The bucket of eggs, none of which had broken, was bobbing in the water. When he got back to the fishing boat, everyone thought he was half dead because his face was covered with blood, but that was from his hands after he’d brushed his hair out of his eyes.

  “Not only that,” says Hugo. He is about to steer the story in another direction when he suddenly freezes. Something has taken a firm bite on the hook. And it can only be one thing. The RIB is being dragged backward against the strong current, and only a fish weighing many hundreds of pounds, or maybe even a ton, would be able to do that. Hugo is practically reclining, with his heels dug in against the pontoon to put up some resistance and not get dragged into the sea.

  Could we at least catch some sort of shark? Is that too much to ask? It doesn’t absolutely have to be a Greenland shark, I think. Recently an unknown type of shark was pulled up near Eggakanten outside Vesterålen. Even the scientists at Norway’s Institute of Marine Research couldn’t identify it. But we are confident this one has to be a Greenland shark. Hugo has direct contact. There’s nothing between him and the Greenland shark, except for the line, with each of them at one end of it.

  “Where’s the knife?” Hugo asks me as the shark hauls the boat in the direction of Steigen. If the Greenland shark goes much faster, Hugo won’t be able to stay in the boat and the knife would come in very handy. After a few minutes the speed decreases, and Hugo can quickly reel in some of the
line by putting the setting in first gear. Intermittently, the shark yanks on the line for a minute or two, and the only thing to do is hang on. Once it makes several strong leaps, and when I move toward the back of the boat, where Hugo is, the bow starts to point alarmingly upward, so I have to retreat to keep the boat balanced. Then the Greenland shark settles down again, and Hugo can reel it in more. The shark is on its way up. If it wasn’t properly hooked, it would have been gone by now.

  Suddenly the shark makes a run for it, taking out a lot of line. I look at the reel, and there can only be a few dozen yards left when it stops. Hugo seems to be in full control, even though it must be hard for him to keep pulling in the shark. We don’t converse, merely utter a few swear words to ourselves. There’s nothing to say. We both know the disadvantages of using this type of method. If we were hauling in a line by hand, we could have tied the shark to a float and let it keep swimming on its own. We can’t do that now that we’re using a rod. The Greenland shark will pop up close to the boat, and the only thing we can do is…I look at Hugo and decide we’ll just have to deal with whatever happens. If things really go wrong, we can always cut the line.

  After half an hour the line straightens out. It won’t be long now before the shark appears. Just below the surface the Greenland shark now starts to spin. The attached chain is only long enough to wrap around its body a couple of times, so the shark quickly reaches the line, which instantly breaks.