by Farley Mowat
It might have been a moment of terror, but it was not. I felt no fear even when her eyes came out of water and she swung her head slightly so that one cyclopean orb looked directly at us. She had emerged from her own element as far as she could in order to see us in ours, and although her purpose was inscrutable, I somehow knew it was not inimical.
Then she sank forward and her head went under. The hump appeared, she blew and sounded and, a few seconds later, was passing directly under the dory. It seemed to take as long for the interminable sweep of her body to slip by as it does for a train to pass a railway crossing. But so smoothly and gently did she pass that we felt no motion except when the vast flukes went under us and the dory bobbed a little.
It was then I heard the voice of the fin whale for the third time. It was a long, low, sonorous moan with unearthly overtones in a higher pitch. It was unbelievably weird and bore no affinity with any sound I have heard from any other living thing. It was a voice not of the world we know.
When the whale had passed on, Onie sat as if paralyzed. Slowly he relaxed. He turned and looked at me with an anxious and questioning expression.
“That whale... she spoke to we! I t’inks she spoke to we!”
I nodded in agreement, for I will always believe she deliberately tried to span the chasm between our species—between our distant worlds. She failed, yet it was not total failure. So long as I live I shall hear the echoes of that haunting cry. And they will remind me that life itself—not human life—is the ultimate miracle upon this earth. I will hear those echoes even if the day should come when none of her nation is left alive in the desecrated seas, and the voices of the great whales have been silenced forever.
THAT SATURDAY MORNING at the Pond was a strange idyll. Nobody came near and nothing happened to break the companionable mood. Onie and I drifted in the dory, rapt, and unaware of the cold biting into our bones. The whale performed her slow and stately dance through the still waters, making a point of coming close to us as she completed each new circuit of the Pond. I cannot know how she felt, but I felt almost happy. I kept hoping to see her swirl into sudden action in pursuit of some small school of herring which might have entered the Pond, but it was a forlorn hope.
Just before noon I decided to go to the fish plant to see if there was any further news of the Harmon, or of the capelin trap from Ramea, and also to see that preparations for a further seining effort had been put in train. Onie had just opened the petcock, preparatory to starting the dory’s engine, when we heard the nasal whine of an approaching aircraft. It was a ski-equipped Cessna which had slipped in to Gull Pond for Bob Brooks. Having picked him up, the pilot was now climbing over Aldridges, where the plane began to describe wide circles as Brooks took his pictures.
I looked anxiously at the whale, but at first she seemed unperturbed. The plane made five or six circles at a reasonably high altitude, but then, instead of going away, it began to descend, circling lower and lower until it was snarling across the Pond at less than three hundred feet. I sprang to my feet and shook my fist at it, screaming useless imprecations. The plane ignored me, making pass after pass over the Pond while the engine’s roar reverberated deafeningly between the rock walls of the hills.
The whale became panic-stricken. At what must have been almost her maximum speed she burst down the centre of the Pond toward the channel, turning only at the last possible moment, in a wall of foam, before racing back toward the shallow eastern arm.
Onie was also on his feet and he, too, was yelling, which was an act of which I had scarcely thought him capable. “She be going to ground! Lard God, she be going to run ashore!” he cried in a voice sharp with fear.
Had I possessed a rifle I think I would have tried to shoot down that plane. I was quite beside myself when, after forty minutes, Brooks evidently decided he had enough photographs and the plane climbed away and disappeared.
In retrospect I do not particularly blame Bob Brooks. I suppose he was only doing what any media man is paid to do: get the coverage and to hell with the local consequences. But I was still shaking with rage when we reached the fish plant and I entered the manager’s office. He had no good news with which to allay my fury. He had tried to call the Harmon on the ship-to-shore radiophone but could not raise her. Finally he succeeded in raising another seiner in Bay of Islands and learned that the Harmon was still lying at her dock, apparently under no orders to sail anywhere.
There had been no word at all from Premier Smallwood. But Gander airport reported three ski-equipped planes laden with press and camera people standing by for takeoff. The delay in their departure for Burgeo seemed to be due to uncertainty about the thickness of the ice on Gull Pond.
The only hopeful news was a message from Ramea saying that the capelin trap was on the dock there, and would be picked up and brought to Burgeo on Sunday by the refrigerator ship Caribou Reefer. However, that delay meant we would not be able to use it until Monday, and might not get a catch from it until Tuesday. I was afraid the whale could not wait that long. The Sou’westers Club had agreed that we should mount another seining effort Saturday evening, but the Club officers were worried about paying for it. I assured them that, if necessary, I would bear the cost myself.
When Onie and I returned to Aldridges we found the solitude had been broken. There were ten or fifteen boatloads of curious people present. Although most of them had left their boats in nearby Richards Hole, or in the entrance cove, one large trap skiff was dead in the middle of the channel, her propeller hopelessly fouled in the barrier net, which we had earlier replaced for the third time.
This boat belonged to a man named Rose who fished a little but whose preferred work was guiding mainland hunters who sometimes visited Burgeo to shoot moose. Rose had once come to me for help over a cancelled guide licence and I had been instrumental in getting it restored. I could hardly believe that he would now repay me like this. I shouted at him, asking if he had not read the sign asking boats to stay out of the Pond. Rose looked up at me, red-faced and hostile.
