Call of the Whales

by Siobhán Parkinson

  The dogs raced and raced, scooping up snow to drink as they ran, without pausing. Pretty soon, we had left the village miles behind, and still we skimmed over the ice, for miles and miles into the icy wilderness. Our faces froze, but our bodies were warm under our skins and furs, and even our feet felt pinky-warm in their layers of socks.

  There seemed to be more of this landscape than you could possibly imagine. It stretched out for ever. The sky, dove grey with clouds today, was low over the ice. You felt you could almost reach out and touch it, and that it would be soft and warm, though of course, even if you could reach it, it would be cold and misty.

  After what seemed like hours, Michael called something to the huskies and they stopped, quite suddenly. While the dogs lay panting on the snow, Michael untangled the sealskin lines that tied them to the sled. The dogs didn’t take any notice. They lay quietly, huddled into groups for warmth.

  ‘Need to rest the dogs,’ Michael said, by way of explanation, and then he started to make conversation. ‘You go to school?’

  ‘Yes.’ I said. ‘Two more years. Then college.’

  It felt a bit weird to be discussing my education out here in the middle of the icy landscape, but of course to Michael, this was all perfectly normal.

  ‘You want to be a doctor,’ he said.

  It wasn’t a question. He said it as if it was a fact, the only possible reason for wanting to go to college.

  ‘Not a doctor,’ I said.

  ‘You want to be a teacher?’ he said incredulously.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘not a teacher.’

  Funny that I ended up teaching after all, though what I meant was that I didn’t want to teach in a school. University’s different.

  ‘Well, what then?’ asked Michael.

  ‘A … a …’ I began, hoping something would occur to me. ‘I don’t know,’ I concluded lamely.

  ‘You want to go to college, you don’t know what you want to be.’ Michael clearly thought I was a bit of a twit.

  ‘I want to study,’ I said defensively.

  ‘What you want to study?’

  ‘History,’ I said.

  I was surprised to hear myself say it, but I was even more surprised to discover I meant it. I didn’t know what you could be if you studied history, but I knew I wanted to do it anyway.

  ‘Wars,’ he said dismissively. ‘History all wars.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘history’s all stories.’

  ‘You don’t want to be an anthropologist?’ Dad said in a mock-disappointed tone.

  I knew I was supposed to step back in horror at the idea and say under no circumstances or something exaggerated, but I didn’t feel like playing that game.

  ‘Not an anthropologist,’ I said, ‘but it’s close, isn’t it, Dad?’

  ‘Oh, that’s too profound for me,’ Dad said, but he looked pretty pleased all the same.

  ‘What do you want to be, Michael?’ I asked. ‘A hunter?’

  I don’t know why I assumed that. No reason why he couldn’t be whatever he liked.

  ‘No. I want a job. I want money. I want to move to someplace where things happen.’

  I laughed at the idea that nothing happened here, but it was a hollow laugh. I knew exactly what he meant. Maybe it had something to do with being fifteen.

  The dogs must have been rested by then, because Michael picked up the reins and we were off again.

  I poked Dad in the side as we sped along.

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘Just hello,’ I said.

  ‘Just hello yourself,’ he said and smiled at me.

  ‘That sky looks like snow,’ Dad called to Michael.

  Michael shook his head. ‘Naw,’ he said, ‘snow unusual here.’

  I looked around incredulously at the vast snowy landscape and I laughed.

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘I can see that.’

  ‘Oh, this take years. It don’t snow much, but it build up.’

  ‘It certainly does,’ I said.

  When we arrived at the fjord, Michael stopped the sled at a good distance from the water, so as not to disturb the hunt, and we left the dogs huddled up together for another rest. We crouched in the cover of a huge lump of ice like a small cliff to watch the hunters from a distance.

  The kayaks were already out on the water. It was completely different from the bowhead hunt we’d seen all those years ago, no whaling crews, just individual hunters in their individual little boats. The hunters sat still, waiting for a sighting of a narwhal. The trick was to keep very quiet so as to be able to surprise the creature. If the narwhal had any warning, it would probably escape and that would be the end of hunting for all the hunters for that day.

