Call of the Whales

by Siobhán Parkinson

  We were lucky. It was only a ten-mile journey to the place that had been chosen for the camp, and we were able to travel most of the way by snowmobile. It only took about a day to get from the village to the camping ground near where the ice had started to open up and make a channel through which the whales were already beginning to swim. Poor creatures, I thought, wishing I could warn them about their fate.

  We struck camp that first night, the different crews spreading out along the ice, each crew forming its own little settlement, but all close by. As soon as we got the stuff unloaded to set up the camp, the girls and women started lighting camping stoves and getting food ready. Everyone was starving after the journey, and soon the delicious smell of fish cooking filled the air.

  That was when I met Henry. He was about my own age or a little younger, short and thin and bouncy and very excited about being a boyer. He showed me how to cut a hole in the ice to make a sheltered place for the Primus stove.

  ‘See, you put the ice you cut out of the hole around it like this, to make a little wall,’ he explained – he was the chattiest Eskimo I ever met – ‘to break the wind, and you put the stove in the hole, so it’s sheltered.’

  I nodded and watched as he lit the stove and set the coffee pot on it.

  ‘Why can’t girls be boyers?’ I asked, mainly because I didn’t want to think about the hunt.

  Henry looked up from the blue flame of the stove and stared at me out of dark, puzzled eyes.

  ‘Girls are girls,’ he said eventually. ‘Boys are boys. Only boys can be boyers.’

  I didn’t get it, so I asked again, why.

  ‘Because,’ said Henry, as if suddenly realising this for the first time, ‘boys will grow up to be whalers, maybe even whaling captains.’

  ‘And not girls?’

  He looked at me as if I was totally mad.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘girls will be women,’ as if that was something I couldn’t work out for myself.

  ‘And women can’t be whalers?’

  He laughed.

  ‘How could they be?’ he asked. ‘They have their own work to do. If the women did the men’s work, who would do the women’s work?’

  It seemed to have an undeniable logic to him. I didn’t argue. I was the outsider, after all, and I didn’t understand. In fact, as I now realise, the women play a very important role in the whaling – it’s just that no one thinks of them as whalers.

  It always seemed to smell of oil up north – diesel and seal oil, axle grease and engines. Modern life had hit the Arctic even then, and in the villages there were television sets and pool tables, deep-fat fryers and pickup trucks, but still every luxury was eked out at a cost, and everywhere was the oily stench of effort. Here at the camp, with snowmobiles parked around the edges of the settlement and everywhere bottled gas and oil-fired stoves, the greasy, oily, fumy reek, tinged with fish and sea, was even more intense than usual, a hard-working, basic smell that I will for ever associate with the Arctic.

  When the tents were all up and the food was cooked, we sat around on anything we could find that was not ice to eat our supper. My dad and I sat in a snowmobile, which gave us some protection from the bitter arctic wind as well as from the freezing surface of the ice. They call it spring when the ice starts to break, but it’s nothing like spring where I come from. No daffodils or tulips, that’s for sure. It’s just slightly less wintry, and the eternal night starts to move towards eternal day.

  The whole crew ate together and laughed and told stories and danced, right through the long, slow sunset. You’d never think they were on a killing mission. It all seemed as innocent as a boy scouts’ picnic.

  Then, just as the air was turning that eerie silvery-navy colour that counted as night up there in the spring time, Matulik stood up and waved his arms for silence. Everyone stopped what they were doing and listened. We listened and listened in the deep blue air, our noses freezing, and the skin on our faces prickling with the cold. I pulled my sealskin parka around me, thinking of Turaq, wondering if he’d ever been a boyer with a whaling crew. I hoped he was OK, wherever he was.

