A Whale for the Killing

by Farley Mowat

  It is my belief that, until they are sexually mature, the young remain in company with their parents as part of the family group—the pod. Unhappily, it is during this youthful period of relative inexperience that they are most vulnerable to the whalers, and catch records show that at least half the fin whales killed in recent years never even had a chance to mate and so help perpetuate their kind. Today, as we hunt them toward extinction, the family pods are almost always small; however, records from earlier whaling days show that fin families often numbered as many as eight individuals.

  We know nothing about their courtship or even how the young whales find their mates; but we can guess that both events used to take place during the periodic assemblies when all the families which occupied a given portion of the ocean came together for a while. Tales of such concentrations are common in the old records although none have been reported in North Atlantic waters during the past forty years.

  Today the few remaining fin whale families are so widely scattered that a young finner may have to wait many years before encountering a potential mate. This is the more deeply tragic because finners seem to be strictly monogamous. There is nothing to indicate that a sexually mature daughter ever produces young while she remains in the family pod, or that a widowed female will mate again except with an unattached male. Polygamy, which is the rule among sperm whales, has helped that nation to partly hold its own against our depredations. But the practice of monogamy among the finners may prove to be a luxury their decimated species cannot afford.

  The love-making of the fin may always remain a secret, and I for one will not regret it; let them keep their tender intimacies well hidden. However, this we do know: the bonds between a mated pair are of legendary tenacity; and if this be not love, then love is nothing. Whalers have long been aware of this, and have bloodily profited from the knowledge. They knew that if they could harpoon the female in a pod, her mate would remain by her, so completely reckless of the risk that he all too often joined her in death.

  The reverse is not always true. A female will abandon her endangered mate if she is pregnant or has a calf in tow. However, if she is not driven by the need to protect the next generation, she too will often remain with a dying mate until the bombs explode deep in her own vitals.

  I knew one old Scots gunner who in his day had killed more than two thousand whales but who had never overcome his revulsion at striking a female of the rorqual tribe.

  “We never wanted to know too much about them,” he explained. “It was too much like murder as it was. I think if I’d had the Celtic gift of ‘sight’ and could have looked into the minds of those beasts, I’d have had to give up the sea and go ashore for good. There’re times when too much knowledge can stand in a man’s way.”

  THE DISASTROUS EVENTS of Sunday, coupled into the bargain with the discovery that the whale was a female who might very well be pregnant, made it even more urgent that I obtain help. I decided I would have to follow through on my earlier decision and at ten o’clock on Monday I sent the following telegram to the Canadian Press head office in Toronto:

  SEVENTY-FOOT WHALE WEIGHING ABOUT EIGHTY TONS TRAPPED LARGE SALTWATER POND BURGEO SINCE JANUARY 21 STOP POND FORMS NATURAL AQUARIUM HALF BY HALF MILE DIMENSIONS ALLOWING WHALE CONSIDERABLE FREEDOM MOVEMENT STOP DURING FIRST FIVE DAYS LOCAL SPORTS USED WHALE AS TARGET HIGH-POWERED RIFLES AND STILL CONTINUE HARASSMENT WITH SPEEDBOATS STOP HAVE PREVAILED RCMP HALT SHOOTING BUT FEARFUL OTHER DANGERS STOP THIS IS FIRST GREAT WHALE EVER REPORTED SIMILAR CIRCUMSTANCES PROVIDING ABSOLUTELY UNEQUALLED POSSIBILITIES FOR STUDY BUT URGENTLY REQUIRE ASSISTANCE PROTECT ANIMAL AND ORGANIZE FEEDING PROGRAM STOP WHALE RAPIDLY LOSING WEIGHT OTHERWISE APPEARS GOOD CONDITION IS TOLERANT HUMAN BEINGS DESPITE PERSECUTION STOP FOR FURTHER DETAILS PHONE ME BURGEO.

