by Farley Mowat
Unmarried, and living with his nephew’s family, Onie seemed to lead a contented life. Everyone liked him, and he was friendly with everyone, yet there was an elusive quality about him—something untouchable, not to be fathomed. His long, melancholy face concealed its own mystery. He was a background man, a slight, shadowed figure who could pass unnoticed in any crowd.
If he had a confidante it was his nephew’s black water dog, Rover. Sometimes man and dog would disappear together for hours on end. Once when I was scunning for whales I happened to turn my binoculars on a strip of beach some distance away, and there was Onie sitting on a balk of driftwood. His hand was on the old dog’s burly head; his body strained forward in a listening attitude, immobile, waiting or watching for something known only to himself. For the rest, his interest in the Burgeo scene seemed passive, almost a little vague... until the coming of the whale.
From the first, Onie was strangely drawn to her. In his unobtrusive way he would make himself and his dory available any time I wanted to visit the Pond, and he never asked for pay for his services. He would sit in his dory, or on the shore rocks, watching the stately progress of the whale as she circled round and round. He seldom took his eyes off her. I was not fully aware of the depth of his absorption until one evening when we were leaving the Pond. Ahead of us the Guardian surfaced and blew and, like an echo, there came the whooshing exhalation of the lady whale behind us. Onie stopped poling the dory through the channel and quietly, but with great intensity, said:
“Everyt’ing ought to be free to go where it wants!”
As if he had given away too much, he turned his back upon me and quickly bent to the flywheel of the old engine.
Those few words stuck in my mind and led me to inquire more deeply into the nature of Onie’s apparently contented life. Only then did I learn that, all through youth and early manhood, he had supported his ailing parents and, after they died, had supported and stood by a crippled sister. His life, which I had tended to think about, romantically, as that of an independent and solitary-minded fisherman, spent of his own choice in the security of a quiet outport, had, in bitter truth, been a life lived out in prison—trapped—for he, too, had dreamed. All his life Onie Stickland had hungered to go to sea—not fishing and not coasting, but deep sea; to roam the oceans of the world.
If I had known this earlier, I would not have been surprised that he took the plight of the whale so much to heart. He understood, and he pitied her who had once been free and now was free no more.
Accompanied by Bob Brooks (heavily garlanded with cameras), we arrived at the Pond to find it deserted by mankind. We took time to erect the new notice board at the mouth of the channel and to refasten the net which the Hanns had used to bar off the entrance, and which had unaccountably come adrift. Then we crossed the intervening ridge.
The Pond was absolutely calm, faultlessly mirroring the surrounding hills and cliffs. Sombre it may have been, but there were many subtle colours in the rocks, and in their reflections, floating faithfully upon a sheet of water that seemed to burn in its very depths with a still, blue flame.
The whale rose into view almost at once, blowing near an islet on the northern shore. I set myself up with binoculars, notebook and stopwatch to observe and record her actions, while Brooks scrambled off among the cliffs to look for camera angles. There was a marvellously dreamy quality about the morning. The movements of the whale were very rhythmic. She swam clockwise—with the sun, as sailors say—remaining submerged many minutes at a time before surfacing to blow once or twice, and then sinking slowly out of sight again. Because of the calmness and icy clarity of the water, I could sometimes see her whole body shimmering beneath the surface.
She was not fishing, for there was probably nothing to catch. Nevertheless, she kept up her steady, fluid progress round and round until, all at once, the illusion of contentment which the day had fostered was suddenly dispelled by a flash of memory. I saw again the steady, deadly, hypnotic pacing of a timber wolf in a cage... hour after endless hour... the pointless and repetitive circling of a prisoner.
In mid-morning the little police launch cautiously nosed her way into the Pond. She anchored and Onie put me aboard for a word with Danny and the constable. As we sat on the warm deck watching the whale, Danny told me that a considerable commotion was developing in Burgeo.