  And then we heard it. I seemed to feel it right inside my body, rather than just hear it, the way you can feel the percussion section in an orchestra if you sit close up. The steady rumble of movement in the water, the occasional splosh in the night and the grunts and clicks of concentration made by the bowhead whales pushing their way through the ice fields in the sea, just as we had pushed our way earlier through the piled up ice to get here. The bowhead is powerful enough to break its way through the hard-packed ice – I knew this from my pored-over library book – as long as it is not more than a foot or two thick, using its broad snout. We could hear loud creaks and tearing sounds as the ice was rent apart by the incessant onward progress of the whales. They weren’t singing, as I’d half-expected they would be, just making their way warily and steadily under and through the ice, heading for the open seas.

  At the sound of the whales, people moved on silent feet to douse the fires and to gather up their equipment. Usually the crews go whaling in the day time, when they are rested and can see what they are doing. But that evening the sound of the whales breaking into their suppertime revelry on the very first evening at camp had invigorated the whaling crews and they were suddenly all set for the hunt.

  The women and girls withdrew like shadows into the tents. The boyers knotted together and the older lads gave whispered orders, telling us where to station ourselves to keep lookout. The men, meanwhile, were gathering up their equipment, all in this weird semi-silent near-darkness.

  ‘Why has everything gone so quiet?’ I asked Henry, who was on lookout with me near the edge of our camp.

  ‘So as not to frighten the whales,’ said Henry. ‘We have to take them by surprise.’

  The idea of not frightening the whales had a hollow ring to me. Don’t alarm them – that way you can kill them easier.

  Then there was a murmur from the men, a low, rhythmic sound in a strange language. It reminded me of the old people at home praying the rosary.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked Henry. ‘What are they doing?’

  ‘Speaking to the soul of the whale.’

  ‘What?’

  Henry sighed. ‘Look, the whale is going to give itself up to the people. That is something very … umm … solemn.’

  I stared at him, but he couldn’t see the expression of complete puzzlement on my face in the dark. How come they could think the whale had a soul and still want to hunt it? I couldn’t work it out. It all seemed wrong to me, wrong and wretched.

  We sat and watched the men of our crew, visible, even though they were hundreds of yards away, as silent silhouettes against the blue-dark sky and the eerie gleam of the moonlit ice. They were dragging their skin-covered umiaq to the water’s edge. They lowered it with a soft plop into the water and got noiselessly into it, each man swaying for a moment as he found his balance and then hunkering down and making room for the next crew member. The whaling equipment was already on board and ready to be used. I felt sick at the thought of it, the huge, heavy harpoon with its deadly spike, and the rifle looming in wait, in case the harpoon didn’t succeed.

  My dad didn’t go in the boat with them. As an unskilled outsider, he would only have been a liability on the boat full of highly experienced whalers. He went instead and stood as close to the edge of the ice as he dared, and watched in the moonlight.

  All along the edge of the ice, as far as we could see, umiaqs were lowered into the water, men slithered into the boats and swayed and steadied themselves. There were about five or six crews in all, I think, spread out along the ice, each with its own umiaq, each umiaq loaded with its own instruments of death.

  Anticipation hung breathlessly in the darkening air as the paddles plashed, turning streaks of silver out of the waters. The sound of the paddles carried on the cold, still air to where we squatted, watching, and the umiaqs slid off over the sea. We boyers glanced occasionally
over our shoulders in a gesture of lookout, but really we were concentrating on what was happening just at the edge of our vision.

  I was itching for a sight of the whales – poor, doomed creatures – but I daren’t leave my post. Everyone had a job to do, and everyone in the crew depended on everyone else doing their job. Nobody had explained that to me, but I seemed to know it. I suppose I picked it up from the behaviour of the other boyers. They all did their tasks with such a grave air that I knew without thinking about it that we were vital, in our small way, to the success of the hunt. I didn’t like that thought, but still, I had to play my part. I’d made my decision, I was there, I couldn’t back out of it now.

  I hunkered on the mat I’d brought with me from our tent to save my knees from contact with the icy floor and screwed up my eyes, desperate to see what was going on, wishing it wasn’t going to happen, and yet bursting for it to be over with. I could hear the whales’ low grunts and whistles, and I could picture their inky bodies, huge shadows in the icy seas. An occasional fount of whale-blow rose up on the horizon, silver-splashed in the moonlight, as a whale broke the surface for a breather, but mainly they moved quietly, under the surface, as if they knew we were watching and waiting.

