by Farley Mowat
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.”
He quoted The Keeper of the King’s Purse and The Keeper of the King’s Conscience as other examples of the office, adding, “It has now been extended to Newfoundland for the first time with this appointment.”
“The whale has a name now, too,” Claire said. “You’d never guess... it’s Moby Joe! For good old Joey himself.”
“It may strain his famous sense of humour a bit when he finds out his namesake is a lady, and probably pregnant to boot,” I replied. “Well, let him have his fun. Main thing is he’s officially said the whale is under government protection. I’m going to wire him to send the Harmon down.”
Smallwood and the mass media were not the only ones to “climb aboard” the whale that day. There was a message from an entrepreneur in Montreal offering me $100,000 if I would deliver her, alive and in good condition, to the World’s Fair, Expo 67. Another offer came from a circus owner in Louisiana stating he would be happy to buy the whale if I would have her stuffed or otherwise preserved for exhibition.
Canadian marine science now also awoke, if only partially, to its golden opportunity. A biologist, who was too busy to come and see the whale for himself, sent the following telegram instead.
DESIRE OBSERVATIONS OF WHALE BY CRITICAL OBSERVER SUCH AS YOURSELF LIKE TIME IN SECONDS BETWEEN BLOWS OVER TWENTY-FOUR HOUR PERIOD STOP CORRELATION ACTIVITIES WITH A DECREASED BLOW RATE STOP FEEDING BEHAVIOUR IN DETAIL INCLUDING SPEED AND RADIUS OF TURNING STOP AVOIDANCE OF OBSTACLES AND DEFINITE PLAY BEHAVIOUR STOP HOW MANY EXCRETIONS OBSERVED TWENTY-FOUR HOURS...
Not all the responses from the outer world were as absurd. There were a number of telegrams from individuals whom I did not know, and would never meet, which were simple and moving affirmations of the fact that some human beings could care about the unhappy plight of a distressed member of another species. These messages were something of an antidote to the unpleasant suspicion that I had got myself involved in a public circus. And, too, they helped ease the guilt I was feeling at the brutal and unthinking assault upon the people of Burgeo as a whole by the media—an assault which I had been instrumental in unleashing.
Almost every story printed or broadcast during those first few days took pains to stress the attack made on the whale by the riflemen, making it sound as though the entire population of Burgeo had taken part in an orgy of bloodletting. Many writers and broadcasters took a tone of holier-than-thou revulsion against the barbarism of an uncouth band of savages.
For years I had been publicly extolling the virtues of people on the fringes of “civilization,” whether they lived in arctic igloos, aboard ocean-going tugs, on prairie farms or on the coasts of Newfoundland. I had celebrated their unsophisticated honesty, defending them against the smug contempt of admass man. I had sought to be their champion—and now, because of my feeling of kinship for the whale, I was being made to look as if I had turned against the outport people and had joined their detractors.
THE SEINING EFFORT had been arranged by the Sou’westers during the afternoon and now they called me to say it would consist of the two Anderson brothers (a pair of dour little men who owned the only capelin seine in Burgeo); Kenneth and Douglas Hann; and Curt Bungay and Wash Pink. The Hanns and the Andersons would each provide a dory to assist in working the seine. Although high tide was not due until after midnight, I thought it would be wise to make a preliminary reconnaissance soon after dark. Curt agreed and we set off in his boat.
The sea, black and motionless as stretched silk, was literally alive with herring. Immense schools drove off on either bow. They were right at the surface and, as they dashed away from the boat, the ebony face of the waters suddenly glowed in pale bands of saffron phosphorescence. Occasionally one shoal overrode another and thousands of herring broke through the surface and sparkled in the beams of our running lights like myriad shards of mirror glass. When I turned the spotlight downward, it revealed layer upon layer of silvered fishes as far as the light could penetrate.
Only once before had I witnessed such a stunning aggregation of living things. That was in 1947, when I watched the mass migration of tens of thousands of Barrenland caribou over the Keewatin tundra. At the time it had seemed inconceivable to me that anything could diminish such multitudes of living creatures; yet, before a decade had passed, the caribou had been virtually eliminated from much of their immense arctic range.
On that winter night in 1967, it seemed inconceivable that such vast numbers of herring could ever be significantly diminished even by man’s monstrous predation; and yet by 1972 those vast schools had been so heavily decimated that informed biologists were predicting an end to the herring fishery in the entire North Atlantic before the end of the decade.
The little cove outside the Pond was jammed with herring. “Lard Jasus!” cried Curt with the uninhibited enthusiasm of a true fisherman. “Would you look at that! I don’t say as what a man couldn’t git out and walk ashore and never wet his feet!”