  I was hardly sanguine enough to believe this sparse account would set the media world afire; I only hoped it would be of enough interest to the press and radio people so they would call back for more information, out of which they might make a story that would stir someone in the outside world to action. Consequently, Claire and I were flabbergasted when we switched on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s noon report of world and national news and heard my account of the trapped whale already being headlined.

  Luck, which until then had run so heavily against her, seemed to have veered in the whale’s favour, and for a reason which we could not have imagined.

  Because of our long absence away from Canada, we had not been aware of a story which had been running for many weeks about a pod of white whales (relatively small, porpoise-like, toothed whales) which became trapped by an early freeze-up in a long inlet on the Arctic Coast near Inuvik, a small community near the mouth of the Mackenzie River. Unable to escape to the open sea beneath fifty miles of new ice, the seventeen whales in the pod were at first able to keep a breathing space open by their own efforts. But as the weather grew colder and their little patch of open water inexorably contracted, their situation became critical.

  The plight of these little whales roused great interest in Inuvik, and a committee was formed to try and save them. By early January, the ice had closed in so completely that the whales only had a strip of open water forty feet long by twenty wide in which they could surface. The Inuvik committee had flown in power saws with which to keep the breathing hole open and the battle to save the white whales had become a national cause.

  On that same balmy Sunday when the trapped finner at Burgeo, some six thousand miles to the southeast, was being harried by sportsmen in motorboats, a full-scale arctic blizzard was sweeping into the Inuvik region, sending the temperature plunging to 40° below zero and preventing anyone from reaching the inlet where the white whales were trapped. On Monday, even as my telegram was clicking into the Canadian Press office in Toronto, a wire was on its way to that office from Inuvik, bearing the news that the breathing hole had frozen over during the night and the white whales had perished.

  The tragic conclusion to the Inuvik story and the breaking of the Burgeo story appeared on the desks of news editors almost simultaneously and the editors were not slow to make the transposition from one story to the other. As Monday wore on, the telephone circuits linking Burgeo with the outer world began to overload to the point of collapse with calls from radio stations, newspapers and wire services, all seeking amplification of the brief CBC report. The young woman who operated the radio relay station at Hermitage had to perform superhuman feats to keep communications open. I never did know her name; but later on, after a particularly hectic night during which she exhausted herself on the whale’s behalf, she so far departed from protocol as to call me personally and, in a voice tearful with fatigue, assure me she would continue to do everything she could to keep the line functioning “so that poor beast has got a chance.”

  The media demands prevented me from visiting the whale on Monday, but Danny Green kept me posted. “She’s swimming as smart as ever,” he reported by phone. “Right quiet, too, and blowing stronger than yesterday. The quare thing though is t’other whale. He was right off the cove all the time we was to the Pond, and the Hann boys says he was there every toime they went in and out. Constable Murdoch and me watched for a good while, and here’s the quarest thing: both them whales was spouting right together; and both was sounding together, though they was half a mile apart and never could have seen each other. Maybe ’tis foolish, but I believes they’s a pair and they talks somehow. You say the one inside’s a she? Well, bye, I says the one outside’s a he!”

  ALTHOUGH THE NOISES made by the smaller, toothed whales, as they are used for sound ranging and echo location, have been studied, we have barely begun to investigate how these complicated sounds are used for communication. That they are so used is not in doubt. The studies on dolphins of Dr. John C. Lilly, while not as conclusive as some orthodox scientists would wish, have made this point. Lilly, and those who have worked with him, have shown that dolphins p
ossess intelligence—alien to ours as it must be—which is nevertheless worthy of comparison with ours; and that these relatively (as compared to the rorquals) primitive little whales can not only exchange complex information but can also transmit to one another rich emotional feelings to a degree unsurpassed by any non-human animal of which we have any knowledge.*

  * * *

  *See Man and Dolphin, 1961, and The Mind of the Dolphin, 1967, by Dr. John C. Lilly.