  Then suddenly, out of the stillness, a harpoon flew up with a heavy whump through the air. We could see – or imagined we could see – the cold arc of its lightning path against the sky, and then it hit its target with a solid thump, and immediately there was an explosion, an almighty crack in the murmurous silence of the night, like a train hitting a stone wall.

  ‘What’s that?’ I whispered to Henry. ‘What’s that noise?’ At least, I thought I was whispering, but I must have shouted to be heard over the terrible crash of the explosion.

  The water was thrashing and boiling now with the stricken whale’s sudden struggle, and his bellow roared over the water like a thunderbolt on wheels.

  ‘The harpoon has a charge in it,’ Henry said. ‘It explodes when it hits the whale.’

  ‘Oh my God!’ I wailed. ‘They bomb it!’

  ‘It’s so that the whale dies more quickly,’ Henry explained. ‘It’s to prevent too much pain.’

  The whale’s dying call boomed out over the squealing rush of the other whales, bereaved, bewildered and panicking. I closed my eyes, and tried to stop my ears, torn between pity for the poor harpooned beast and terror that he would pull the whole fragile umiaq and crew down with him into the icy water in a last desperate dive for freedom. My heart felt squeezed in my chest as I heard, even through the fingers stuck hard in my ears, the whale’s cry fading on the night air. I felt my heart expand then, as if daring to get pumping again only when the whale’s last moment came. I opened my eyes and unstopped my ears, thankful at least not to have to hear the whale roaring in pain and contorting and twitching in the water.

  Silence descended and hung for moments in the semi-darkness.

  ‘Who got it?’ I whispered to Henry then, meaning which of the crews.

  ‘We did!’ he said aloud, jubilation in his voice.

  I wanted to kick him, to punch his grinning face in. I wanted to stamp my feet and pull my hood over my face and wail for the dead creature. But I just sat there and stared. Then, with shaking fingers, I struck a match and relit the stove we were in charge of. I warmed my fingers at the small flame and tried to think of nothing, nothing at all.

  Sharing the Whale

  Already the camp was alive with celebration. The women and girls emerged from the tents, carrying buckets and long knives and tarpaulins, and hurrying to the edge of the ice. The fishy, oily, metallic smell of whale and whale blood filled the air.

  Matulik was already ‘ashore’ on the ice, and he and his crew members were working at an enormous winch they had set up as near as they dared to the edge of the ice. Members of other crews hurried to join them, to help with the work of bringing the whale ashore.

  As the men worked, the sky started to pinken again, and all through the spreading blush of dawn Matulik’s whaling crew and the other men worked the ropes and the winch and tackle. We boyers hurriedly cut lumps out of the ice with our snow knives, to melt down for water, and we made coffee on our little oil stoves for all we were worth. We took it in turn to run with cans of coffee to the edge of the ice and pour it steaming into mugs for the men as they worked.

  They were glad of it, as much for the chance to warm their hands, slippery with blood and ice and cold, as for the drink itself, and we were thrilled with the chance to get close to the action, even for a few moments.

  We couldn’t stand around for long, though, watching the men at their hauling and winching, for our job was still to man the camp and keep at bay any curious bears that might wander by, by banging saucepan lids and waving torches. Just because our crew had – miraculously – landed a whale on our very first night at camp, it was no excuse for us to leave our posts and gather round the catch.

  All through the dawn the men worked, my dad among them, to raise the whale out of the water. The rising sun gilded their bodies, so that they looked, from our vantage point at the edge of the camp, like some sort of shining gods landed down on the ice to direct operations – rather squat gods, it has to be admitted, bundled in their hooded parkas and with their polar-bearskin leggings and long leather boots.

  By the time the sun was high in the sky, the whale had been hauled out of the sea and lowered onto the ice bank and the butchering was about to begin. I ran forward, grabbing a coffee-pot as my excuse, to see the magnificent animal while it was still intact, with just a rivulet of blood running down from its huge, grimacing mouth, and congealing on the icy floor.

