A Whale for the Killing

by Farley Mowat

  “Danny told me later the whale could have smashed up both our boats as easily as we would smash a couple of eggs. Considering what people had done to it, why didn’t it take revenge? Or is it only mankind that takes revenge?”

  Once she accepted the fact that our presence boded her no harm, the whale showed a strange interest in us, almost as if she took pleasure in being close to our two forty-foot boats, whose undersides may have looked faintly whale-like in shape. Not only did she pass directly under us several times but she also passed between the two boats, carefully threading her way between our anchor cables. We had the distinct impression she was lonely—an impression shared by the Hann brothers when she hung close to their small boat. Claire went so far as to suggest the whale was seeking help, but how could we know about that?

  I was greatly concerned about the effects of the gunning but, apart from a multitude of bullet holes, none of which showed signs of bleeding, she appeared to be in good health. Her movements were sure and powerful and there was no bloody discoloration in her blow. Because I so much wished to believe it, I concluded that the bullets had done no more than superficial damage and that, with luck, the great animal would be none the worse for her ordeal by fire.

  At dusk we reluctantly left the Pond. Our communion with the whale had left all of us half hypnotized. We had almost nothing to say to each other until the RCMP launch pulled alongside and Constable Murdoch shouted:

  “There’ll be no more shooting. I guarantee you that. Danny and me’ll patrol every day from now on, and twice a day if we have to.”

  Murdoch’s words brought me my first definite awareness of a decision which I must already have arrived at below—or perhaps above—the limited levels of conscious thought. As we headed back to Messers, I knew I was committed to the saving of that whale, as passionately as I had ever been committed to anything in my life. I still do not know why I felt such an instantaneous compulsion. Later it was possible to think of a dozen reasons, but these were afterthoughts—not reasons at the time. If I were a mystic, I might explain it by saying I had heard a call, and that may not be such a mad explanation after all. In the light of what ensued, it is not easy to dismiss the possibility that, in some incomprehensible way, alien flesh had reached out to alien flesh... cried out for help in a wordless and primordial appeal which could not be refused.

  During the run home, my mind was seething with possibilities, with hopes, with fears. Only one thing seemed sure: the whale would need more help than I alone could give. We needed allies, she and I.

  As soon as we reached home I called the fish plant manager, who, because of his position as “boss,” was one of the most influential men in the community. In rather incoherent fashion I tried to convince him of the importance to Burgeo, and to the world at large, of our having one of the great whales in our keeping. A withdrawn, uncommunicative man who seemed to think of everything in managerial terms, he was not easy to persuade; obviously finding it hard to understand why anyone would be much concerned about the life or death of a whale. However, he finally did agree to post notices at the plant asking everyone to leave the animal alone.

  He helped me more than he knew, for his very coolness brought me sharply up against the realization that I would have to marshal some convincing practical reasons why the whale should be saved. The most obvious one I could think of was the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, no human being had ever before had the chance to study closely a living rorqual. That chance was here—was now. I was sure the scientific people would recognize its importance, would be as excited as I was, and would come rushing to help. Science had to be alerted.

  This was easier said than done. Our telephone link with the outer world consisted of a makeshift system of radio transmitters and microwave relays, no part of which was even moderately efficient. Even after a connection had been established with the “outside”—a feat which might take several hours—the chances were excellent that neither party would be able to hear or understand the other. I disliked and distrusted the black machine hanging on our wall so much that I refused to have anything to do with it except in case of dire emergency. But this was an emergency.

  The first call I placed was to the federal fisheries office in St. John’s, Newfoundland. I managed to conduct a shouted conversation with a senior biologist there who explained, kindly, as one would to an enthusiastic but ill-informed child, that his station only concerned itself with fishes... and whales were mammals.

  Cursing his bureaucratic mind, I spent the next three hours trying to reach the central fisheries research station near Montreal. When I eventually got through to its director, I found him sympathetic but no more helpful than his colleague in St. John’s. He told me the department’s whale expert was away in the United States studying whale skeletons in museums. It was apparently out of the question that he should be recalled from his research into the bones of the dead in order to visit Burgeo and study a rorqual in the living, breathing flesh.

  By this time it was late at night and I was beginning to suffer from a growing sense of frustration, coupled with a certain feeling of unreality. Could it be, I asked myself, that the world of science would prove to be unmoved by this unique opportunity to gain a little insight into the life of one of the of the most remarkable animals that ever lived?

  In something between panic and despair, I now called a tried and patient friend, my publisher, Jack McClelland, in Toronto. Jack resignedly climbed out of bed to spend the next several hours himself trying to interest marine biologists all across Canada. Most of those he reached were outspokenly irate at being roused in the middle of the night, and none of them apparently gave a damn whether or not Burgeo possessed a captive fin whale. One eminent cetologist in British Columbia listened with cold politeness while Jack described the situation, then gave him a little lecture.