“Them radio broadcasts sure stirred ’em up! They’s a bunch would like to run you over the end of the government wharf. Mad as hell at you for sticking your nose in where it waren’t wanted. But they’s plenty others thinks you done right. Trouble is, most of they aren’t talking much, and the first lot talks too much.”
“What do you think, Danny?”
Danny’s sardonic face eased into a slight grin. “Well now, you’re a bloody fool, a-course. Still and all, ’tis toime that trigger-happy crowd was slapped in the chops. Getting worser every year, they is. Was a toime, not long since, when a man went gunning if he needed meat. Now, be Jasus, I t’inks some of them carries a gun to the shithouse... in case they get a chance to shoot the neighbour’s cat!”
He paused and eyed the circling whale reflectively.
“’Tis a quare thing. I hears the Sou’westers Club is all for the whale now. Going to feed it and cosset it. But I guess I knows why. Might be good for business. Might help get the government off its rump and put a highroad into Burgeo. But here’s the joke, Farley, bye... a good part of that lot was right here pumping lead into the poor jeezly whale less’n a week ago.”
The launch departed and once again we three were alone with the whale, though not for long. An Otter seaplane roared high overhead and landed in the direction of Short Reach. Soon afterwards a power skiff entered the Pond and unloaded a CBC television crew which had been flown in from St. John’s. I knew most of the crew and was pleased as well as surprised to see them.
“Where’s your cockeyed whale, Mowat?” the lanky cameraman asked as he struggled up the ridge toward me. “Or did it come out of the bottle too many you drank last night? My God, you’ve started something! Columbia Broadcasting System’s flying a crew up here from New York. Toronto put the bee on us to get them film for CBC’s national newscast tonight, or else... so if you don’t have a whale, you’d better get one goddamn fast!”
“There’s your whale,” I said, pointing to the Pond, where she had just begun to surface. The four men in city clothes turned to stare in the direction indicated. Somebody gasped audibly.
She had chosen to surface not more than thirty yards off the point where we were standing, and less than fifteen yards beyond Onie, who was sitting in the drifting dory. As she floated up out of the deeps, her massive, green-tinged bulk seemed to be magnified to unbelievable proportions by the distortion of the water. Current boils the size of swimming pools marked the thrust of her flukes. Then the sleek black dome of the breathing hump broke surface and a column of mist shot twenty feet into the air, hung like a diaphanous haze against the sun, and slowly began to fade as the entire length of the beast’s back wheeled into view and sank below again. It was some time before anyone spoke; then the cameraman turned to me and his usually quizzical face seemed oddly solemn.
“Holy Mother of God!” he said softly. “You’ve got a whale!”
After that I was ignored. There was a wild scramble to set up the camera gear, and not until the last foot of film had been shot did anyone have further time for me.
While they were taking down the tripods, the producer offered me a drink from his flask. “You know, Farley, they’re treating this whole thing as a kook story on the mainland. Ahab Mowat and Moby Dick sort of bit. Funny cartoons in the newspapers. Max Ferguson did a hilarious skit on national radio this morning about a fight between Prime Minister Pearson and Smallwood, whether it was a provincial whale or a federal whale. We thought it was a kook yarn too. Not anymore. Did you ever see anything so damned big? Poor bloody beast. I hope you save its life. I hope you get it out of here somehow.”
ONE OF
THE things I tried to do that day was determine the damage done by the gunners. After the CBC crew departed I joined Onie in the dory and we rowed some fifty yards off shore and then sat motionless. Because of the exceptional clarity of the water, it was possible to get a look at the whale’s underbody when she passed close alongside. On one occasion she surfaced within a dory-length of us and I had the uncanny feeling that the gaze of her great eye—it seemed to be as large as a man’s head—was directed straight at me. Certainly she must have had as good a look at us as we did at her. Time and again she passed directly beneath the dory, or a few feet to either side, as if she were deliberately courting our company.