  We spotted Leon on the water. He sat hunched with his face peering out of his parka like an old walnut, not making a sound, not a ripple on the water. He didn’t look like a tourist guide today. He looked like a man with a job to do.

  We watched and waited, and watched and waited for what seemed like hours, our limbs stiffening and freezing as we crouched uncomfortably.

  Then, entirely without warning, in a single movement, Leon threw his harpoon. It sliced the air and hit its target almost at the same time. I tensed for the explosion, but it didn’t happen. Instead, Leon made a swift movement with his lance. I couldn’t see the narwhal, as it was shielded from my view by Leon’s body, but I knew by the way he wielded the lance and the way the movement stopped so swiftly that he had killed it with a single stabbing motion. I was glad about that. I couldn’t have borne it if the creature had bellowed in pain and thrashed the water and had a long, slow death.

  When the younger men had helped Leon to manoeuvre the narwhal to shore, I managed to get glimpses of it between the moving bodies on the shoreline. It was the strangest-looking creature. It looked like a very large, bloated dolphin, streaked with its own blood, awkward and sodden in death, not magnificent at all, as the bowhead had been. The oddest thing was that, as far as I could see from where we stood – our view was intermittent, constantly being blocked by the movements of the hunters – Leon’s spear seemed to be stuck right through the head of the narwhal, so that it looked as if it had grown an unwieldy tusk, as long as its own body, or longer. It looked a bit like an overweight swordfish.

  ‘The meat has to be shared,’ Michael explained, ‘but the hunter who kill the narwhal, he get the tusk.’

  ‘Oh, so it is a tusk then,’ I said.

  ‘Of course it’s a tusk,’ said Dad. ‘It’s a narwhal. Surely you know now what I mean about the narwhal being an unusual whale? I mean it’s the tusked whale.’

  ‘Dad, I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said, as we watched while Leon cut the tusk from the narwhal’s forehead. ‘You talk as if I should know everything there is to know about narwhals, but I’ve never even heard the word before today.’

  ‘But the tusk,’ said Dad. ‘The tusk. We’ve had that tusk for ever. You must remember the tusk.’

  ‘What tusk?’ I asked.

  ‘In the sitting room at home,’ Dad said. ‘The one you used to pretend was a unicorn horn when you were small. The one you told Tom and Tessa about before we came away, remember, when you were being a unicorn?’

  ‘What do you mean, I used to pretend it was a unicorn horn? It is a unicorn horn. You always said it was.’

  ‘Taig,’ said Dad, ‘you are fifteen years old. You know the dreadful truth about Santa Claus. Surely you don’t think that the narwhal tusk we have at home is a unicorn horn!’

  ‘But of course I do!’ I exclaimed. ‘Did, I mean, until this minute. You said so Dad, you always said so.’

  I could feel hot, shameful tears gathering behind my eyes as I realised my error. All those years, I’d believed in unicorns, and I’d believed it, not out of some childish naïveté, but because I had scientific proof on the wall of my own sitting room at home. I’d never questioned it, never had a reason to question it.

  But now, here in front of me was Leon brandishi
ng a narwhal tusk that he had just hacked off a fat, stubby, dead and undignified whale. The tusk oozed blood. It looked nothing like a unicorn horn. It looked like a big, ugly, gnarled, overgrown tooth with the bloody roots attached. It did spiral, like a unicorn horn, but there was certainly no seam of gold running up through it. This great clump of a thing had never graced the head of a fabulous white horse that flew over the sea. As I watched Leon hacking at the roots of the narwhal tusk with his knife to free it of blood and meat, I could see with another eye my star-lined velvet cloak floating off over the sea and disappearing beyond the horizon.

  It looked from this angle, the way he stood over the small whale’s body, almost as if Leon was tussling with the narwhal for the tusk. Leon, I thought, Leon means lion.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘The lion and the unicorn are fighting for the crown. The unicorn of the sea, Dad. You always said the horn belonged to the unicorn of the sea.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dad. ‘That’s what the narwhal is called. It’s a sort of pet name or nickname. The unicorn of the sea.’

  ‘So there are no unicorns,’ I whispered.

  ‘Son, there are no unicorns.’