For fear of disturbing the schools, we did not enter the cove but instead landed a few yards farther down the open shore. With the aid of flashlights we scrambled over the slippery rocks to the channel in order to remove the barrier net the Hanns had put in place. Someone had been before us. The head-rope of the net had been cleanly sliced and the net itself had already been hauled ashore in a tangled heap.
When I asked the Hanns for an explanation of the ruined barrier net, they w
ere evasive. Not until later, when Curt and I were alone in his kitchen awaiting the arrival of the Andersons with the seine, did I get an explanation.
“Seems as if some of the people down to The Reach is right ugly about you barring off the Pond,” Curt said. “Claim nobody got the right to bar off a boat passage. Not you, nor the Mountie, nor Joey hisself.”
“But,” I protested, “the Hanns fixed the net so anybody could slip one end of it and pass a boat through with no trouble. The fishermen must know it’s not intended to keep them out of the Pond. It’s just to keep the herring in.”
“No matter, Farley. ’Tis partly that sign you put up saying the Pond is closed. We... them fellows been free to come and go on the water anywhere they wants, all their lives. If you was to bar the channel with anchor chain I don’t say they wouldn’t cut it clear somehow.”
I was getting angry.
“That’s just damn stupid! Surely they realize we have to hold herring in the Pond. And it won’t be forever... not more than a month at most... Well, the hell with it! The channel’s going to be barred and it’s going to stay barred so long as need be.”
Curt’s round, red face was impassive and he made no reply. I got to my feet. “Let’s get the crowd and go. It’s midnight and we’ve work to do.”
The moon was up by the time our three-boat flotilla deployed off the mouth of the cove. Quietly the men fed the hundred-yard-long seine over the stern of Curt’s boat as she slowly moved parallel to the shore. The Andersons, in one dory, were left to hold the free end. When the net was all paid out, the second dory, manned by the Hanns, took the remaining end. Then both dories moved landward toward the cove.
The curved net began inching shoreward as Curt, Wash and I waited, watching silently. Then, as if there had been an explosion down under, there came a violent eruption and a surge of water that set us rolling wildly. I instinctively grabbed for the gunwales to brace myself just as a sonorous whoosh sounded so close at hand I thought for a moment it was in the boat itself. A fine mist settled over us. Transfixed, we stared astern where the streaming back of the Guardian was arching smoothly under, not a dory’s length away. Curt was the first to recover.
“Lard God Almighty! That was close enough! Hope the bugger’s got his radar working! What the devil do you suppose...?”
He was interrupted as the usually imperturbable Wash Pink shouted:
“Look, bye, look there! Look at them herring drive!”
Fifty feet to port, between us and the entrance to the cove, the water was surging with the bodies of wildly fleeing herring. In the glare of the spotlight it looked like a groundswell running to shore after a storm. The swell seemed to break against the right-hand section of the seine and along the remaining gap between the Andersons’ dory and the shore.
Curt and I looked at each other.
“You don’t think...?” I began hesitantly. “You don’t think he did that on purpose, do you?”
“Purpose or no, Farley, bye, he sure and hell druv a couple hundred barrels right straight into the cove.”
Later the Hanns told us the rush and flow of herring under and around them had rocked their dory. Kenneth had no doubt at all as to what had happened.
“That whale you calls the Guardian, we t’inks he has his own way of doing for the one inside. Me and Doug’ve seen he rush the cove like that afore. ’Tis certain he be trying to drive herring into the Pond for she to eat.”
Fortunately for our nerves, the Guardian did not reappear. In a few minutes the two ends of the seine were in shoal water. Wearing hip waders, the four fishermen went over the sides of their dories and began pursing the seine through the cove toward the mouth of the channel. Penned ahead of them was what we later estimated to have been about five tons of milling little fishes.
When the trapped school was almost in the mouth of the channel, the men began wading back and forth along the perimeter of the seine, banging the surface of the water, shouting, and shining flashlights into the seething mass. Finally an arrow stream of fishes sped into the channel and in a moment the entire school was pouring into Aldridges.
It was too dark to see what was happening beyond the channel, but the swoosh and surge of water, and a mighty splashing of flukes, told us that the prisoner was hungrily enjoying the bounty we had provided.
The first sweep was a great success, but a second failed when the seine snagged on the rocky bottom and allowed most of the herring to escape. Nevertheless, the men managed to bag four or five barrels in one end of the net, and they decided to tow the bag right through the channel. Kenneth Hann described what followed:
“We was no more’n ten feet inside the Pond when we opened up the bag and let the herring go free. I had a holt of the seine and was leaning overside to see was they all clear, when Dougie yelled for me to look arter myself. I turned me head and there was the whale coming straight for we with her mouth open wider’n the main hatch of the Baccalieu. She was pushing water ahead of her like one of them ocean liners, and the dory rose right up and near capsized.