The slice across the base of her fin, a hand-breadth wide, showed a layer of yellowish-white blubber about six inches thick, with a dark red, almost black cut in the underlying muscle tissue. By comparison to this, her numerous other wounds seemed trivial. I counted about a hundred and fifty small white breaks in the black skin which were certainly bullet holes; but on that huge animal they seemed of little more significance than mosquito bites on a man. They were not bleeding and their apparent unimportance strengthened my hopes that the shooting had perhaps done her no serious harm. I was happy to believe that the vast bulk of muscle and bone beneath the blubber could doubtless absorb rifle bullets as easily as a bull might absorb a charge of shotgun pellets fired into his rump.
My optimistic assessment of her wounds, together with the evidence of her apparently undistressed behaviour, convinced me that the corner had been turned. With the outside help which I was now sure would soon be on its way, I believed we might win the battle for her life and freedom.
But it could not be won until we had solved the problem of feeding her. I could see for myself that she was rapidly losing weight. Her back was becoming V-shaped, and the bulges which marked the locations of her enormous vertebrae increasingly distinct. Her rapid loss of weight, together with the absence of any very young whales in the family pod, strengthened my suspicion that she was pregnant. There was no way I could be sure about this, but I had to work on the assumption that she was carrying a calf, and one, moreover, that could not be much more than two months short of term.
The picture was not all dark. If herring were needed in quantity, at least they were to be found close at hand. The difficulty was to get them into Aldridges Pond and hold them there until they became whale dinners. One solution might have been to hire a few men to run gill nets in Short Reach and then haul dory loads of freshly netted herring into the Pond and dump them there. However, I had my doubts whether she would, or could, take dead food. A fin whale’s head is formed for engulfing living, swimming schools of fish, or concentrations of plankton, in mid-water, and not for scooping dinner off the bottom, even assuming that a finner would eat carrion at all.
The opportune arrival of the Hanns with a big load of cod from The Ha Ha gave me an idea. We rowed over to where they were cutting and I asked them to save the cod’s belly contents, which consisted almost exclusively of herring. When they had finished, Onie and I took their big bait-box, which now contained about two hundred pounds of dead herring, and, balancing it precariously across the forward gunwales of the dory, we rowed to a point off the islet where the whale was in the habit of surfacing.
We let her make several undisturbed circuits of the Pond and on the fourth, just as the green-white mass of her chin was rising out of the depths toward us, Onie pulled the dory into her path, while I tipped the bait-box overboard.
The herring sank belly up through the clear water, glittering like metallic confetti. The whale had only to open her mouth and accelerate a little in order to scoop in the entire mass. She did nothing of the kind. With an almost imperceptible motion of her flippers, she swung gently to one side, avoiding the cloud of dead food, and passing on to surface and blow a hundred yards away. It was an experiment which did not need to be repeated. Clearly she needed a supply of living herring which she could catch for herself.
Reluctantly leaving the Pond (for I knew the superb weather could not last and I hated to waste any of it), Onie and I set off to visit the manager of the fish plant, who at my request had arranged a conference with my new allies, the members of the Sou’westers Club.
I was a little nervous about my reception at the plant, which, according to Danny, had become hostile territory to whale-lovers. Leaving Onie with the dory, I walked to the office past a number of men whom I knew had been involved in the gunning of the whale. Although nothing was said, there was no masking their hostility. The atmosphere at the office was quite different. The manager greeted me warmly and called in several other senior employees who were also Sou’westers. We began discussing the problem of how to feed the whale. As a first step, the manager volunteered to have his men construct an open-work barge, ballasted so its hinged top would float just at water level, in which live herring could be transported. The plan was to tow the filled barge through the channel and release its contents in the Pond. The manager thought the barge could be ready the following morning.
This was fine, but we were still left with the basic problem of how to get the live herring with which to fill the barge. While we were mulling this over, one of the Sou’westers asked if I had happened to hear a radio address delivered by Premier Smallwood a couple of hours earlier, in which the Premier had announced not only that the whale was now the official property of the province, but that the government intended to do everything necessary to save its life.