“I can’t read!” he shouted back—and I was ashamed of myself for not remembering that he, like many another outport man of his generation, had never had a chance to get much schooling.
“No matter could I read,” he added defiantly, “I got me rights to go where I wants on the water, and ’tis what I aims to do!”
The timely arrival of the police launch saved the situation. Rose’s boat was freed and he was persuaded by the constable not to motor into the centre of the Pond. But Murdoch could only use persuasion and, as the afternoon wore on, this was not enough. Several boatloads of young men challenged the police, and me, by roaring into the Pond. In our presence they did not quite have nerve enough to chase the whale, but they disturbed her sufficiently so that her erratic attempts to keep clear of them took her into dangerously shoal waters.
In contrast to the quiet of the early morning, it was now growing into a tense and miserable afternoon. Although most of the people present were seemingly content just to watch, the hostility between myself and the speedboat crowd hung over the Pond like a miasma. I was afraid that not even the presence of the policeman would be enough to restrain them, and I dreaded the possibility of another outburst such as had occurred on Sunday.
The tension was eased somewhat when a party of officers from the CGS Montgomery came ashore to see the whale. The oceanographer was with them and he proved to be as sympathetic as I could have hoped. He told me the Guardian was still standing watch beyond the cove, but that he had sheered off and sounded when the press of visiting boats became too heavy.
Danny and Murdoch agreed to remain at the Pond until all the intruding boats had gone, since I had to return to Messers to organize the next seining expedition. I could only hope their mere presence would deter the “sportsmen” in the speedboats, and I was in a depressed state of mind as Onie piloted us homeward. He sensed it, and as
he dropped me at Sim’s stage, he said quietly:
“Don’t you take it too hard now, Skipper. They’s a good many people don’t want that whale hurted. They thinks you’s doing the right thing. Seems like Burgeo’s gone adrift these times. People moved in from all along the coast, all mixed up together like mackerel in a puncheon. And some of they gone sour because of it, and don’t rightly know what they’s about.”
THE ATTEMPT AT herring seining that evening was a fiasco. A porpoise expert from Florida had suggested that we try using lights to attract schools of small fish so they could more easily be seined. So I had borrowed a Delco generator from the fish plant and, when we reached Aldridges, I installed it on shore and set up a pair of lights which flooded the mouth of the gut.
The generator and lights worked well, but when the men made their first sweep across the cove, the seine hooked on the bottom and tore to shreds. When I went aboard one of the dories to look at the remnants of it, I found I could pull it apart as easily as if it had been made of rotten straw. I could get no credible explanation from anyone as to why the net, which had functioned well enough only two days earlier, should suddenly be rotten now. When I asked Curt, he refused to answer or to meet my eyes. The Andersons, on the other hand, were defiantly defensive at the implication that they had substituted an old and useless net.
“’Tain’t the net’s fault, bye. Nothing wrong with she. ’Tis hard use beat her up on the rocks. ’Tis only foolishness to fish a net on foul bottom. We only risked her to pleasure you, and now we’s lost our net. Who’s going to pay for it, we wants to know?”
Disgusted, I sent the Andersons on their way. The rest of us remained and kept the floodlights burning, hoping they would attract at least some herring into the Pond. A few barrels did in fact enter the mouth of the channel but they were reluctant to swim through it, and we could easily see why.
Undeterred by the brilliant glare, the lady whale had appeared at our end of the Pond, where she swam back and forth as close to the inner opening of the gut as she could safely go. At times she came into such shoal water that she had to swim on the surface to avoid grounding. It was heartbreakingly obvious that she understood what we were trying to do and that she was desperately hungry.
It was two o’clock in the morning before we finally accepted the uselessness of our efforts and packed up the gear. I retained a faint hope that, in our absence, the Guardian might succeed where we had failed, and so we left the channel open.
It had been a long, distressing day. There had not even been the solace of seeing reinforcements arrive in the shape of Schevill and his party, for the U.S. Navy had decided that weather conditions were still not good enough to risk the flight. When I wearily stumbled up the steps and into the kitchen of our little house, it was to find Claire waiting with a table piled high with mail. During the afternoon the coastal steamer, SS Baccalieu, long delayed by weather, had finally reached Burgeo. Claire had walked to the post office and had staggered home under the weight of a full mail bag.
I was too tired to do more than glance at the mountain of letters from all over North America. Many of them contained small cheques and some held coins, gifts from all sorts of people: school children, the manager of a Chicago automotive works, a stockman from Calgary, a radio disk jockey from New York and a housewife from Labrador City. The gist of what they had to say was all much the same. They begged me, sometimes in extravagant words, to save and free the whale. Some were sentimental; but the words were of no importance. What mattered was that these scattered and diverse people in far distant places had all been moved by one thing, by compassion for a strange, great creature, trapped and endlessly circling in a small pond on the remote coast of Newfoundland.
They gave me hope again.