“By the time I got me bearings she was gone again. And I tells you, bye, it never took we long to be gone out of there ourselves. If they was a herring she never got, he must have been some slick. She could have had we just as easy, but she never bothered. ’Twas just as well. I never did envy that fellow Jonah anyhow.”
All in all it had been a good day. Temporarily, at least, we had solved the feeding problem. And we knew for sure that the lady in the Pond had a good appetite and was able and anxious to fill her belly.
16
I WOKE LATE, TO THE familiar whine of a sou’west wind and the dry rustle of snow blasting against the house. Already, great grey seas were pounding the headlands of the offer islands. It was clear there would be small chance to visit the whale this day. I viewed the storm with mixed feelings. We could do no further seining while the sou’wester lasted but, on the other hand, the whale would be left in peace, free of human interference and intrusions, to feed on the herring we had already driven into the Pond.
But if she was to have a day of peace, we were not. Before I had been up ten minutes I was called to the phone, and for the balance of the day was engaged in dealing with an almost continuous telephonic siege.
Many of the calls were querulous requests for help from newsmen and camera crews stranded in stormbound airports all the way from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to St. John’s, Newfoundland. Some of them seemed to take the storm, and Burgeo’s isolation from the world, as personal affronts. How was it, asked one television interviewer, with an edge in his voice, that he had recently been able to cover stories in Helsinki, Tokyo and Chile, all within the space of a week, but couldn’t reach a godforsaken little burg in his own country?
A bit impatiently I explained that he could always do as we natives did and catch the weekly steamer to Burgeo from Port aux Basques. This suggestion seemed to give him little comfort.
It also gave small comfort to Bob Brooks. He was now in a fever of impatience to be gone with what was still a photographic scoop on the whale. However, although the westbound coastal boat was due in Burgeo this day, he could not be persuaded to book passage in her. Apparently modern media man, deprived of winged machines, is something of a cripple. And it was obvious that the only wings we were going to see over Burgeo for the next day or two would belong to storm-tossed gulls.
I did not feel much sympathy for the problems of the news people but it was quite another matter when I got a call from Dr. William E. Schevill at the marine research station, Woods Hole, Massachusetts. I knew Schevill to be one of the world’s foremost whale biologists. He told me he had heard about our whale and was ready to come to Burgeo at once. His difficulty was how to get to us. I suggested he try to arrange something with the U.S. naval air base at Argentia in southeast Newfoundland. This he did with such dispatch that he was able to call me from
Argentia late that evening with the news that not only had he reached Newfoundland, but he was standing by with an amphibious navy aircraft at his disposal, ready to descend on Burgeo the moment the weather cleared.
“It may not clear for days. If you want to be sure of getting here, you’d better come by sea,” I told him, adding half facetiously that he might ask the navy to lend him a destroyer.
Alas, the navy was not to be persuaded. The storm had worsened and the naval commander at Argentia decided that the roaring rock wall of the Sou’west Coast was no place for one of his ships.
The Burgeo whales seem to have decided that the inshore waters were no place for them that day either.
Early in the morning the Canadian government ship Mont-gomery, which maintained and serviced lighthouses and navigation aids on the coast, put into Burgeo for shelter. She dropped two anchors in the mouth of Short Reach only a few hundred yards from the entrance to Aldridges Pond and there she rode out the gale for the next two days. One of her people, an oceanographer, made the most of this opportunity to watch the Burgeo whales.
Shortly after the Montgomery came to anchor, a pod of four appeared in the mouth of The Reach. They were fishing hard, as if perhaps they knew it might be some time before they would feed again. Time after time they worked shoals of herring in toward Greenhill Island and the oceanographer could see sudden flurries of little fishes break the surface at the end of each whale’s rush.
About noon, by which time the sea was building to formidable size, three members of the pod swam past the ship in close formation, heading resolutely southeast toward open water. When their spouts were last seen they were nearly a mile offshore.
“I guessed what they were up to,” the oceanographer told me later. “We’d heard the marine forecasts and we knew there was a devil of a blow coming. Our skipper had to choose between running in to the lee of the land for shelter—which he did—or heading out to sea to get as much of an offing as we could. And I think the whales must have had just about as good an idea of what was brewing as we did. Only their choice was to go offshore. It made sense. Even in as good an anchorage as ours, the groundswell was bad enough to keep the ship tugging at her anchors like a wild horse. The surge coming right up from the bottom would have made lying uncomfortable for a whale. But once away from land they could go way below the turbulence and drift around in comfort with just the occasional trip back up to spout. It’s the same principle submariners use in a storm: go deep and find the quiet water.”