  ‘You told Tessa and Tom we were going on a unicorn hunt,’ I said accusingly.

  ‘Yes, I did. But Tessa and Tom are three years old. That’s the sort of story you tell babies. You pretended you could fly! But you can’t fly, and there are no unicorns.’

  But then, there are narwhals. When you think about it, that’s pretty amazing in itself. What on earth does a whale need with a great long tusk like that? It’s too fragile to be any good as a yoke for poking around looking for food, and it’s too awkward to do anything else with. The narwhal is a fantastic enough sort of a creature if fantastic is what you are after. But at the time, it didn’t seem much of a compensation. I didn’t see myself riding a narwhal wearing a cloak spangled with stars. It just wasn’t the same.

  Whistling to the Aurora

  Two days later, we flew to Copenhagen in broad arctic daylight, and we arrived in ordinary European night. We had several hours before we could catch our connection to Heathrow and on to Dublin. As the night thickened, the airport went into that curious lulled state you get at night in places that never sleep, like airports and hospitals. The lights are on, but they’re slightly dimmed, in deference to the patients or passengers who are trying to snatch a bit of shuteye, and the non-essential services, like the cafeteria, shut down for a few hours. In that hour before the early shift arrives with mops, and the hiss of the coffee-machine starts up again, the poor demented souls who are waiting endlessly in the wide, tiled, echoing corridors or foyers go into a trance that is not quite sleep and not quite the waking state either, a sort of suspended animation, where the nerves are somehow more alert than normal and ready to spring into panic, even though the other organs of the body seem to slow down as in sleep.

  This was the state I was in at about four in the morning, with my rucksack on my knee, when Dad suddenly nudged me and started calling my name in a loud, urgent whisper.

  ‘Wake up, wake up! Oh, you’ll never guess, it is so fabulous! Wake up, can’t you!’

  I opened my eyes, exposing my eyeballs to the assault of the waking world. Dad was hopping on the spot in front of me, and pointing out the wide, wide glass barrier that served as both wall and window, into the night sky. At the very least, it had to be a unicorn flying across the stars, I thought, to make him so excited.

  ‘Damn these planes,’ he muttered. It would have been funny if I’d been wider awake, Dad swearing about planes at an airport. ‘They keep interfering. They come in to land and everywhere lights up like a Christmas tree. Oh, there it is again, now, quick, now, before another wretched plane comes, quick, quick, while it’s dark. Just our luck to be at an airport at a time like this.’

  ‘What am I looking for?’ I asked, my head feeling like a leaden ball on my neck.

  ‘The lights, the lights!’ Dad practically shouted.

  I looked up at the dimmed overhead lights.

  ‘No, no, the Aurora, the Aurora Borealis, look, look, look, it’s the Northern Lights. I’ve never seen them so far south before. Isn’t it wonderful?’

  I screwed up my eyes and looked where his frantic finger was pointing, and sure enough, across the navy tent of the clear night sky outside the enormous expanse of airport glass, I saw a streak of red and a streak of green, followed by a streak of red and a streak of green, as if someone was pulling a huge, airy red and green curtain across the stars.

  ‘Wow!’ said Dad. ‘Oh wow!’

  I could hear tears in his voice. I looked at him, and his eyes were glistening.

  ‘Just imagine what this looks like in Thule,’ he said.

  Thule spread in front of my mind again, the starry autumn night doming the moongleamed icy floor. And as I watched the Northern Lights flit softly over the Copenhagen sky, I could see them also in my mind’s eye wafting eerily across the icy landscape we had just left.

  ‘A shame we didn’t see it in Thule,’ I said. ‘Would we have seen it if we’d stayed a bit longer, if we were there tonight?’ I added guiltily.

  ‘No, probably not. It’s almost too far north to get a good view in Thule,’ Dad said. ‘They rarely appear there.’

  Just then we heard a whistling sound, eerie and sudden. It was repeated and repeated, high-pitched and urgent. It seemed to be coming from near by, inside the airport building. I turned my head, to see who it was that was whistling. Everyone was half-asleep, half-aroused by the whistling. Everyone except the squat orange-clad figure of an early-morning cleaner wielding a huge industrial floor-cleaning machine. The cleaner stood like us at the sheet of window and stared out into the night sky, his cleaning machine abandoned, his hands pressed flat against the glass. He whistled again, and then he turned a cheerful face to us. A cheerful Inuit face.