  My eyes filled with unexpected tears. All these months bowheads had lived in my imagination, and now here I was looking at one for the first time – but it was dead. Sadness possessed me, and I turned away from the sight of the poor, destroyed beast.

  ‘I’ll have a swig,’ said one of the men, thrusting an enamel mug under the spout of my coffee pot.

  I stared at him. It took a moment to register that he wanted coffee.

  ‘Oh!’ I said, and took the cup from him.

  There was blood on the handle, but I grasped it firmly, to counteract the shake in my hand, and poured the coffee, black and acrid, and thrust it towards the whaler. Then I ran back to the camp, bashing my face with my arm as I ran, pretending I wasn’t soaking up tears.

  Children swarmed over the dead whale, now, singing and flinging their arms about, as if they had caught it themselves. Some of the mothers were taking photographs of the kids dancing on the whale, and the men were out with measuring tapes, trying to work out how long the whale was.

  But soon the merrymaking had to let up because the work of the butchering had to begin. They cut a huge belt of meat from behind the head of the whale and divided it up into portions to be shared by the village families. This first cut of meat, from what they call the captain’s belt, has to be given away. Everyone gets some except the whalers themselves.

  ‘Why?’ I asked Henry.

  It seemed to me very odd to go to all that trouble to kill a whale and then give away the meat.

  ‘Because that is the tradition,’ Henry said.

  ‘Yes, but why?’

  ‘So that the whalers don’t become greedy, I suppose,’ he said. ‘The whales are for everyone to share. If the whalers took the first meat for themselves, then they would not be sharing. The sharing is the important thing. That’s how our people have always survived. If we didn’t share, we died.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know that.’

  That cheered me up a bit.

  Soon the chief boyer came by and sent me and Henry to bed. We’d been up all night, though I’d hardly noticed, there’d been so much happening. Now it was the turn of the younger boyers, who had been sent to bed at sunset, to get up and take their turn at the boyers’ work.

  It was only when I finally climbed into my sleeping bag that I realised how exhausted I was. It had been a long
, exciting, confusing, distressing day and night, and now I needed desperately to sleep. The last thing I thought as I drifted off was that I hoped the younger boyers would be as efficient as we were at scaring off the polar bears. That bloody smell in the air would be sure to attract them.

  The Igloo

  The polar bears held off. I don’t know whether it was good luck or the good efforts of the other boyers. Or maybe there were no polar bears at all in that area. Maybe the grown-ups just wanted us to feel important.

  I woke up feeling stiff and giddy. I rubbed my eyes with my hands and smelt the smell of stale blood. I looked at my hands. My left hand was smeared still with the dried blood of the whale, which I had picked up off the coffee mug of the whaler I had served. I shuddered. I was implicated in this butchery, whether I liked it or not.

  Outside, an impromptu feast was going on. The whalers had taken a break from their butchering work and the women had set up stoves beside the whale and were cooking maktak.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘Whale skin,’ said Matulik, handing me a piece. ‘It’s delicious. You should try some, Tyke.’

  I stepped back.

  ‘No,’ I said, horrified at the idea of eating boiled whale skin. ‘Anyway, I thought you had to give it away to people not in the crew.’

  ‘Well, you’re a guest,’ said Matulik, licking his fingers. ‘But anyway, this is maktak, it’s the skin, not the meat. My favourite. You sure you don’ want some?’

  But I drew the line at actually eating the whale.

  The rest of the day was spent in feasting and celebrating, but also in working. The whale had to be divided up into pieces for distributing to all the village families and for storing in icy cellars, so it could be eaten later in the year. There were several days’ work in that, and even though they had been up all night catching the whale, the crew worked hard all day dealing with their giant catch, the men cutting and butchering, the women packing and labelling. They took it in turns to slip away for a couple of hours’ sleep, but the work never stopped. Meanwhile, Henry and I were back on coffee-duty, and we were kept busy running around the crew with steaming cups.