  Fin whales, he said, do not eat herring; they subsist entirely on plankton. Thus, even if I did have one in captivity, I could not possibly feed it. However, feeding such a captive would be unnecessary in any case because fin whales can easily survive for six months by assimilating their own blubber. Anyhow, the point was not germane, he continued crushingly, because fin whales never come near shore unless they are dead or dying; therefore, the Burgeo whale, if it was a fin at all, must be in a dying condition. Since scientists had already studied a good many dead fin whales, they would not be much interested in studying yet another. He advised Jack to forget the whole thing.

  I was having breakfast early on Saturday morning when Jack phoned back with his doleful news. He did his best to sound optimistic.

  “Look, if you’ve really got an eighty-ton whale on your hands, I’ll believe you. Evidently not many people will. But not to worry. You concentrate on keeping it alive and I’ll keep plugging until I find some way to get these silly bastards off their asses.”

  Saturday had brought another raging blizzard and, since there was no possibility of visiting Aldridges Pond until the weather moderated, I was left to pace the house and consider ways to keep the whale alive. I also had to consider what my ultimate intentions were. Mere success in preserving her life could simply doom her to perpetual captivity in the confines of the Pond, with the likelihood that she would end up as the object of a money-grubbing attempt at exploitation as a tourist attraction. The prospect of saving her life only to deliver her over to the Banderlog was a revolting one. Nevertheless, I was tempted by selfish considerations to equivocate. It was something, after all, to be the nominal possessor of such a fantastic creature. No other human being had ever had a fin whale for a “pet.” And yet... and yet I could not refuse to see that to keep her captive would be to commit another kind of atrocity, almost as cruel as using her for target practice.

  Ultimately I could find no way to evade the simple truth. My duty, obligation, purpose—whatever it might be called—did not lie with man; it lay solely with the trapped whale. What
ever I did on her behalf had to be directed toward setting her free. Only so could she be saved.

  With this decision made, I had to face the problem of how to free her. From local charts, the weather records which I kept in my daily journal, and from the scraps of information I had already picked up from the Hann brothers and other people, I calculated that she had entered the south channel of Aldridges Pond when it carried a maximum depth of about eleven feet. A textbook on the Cetacea indicated (although there were no concrete data) that an adult finner, swimming at the surface, carries a draft of just about that much.

  The tide tables told me it would be nearly a month before there would again be anything approaching sufficient depth in the channel to float her out to freedom. So that left me with slightly less than a month to plan her release. Considering the difficulties I could expect to encounter in trying to manoeuvre such a titanic beast safely through the narrow channel, a month might be none too long. However, for the moment I felt I could relegate the detailed planning of her escape to the back of my mind while I tried to deal with the immediate difficulties involved in simply keeping her alive.

  The first thing, of course, was how to keep her fed. I knew, from my several years of watching finners at Burgeo, that the whale specialist in British Columbia had been talking through his academic hat when he told Jack that fin whales don’t eat herring; and I was sure he was just as far at sea when he claimed that a finner could survive comfortably for six months on its own blubber.

  The blubber layer—which is an integral part of a whale’s skin—serves only in a secondary role for food storage. Whales developed oil-impregnated tissue primarily as insulation to protect them against the loss of body heat into the hungry conductivity of icy seas. While it is true that a starving whale will, perforce, burn its own blubber oil for fuel, this is a dead-end street in cold northern waters. As the blubber layer thins, ever greater quantities of fuel are required to compensate for the increasing rate of heat loss until, if no other source of food is found, the whale dies of a combination of starvation and exposure.*

  * * *

  *Whales make still another demand on their supplies of stored oil. Although they live surrounded by water, it is salt water—which is just as unusable to their metabolism as it is to ours. They have no direct access to any source of fresh water. To obtain the vital supplies they need, they must rely on what they can obtain from the body fluids of their prey, supplemented by the chemical breakdown of their oil reserves, which provides fresh water as a byproduct. Consequently, if a whale cannot feed, its entire freshwater requirements must be provided from the stored oils, particularly from blubber oil. A whale that is denied food is not only threatened with death by starvation and exposure, it is also doomed to die of thirst.

  Since the temperature of the sea at Burgeo in February hovers around 31°F, just below the freezing point of fresh water, it seemed all too clear that, without a large and steady supply of food, the trapped whale must perish long before she could be freed.

  Food meant herring. But the Hann brothers had told me that Aldridges Pond was rapidly emptying of the little fishes. Either the whale had already decimated the schools or they had fled before the demands of such a gargantuan appetite. It was unlikely that new schools would now enter the Pond of their own free will since there is nothing suicidal about the behaviour of a herring school. I would have to find a way to drive them in and pen them there; and at this juncture I had no idea how this could be done.

  Equally pressing was the matter of protecting her from the sportsmen. The fact that the Mountie would now try to prevent them from using firearms was no guarantee they would leave her alone. On the contrary, Danny Green had already intimated that they might go to considerable lengths to do her further hurt, if only to spite me for having been instrumental in stopping their target practice. There was a considerable stock of dynamite in Burgeo and it was all too readily accessible. I only hoped this thought would not occur to them but I had no confidence it would not.