  Dad said: ‘Must be a Greenlander. Lots of Greenlanders work in Copenhagen.’

  He waved over at the cleaner. ‘Whistling at the Aurora?’ he called.

  The man grinned and made a thumbs-up gesture, to show he understood. He nodded and smiled and waved his thumb a bit more, jerking it in the direction of the lights outside the window, and then he turned and started pushing his cleaning machine. He was pushing it in our direction.

  ‘The children of the Arctic whistle when they see the Aurora Borealis,’ Dad said. ‘They believe if they whistle, they can make the lights come down to earth, they can prolong the lights. They only appear at night, of course, and when you think what night means up there in the high north, anything that lights the night is well worth cultivating.’

  By now the cleaner had reached us, and we could see that he was quite old.

  ‘Whistle,’ he said.

  We smiled at him.

  ‘In the Arctic,’ Dad said to me, ‘the people believe that the Northern Lights are torches that the spirits of the dead light to guide the souls of people who have just died up into heaven. Isn’t that right?’ he added, to the cleaner.

  The old man nodded. ‘Stars,’ he said, pointing out at the sky.

  ‘Yes,’ said Dad. ‘The souls can get into heaven through little holes in the dome of the sky. The little holes are the stars, where the light shines through from heaven.’

  ‘Stars,’ said the cleaner again. ‘Lights. Whistle.’

  ‘I think he wants us to whistle, Dad,’ I said. ‘Let’s whistle to the Aurora.’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ Dad said, looking around at the other passengers slumped in the airport chairs, their chins on their chests.

  But I whistled anyway, softly, so as not to wake the snoozing people. My cleaner friend whistled too.

  ‘I have to be able to tell Tessa and Tom I whistled,’ I explained.

  ‘Tessa and Tom,’ said Dad, vaguely, as if he’d only just remembered he had other children.

  Then he said: ‘How long do you think before they’ll be ready to come to the Arctic, Tyke?’

  He’d never cal
led me by my arctic nickname before. I knew then what I’d only vaguely thought before. I knew then for sure that he knew that this was my last trip.

  ‘Oh, pretty soon, Dad,’ I said. ‘Pretty soon. And twins will go down a treat, don’t you think?’

  ‘I think,’ Dad said, and he laughed.

  The cleaner laughed too, and trundled on by with his machine.

  Epilogue

  Tessa and Tom are grown up now too, of course. Tessa works in television, making wildlife programmes, and Tom is a veterinarian, specialising in sea mammals. As you can guess, they both took many trips to the Arctic with Dad when they were children, mainly in the summer time, which is probably why neither of them has ever seen the Aurora Borealis.

  I really do mean to keep in touch with Henry this time. Meeting him in Geneva spread my whole arctic past in front of me again, a past I don’t often revisit, but a past I couldn’t shake off even if I wanted to. Things have changed beyond recognition now in the Arctic, except maybe in Thule, and I was privileged, as a boy – though I didn’t know it at the time – to get even glimpses of a way of life that is now only preserved in small remote pockets and by the efforts of people like my friend Henry.

  They say you shouldn’t go back, you should never try to revisit your childhood, but I think I will. I can’t resist it. I’ve tried, but I can’t. I can’t resist it because the song of the whale is like a call to the north. I hear it in my sleep. Eerie and sonorous, it pervades my dreams, so that I am drawn down into the deep, where huge sea beasts roll slowly in the inky-cold seas, wailing for their lovers over acres of waters.

  I wake, gasping for air, from these whaley dreams, but even though I wake, I cannot seem to shake off the dream. All day the whales are with me, as I work my way through my city schedule – breakfast, train, work, lunch, work, drink, train, dinner, TV, bed – swishing their powerful tails, diving uproariously to the seabed, drifting in the depths and then slowly, slowly, like the air leaking out of a tyre, ballooning up and up and up to crash onto the surface once again and exhale their fabulous fountainy breath …