Because I had been at the Pond I missed this broadcast but, hearing it now, remembered a telegram received the previous day from a friendly sailor on the Harmon II, a herring seiner owned by the Newfoundland government and used for the training of outport crews. The Harmon was lying inactive at her berth in Corner Brook on the west side of the island and the sailor wondered if she could be put to work catching herring for our whale. I told the Sou’westers about the telegram, and added:
“If Smallwood means what he says he can hardly refuse to send the Harmon. It shouldn’t take her more than a day or two to get here. With her gear she can seine a hundred tons a day and we can turn Aldridges into the biggest damn herring bowl in history!”
“Might take some time to arrange, though,” the plant manager said cautiously. “Government don’t always move too quick, you know.”
“Well, all right. In the meantime why don’t we call British Columbia Packers at Hermitage? They’re fishing at least a dozen seiners on the coast; some of them right here among the islands. We’ll ask them to donate a few tons of live herring as a stop-gap until we get the Harmon.”
I picked up the manager’s phone and, after fuming through the usual delays, reached a B.C. Packers official in Hermitage. I told him our needs and waited expectantly while he took a few seconds to think it over.
“Sorry,” he said at last, “we can’t spare the herring. Need all we can get to keep our plant working full shift. Sorry about your whale...”
He hung up before I could become abusive. The plant manager calmed me down.
“Listen now. There just might be some old capelin seines around. We could find out easy enough. We could maybe hire a crowd and hand-seine into the cove at Aldridges tonight when the tide’s high. Might be able to purse what herring there is in the cove and drag the seine right in through the gut. Then all we’d have to do was keep the entrance barred off till the whale had her feed.”
Since this appeared to be the only course open for the moment, we decided to give it a try.
15
I ARRIVED HOME TO BE met by a distracted Claire. “Thank heavens you’re back!” was her relieved greeting. “There... that damned telephone again! You answer it!”
The call was for Bob Brooks from his impatient editor, ordering him to depart from Burgeo that very night.
“Bloody fool,” Brooks muttered after he rang off. “Does he think I’m going to call a cab, or maybe jump aboard the next Air Canada jet? Where in hell does he think I am?”
It was a
good question. Most of our callers seemed to believe Burgeo was a suburb of Halifax, or maybe of Boston. The very impatient producer of a major U.S. network show had telephoned to inform Claire that he and his crew were catching the first scheduled flight to Burgeo and would be on hand next morning.
“Tell Mr. Mowat to have 110-volt power available beside the whale for lights, and we’ll need two half-ton trucks and a station wagon to carry our gear from the airport.”
Claire rose nobly to that one. In the most winsome accents, she replied: “We’ll try to find you some gasoline lanterns. I’m sorry but there is no airline and no airport. If you can find a charter ski plane to take you as far as Gull Pond we can probably get a dog team to pick you up there. But do bring your snowshoes, just in case.”
As we sat down to a hurried meal, I leafed through the messages. There was another telegram from the Premier.
I HAVE THE PLEASURE AND HONOUR TO INFORM YOU THAT YOU ARE APPOINTED KEEPER OF THE WHALE STOP THE OFFICIAL DOCUMENT RECITING YOUR APPOINTMENT WILL BE FORWARDED IN DUE COURSE STOP KINDEST REGARDS.
JR SMALLWOOD
“What the devil is that all about?” I asked in bewilderment.
“Joey was interviewed about it on the CBC this afternoon,” Claire explained. “He said the whale is worth a hundred million dollars in free publicity to Newfoundland. Canadian Press wired a copy of an interview they did with him. Here, read it for yourself.”
St. John’s, Nfld. C.P. Author Farley Mowat has been officially appointed Keeper of the Whale and an appropriate uniform for the office is under consideration, Premier Joseph Smallwood announced in the Legislature.
“We have not decided upon a uniform,” Mr. Smallwood said. “He normally wears a kilt. But I’m sure we would not want him monkeying around with an 80-ton whale wearing a kilt.”
As laughter rippled through the house, the Premier cautioned that no member or citizen should “take lightly the extension of this great tradition in Britain’s oldest colony.”