  Food, protection and a workable plan to free her at the next spring tide—the next tide, not some other—these were her needs, which I had made my problems. It was increasingly clear that I could not do it all alone. I would have to find help from the outside.

  Before noon on Saturday, I had again returned to the black djinn of the telephone. This time I decided to appeal directly to the angels. After two hours of wrestling with the intervening demons of air, I managed, by a miracle it seemed, to reach the Minister of Fisheries for Newfoundland, on whom, in law at least, the responsibility for the whale rested. I gave him the best pitch I could muster, but my shouted explanations and pleadings brought no tangible result except a hoarseness which was to become chronic in the days ahead. The government of Newfoundland, I was told, had better things to do than concern itself with the preservation of a lone fin whale.

  Several other calls to both provincial and federal bureaucrats proved equally fruitless. Apparently nobody in authority had any interest in assuming responsibility for the whale or in providing assistance to me in my self-appointed task. I suspect that many of the men I spoke to thought I was a little mad.

  Although my previous experiences with Burgeo’s resident politicians had given me no grounds to expect help from that quarter, I was driven by my failures elsewhere to turn to our own mayor; but he was absent in St. John’s. I thereupon tracked down his deputy, who was the male member of the doctor team. He was a “soft-centred” sort of man, physically graceful in a willowy kind of way, and with a willow’s capacity to bend easily before the wind. Although a neutralist by nature, his response to my request for help was distinctly hostile. Not only did he firmly reject the idea that the whale was any of his, or the town council’s, business, he was equally emphatic that it was none of mine. His wife, who was also a council member, not only confirmed his judgement but stated her opinion that the Burgeo people had every right to kill the whale by any method they might choose. Furthermore, she said, the carcass could be put to very good use... as dog food. (It may have been pure coincidence that the doctors owned those two immense and perpetually hungry Newfoundland dogs.)

  Darkness had fallen by this time, and the house shook and shuddered in a snow-filled gale. The devils of self-doubt began to stalk me. Perhaps I was a little mad—deluded anyway—in thinking I might save the whale. Perhaps the battle was already lost. Perhaps I had no business meddling in a tragedy which was essentially a natural one... but then I saw again the whale herself, as we had watched her slipping through the green void beneath Curt Bungay’s boat. That vision routed the devils instantly. That lost leviathan was one of the last of a disappearing race, and I knew she had to be saved if only because contact with her, though it lasted no more than a few brief weeks, might narrow the immense psychic gap between our two species; might alter, in at least some degree, the remote and awesome image which whales have always projected onto the inner human eye. And if, through this opportunity for intimate contact, that image could be changed enough to let men, to force men, to see these secret and mysterious beings with the compassion we have always denied them, it might help bring an end to the relentless slaughter of their kind.

  This thought, combined with the effect of the rejections from those whose help I had thus far sought, began to make me fighting mad. I decided that if those who ought to have displayed some interest in the whale refused to do so, I would make them. And, by God, I thought I knew how to do just that.

  “Claire,” I told my wife, “I’m going to give the story to the press. The whole story. About the shooting. There’ll be plenty of people who’ll react to that. They’ll surely make enough fuss, raise enough hell, to force someone out there to act. Burgeo won’t like it. It could get damned unpleasant around here. What do you say?”

  Claire was very much in love with Burgeo. This was where she had made her first home as a married woman. She understood the delicate nature of our acc
eptance in the place and she had a woman’s shrewd ability to see the possible implications of this decision. Her voice, in reply, seemed very small against the cacophony of the storm.

  “If you must... oh, Farley, I don’t want that whale to die either... but you’ll be hurting Burgeo... the people you like won’t understand... but I guess... I guess it’s what you have to do.”

  The phone rang and I went to it, and it was a reprieve. The operator in Hermitage, her voice barely audible over the babbling static, slowly read me a telegram. It was from Dr. David Sergeant, a biologist with the federal Department of Fisheries. Sergeant is a maverick and the possessor of a truly open and questing mind. He had taken it on himself to rouse his fellow scientists to action.

  HAVE CONTACTED SEVERAL EMINENT BIOLOGISTS NEW ENGLAND THEY VERY EXCITED YOUR WHALE SUGGEST YOU BEGIN SYSTEMATIC OBSERVATIONS IMMEDIATELY PENDING THEIR ARRIVAL AT EARLIEST POSSIBLE DATE STOP PHONE CIRCUITS BURGEO IMPOSSIBLE BUT WILL TRY AGAIN TOMORROW GOOD LUCK.

  It was a small enough glimmer of light, but on that dark Saturday it persuaded me that help would come. As we prepared to go to bed, Claire and I were further cheered by a radio forecast which promised an end to the storm and a fine Sunday coming.

  If I had guessed what that Sunday would bring, I think I would have prayed for a hurricane.

  12

  BURGEO WINTER WEATHER OFTEN SEEMED to consist of six days of storm followed by a seventh when all was forgiven, and the seventh day was almost always a Sunday. I once discussed this interesting phenomenon with the Anglican minister but he decently refused to take any credit for it.