18
SCHEVILL CALLED EARLY SUNDAY MORNING from Argentia to say that, despite the uncertain look of the weather, he and three other “whale watchers” would be taking off in an amphibious Catalina immediately. He wanted to know how landing conditions were in Burgeo.
“Good enough. Tell your pilot to find Short Reach on his chart. He can moor to the fish plant wharf.”
“How’s the whale?”
“Haven’t seen her today, but we didn’t get her a feed last night and she’s getting desperately thin and awfully logy.”
“Let’s hope she’ll make it. We’ll be there soon to lend a hand.”
The imminent arrival of professional support stirred me from a lethargy of fatigue and depression, and I bolted my breakfast, barely remembering to wish Claire “many happy returns” on this, her birthday. Soon there was a dull roar from eastward. We ran out on our porch and watched exultantly as a Catalina lumbered over Burgeo and began circling the village.
It circled and it circled.
“Why the hell don’t they land?” I cried in a fever of impatience.
Almost as if he had heard me, the pilot put the plane’s nose down and she began a ponderous descent toward Short Reach. As she slipped out of sight behind the intervening hills, I was already sprinting for Onie’s house to ask him to get the dory; but before I reached it there was a snarl of engines running up to full power, and the Catalina reappeared, climbing laboriously into the overcast.
I watched, incredulously, as she headed northwest toward the interior barrens and disappeared. When I realized she was not coming back, I went into the kitchen, glumly poured a cup of tea, and listened to the weather forecast on the marine radio. Strong southwest winds increasing to forty knots by mid-afternoon, with visibility lowering to zero in fog and snow flurries... I did not need the weatherman to tell me this was the beginning of another two- or three-day storm during which no aircraft would reach Burgeo.
Schevill called a couple of hours later from Stephenville, a “rented” U.S. Strategic Air Force base on the west coast of Newfoundland. It seemed that the navy pilot had changed his mind about landing because he was afraid he might be marooned in Burgeo by bad weather. Rather than risk that awful fate, he had continued on to the comforts of the Stephenville base. Schevill was as disappointed as I was, but he remained optimistic.
“Never mind. I think I can talk the Air Force into bringing us in by helicopter. Look for us about noon.”
We looked hard enough, God knows, but the helicopter never came. Instead, a Beaver on skis slipped in under the lowering overcast and landed on Gull Pond. It was some days later before we learned it had brought a television crew who, when they found they would have to hike cross-country from the landing pond, got back into the Beaver and flew home again. No whale was worth that much effort.
By early afternoon we were experiencing a proper sou’wester and, since there was no longer any chance of visitors arriving, Onie and I set off through the grey storm scud for Aldridges Pond.
It was a forbidding sort of day. Streaming clouds, whipped by a whining wind off the black and frigid ocean, completely concealed the peak of Richards Head. Snow flurries driving across the runs and tickles obscured even the familiar shapes of nearby rocks and islands. It was savagely cold, and the lop which was beginning to kick up in the mouth of Short Reach warned us we could not stay long at the Pond.
As we bucketed into the cove, visibility was so bad we did not realize we were not alone until we nearly rammed a whale, head-on. The whale was so deep inside the cove that there was hardly enough room for it to swim, let alone submerge. I glimpsed the gleaming mass of its head surging toward us when it was less than twenty feet away and, at my startled yell, Onie swung the tiller hard over and cut the engine. The whale also went into a hard turn, but in the opposite direction, and with such acceleration that the boil from its flukes heeled the dory far over on her side. Then another snow flurry swept down, obliterating everything from view. When the flurry passed, the whale had disappeared.
The wild thought flashed into my mind that, aided by a high tide raised higher still by the s
ou’wester, the prisoner had escaped!
In jubilation, I yelled at Onie to start the engine.
“I think that’s her! I think she’s out, Onie! Head into the Pond. Quick, man, quick!”
The old Atlantic barked into life and we shot through the narrow gut, propelled not so much by the engine as by wind and tide. The water in the channel was very high, higher than I had ever seen it before. Inside the Pond there was no sign of the trapped whale. I was now almost sure she had succeeded in escaping.
“Circle the Pond,” I cried to Onie.
Obediently he put the tiller over and we puttered through the driving scud. As I stood in the bow peering about, I was vaguely aware that my initial surge of jubilation was fading and in its place was a growing and aching sense of anxiety; but I had no time to dwell on that. For then I saw her.
She was on the surface and moving very slowly. Almost all of her great length was exposed. She could easily have been mistaken for one of those colossal sea monsters which decorate ancient charts. The illusion was intensified by the vagueness given to her outlines by the drifting snow.
I hardly know how to describe or explain my reaction. Instead of feeling sick with disappointment as I realized she was still a prisoner, my spirits rose. I felt something akin to elation. The only explanation I can offer, and it is no easy one for me to accept, is that if she had managed to escape without my help, it would have made a travesty of my attempts to save her. Or was it, perhaps, that I needed her continuing presence in the Pond to justify my own actions and attitudes toward those who had tormented her? Had I come to rely on her presence in order to maintain my role? Had my need of her become greater than her need of me?
I have no answers to these questions, and I think I want none.