  As yet we can only guess at the communicatory capabilities of the rorquals and other great whales. Until two decades ago it was actually believed by science that most, if not all, the baleen whales were completely dumb! Although they had been hunted for centuries, apparently no man had ever heard one of them utter a single sound. However, the use of supersensitive hydrophones (designed to eavesdrop on enemy submarines) has recently resulted in the astonishing discovery that the rorquals are amongst the most “talkative” of living beings. The range, complexity and frequency of their outpourings is so great that the few scientists who have studied rorqual sounds admit to being completely baffled when it comes to interpreting, or understanding, their modes, purposes or meanings. Some of the weirdly melodious sequences may very well be music in the highest sense of the word. Other incredibly complex combinations of high-frequency clicks and whistling sounds are uncommonly like high-speed communication codes. It may be a long time before we crack these codes, if indeed we ever do. In the meantime, anybody with an open mind who listens to underwater recordings of the humpback whale, for instance, will find it extraordinarily difficult to resist the conclusion that these rorquals can and do communicate with each other on levels of content and efficiency which we may have reason to envy.* As to what they have to say to each other, we have only the faintest of clues. Still, we can be reasonably confident that they are not just talking for the sake of hearing the sound of their own voices. They seem far too intelligent for that.

  * * *

  * Songs of the Humpback Whale, recorded by Dr. Roger S. Payne, is available on Capital Records.

  Whale talk needs no electronic aids in order to span great distances. Water is a much better conductor of sound than is air, and even with our relatively inefficient hearing, we can listen in to fin whales talking underwater, with their low-frequency ranges, at distances of up to thirty-five miles! There is strong reason to believe that some of the great whales can communicate with each other when they are many hundreds of miles apart, and I know one scientist who suspects that whale “talk” may be transmitted right across ocean basins through peculiar “carrier corridors” of water deep in the oceans. The exotic properties of these corridors have only recently been discovered by men, and they are now being exploited for military purposes so that not much has been said about the matter publicly. My friend, who occasionally works for the U.S. Navy, is convinced that whales know about these global communication channels, and may use them for “long distance” calls, free of any tolls.

  THE GUARDIAN, AS we christened him, was still at his post Tuesday morning when, despite snow squalls and a wicked wind, I fled from the media monster I had unleashed, to the gentler company of the quiet monster in the Pond. Onie took me in his dory and we were still some distance from the entrance cove when we saw the Guardian send his “spray,” as Onie called it, high into the murky air.

  We cut the engine and let the dory drift down toward the whale, who was behaving in a most unusual way. He was circling at speed in a space not more than two hundred yards in diameter at the very mouth of the cove, and rising to blow at intervals of only a minute or two. He appeared to ignore our presence, lingering briefly on the surface even when we had drifted to within fifty feet of him. It was then I heard the voice of the fin whale once more, and this time under circumstances which left no doubt about its source.

  Again it was something felt as well as heard: a deep, vibrant sound such as might perhaps be simulated by a bass organ pipe heard from a distance on a foggy night. It was a deeply disturbing sound, a kind of eery ventriloquism out of another world and utterly foreign to anything Onie and I were familiar with. Hoping for a repetition, we waited silent in the dory until the little boat had drifted well past the entrance, but the Guardian whale had sounded and we heard the voice no more. I told Onie to spin the flywheel and we nosed into the Pond.

  We had no sooner cleared the channel than the lady whale spouted close by... spouted and instantly submerged as a big white speedboat roared down upon her at such a clip that the four men in it did not even see us until they had almost swamped us with their wash. They circled and throttled down, and I recognized some of the enemy from Sunday.

  I jumped to my feet. “You get the hell out of here!” I yelled furiously. “Get out now and don’t come back!”

  The driver idled his outboard and grinned defiantly.

  “I suppose you can make we go?” he challenged.

  I bluffed. “The Mountie sure as hell can! Premier Smallwood has taken over this whale. It’s government property now.”

  In the Newfoundland of 1967 there was but one God, and Joey Smallwood was his Prophet. Although Smallwood had as yet betrayed no interest in the whale, I did not hesitate to take his name in vain. It was the only threat which could have had any effect upon these men. There was some muttering, but in the end the speedboat and its occupants departed.

  Onie and I went ashore and settled ourselves in the lee of a commanding rock. With the return of peace, the whale resumed her circling routine but at first she surfaced only at the north end of the Pond, the farthest point away from our moored dory. An hour passed before she came up close enough so that we could see, with horror, a great slash some three or four feet long across her back and just forward of her fin. The white blubber was laid bare to a depth of several inches. When the sportsmen in the white speedboat went back to Burgeo, they described to some of their friends how they had bravely planed their boat at high speed over the whale’s back as she was submerging.

  “Bust a sheer pin,” one of them bragged, “but we cut a Jesusly big hole into her!”

  Despite the ugly appearance of the whale’s new injury, it did not seem to distress her or to interfere with her activities, which, on this day, included something I had heard about from Uncle Art and others, but had not seen before. Shortly before high tide she suddenly stopped her slow patrolling and dashed, swiftly and purposefully, toward the middle of the Pond, where she began circling so close to the surface that the water boils from her flukes made a continuous pattern of interlocked rings. Then she again altered course. There was a flash of greenish-white light reflected from her undersides, followed by a swirl of water and rising bubbles which signified that she had opened her cavernous mouth.

  “She got a smell of herring!” Onie cried excitedly. “Tide’s up now. A bit of a scull must have slipped in through the gut and she took a run at they!”

  It must have been a very little school, for we were perched where we could see the bottom of the channel and could hardly have avoided noticing even a minor run of the little fishes. Nor did the whale make any more attempts to feed that day.

  “I t’inks she’ll starve on what herring comes into the Pond of its own,” was Onie’s opinion. “She must be some hungry. Too bad she wouldn’t glutch down ary o’ them young connors in the speedboat. Put them to a mite of good, it would.”

  We remained at the Pond until dark, when, almost frozen, we headed home. Apart from the incident with the speedboat, it had been a quiet day at Aldridges... but things had been quite different at Messers. I had sown the wind and poor Claire had reaped the whirlwind. She was numb from listening to more than thirty phone calls and telegrams from newspapers, wire services, radio stations, and even one from the Premier of Newfoundland.

  DELIGHTED TO BE ABLE TO TELL YOU MY COLLEAGUES HAVE ACCORDED MY REQUEST THAT WE PAY UP TO ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS TO THE FISHERMEN OF BURGEO TO ENABLE THEM TO SUPPLY HERRING
FOR YOUR WHALE STOP WOULD YOU UNDERTAKE TO ORGANIZE CARE AND FEEDING OF YOUR CATCH STOP KINDEST REGARDS.

  JR SMALLWOOD

  As I was reading the telegram, Claire said, “I had a phone call from a St. John’s reporter. He told me the whale story was national and even international news already, and Joey was going to climb on the bandwagon. He also said to tell you not to spend any of that thousand until you had it in your hands.”

  The day had also brought photographer Bob Brooks from the Toronto Star. Brooks had arrived late in the afternoon aboard a chartered ski plane that had landed him two miles inland on the ice of a small lake, from whence he had to slog his way through knee-deep snow to the shores of Short Reach. Luckily for him a passing fisherman saw him there and ferried him across to Burgeo just before he froze.

  He was still indignant about the isolation of Burgeo when I arrived home to find him thawing out before our stove.

  “Hell,” he said feelingly, “it’s easier to get to Baffin Island than here. What a place you chose to live!”

  Not all the calls Claire answered that day were from away. One of them came from the female member of the doctor team. She was furious because I had dared tell the outside world about the whale—as if I were some kind of informer. But that hardly mattered because Smallwood’s message had got around and it was beginning to dawn on our businessmen, even on our politicians, that a real live whale right here in Burgeo had publicity value. From being no more than a massive curiosity, fit only to provide a target for the local sports, she now began to look like something different—like money.

  My first intimation of her new status came late that evening. Claire and I were discussing how we should handle contributions of money which, we had been told by several reporters, were already being collected to help feed the whale.