by Ellen Datlow
It wasn’t till then that I came to myself, became aware that I was strapped in and that a charter crewman was reaching over to haul the cabin door back, became aware of Will beside me, first pulling back his headset then mine before handing over the skull and urging me on.
“It’s time, Dave. It’s time.”
I took the thing, hardly knowing what I’d been given at first. But as I prepared to throw it down to the wet rocks that came and went amid the heaving whitewater below, I found I could speak of it at last.
“Brooke’s skull, not Farday’s. Captain Brooke’s, you hear? Farday’s ghost borrowed it, possessed it, treasured it, anything so he could come home.”
Will had known to lean in close. “You’re sure?” he called above the roar of the rotors and the ocean.
“Two ghosts fighting over a single skull.”
Then I let it go, felt my twin guests leave me, slip away, saw the skull’s jaws snap wide in a scream or a shout, what it looked like, though how could we ever know? But for me it was to bite something so they were locked together, fiercely and forever, going to whatever home they could find for themselves in that harsh and unforgiving sea.
THE WHALERS SONG
RAY CLULEY
Sebjørn squinted against the pale light of the midnight sun. The sky was cloudless. There was no wind. The sea was still and vacant, except for where it frothed against the hull of the Höðr, splitting around them into a wide V of wake. It was so quiet that Sebjørn had become aware of the throbbing noise of the boat’s engine, a sound so familiar that he was usually as ignorant of it as he was the pump-thump of his own heartbeat. The regularity of his breathing.
At the bow, Aaron leaned on the barrel of the harpoon cannon. He, too, searched the sea. He wore binoculars around his neck and occasionally he used them, but only briefly.
In the crow’s nest, Sigved used his more frequently. He wore his bright orange waterproof, as if he’d seen rain the others had yet to notice. He wore the hood up, cords pulled so tight that it puckered around his face, and he held the binoculars at what little gap remained.
Brage and Nils—one port, one starboard—also looked to the water. Searching, like the others, for a plume of expelled spray. The run-off from an arching back. Maybe birds, sitting on the water, bobbing to eat krill.
There was nothing.
In the wheelhouse, Osvald held them steady. Grim-faced but fierce when others might be sullen. A suitable expression for a captain yet to catch his first whale of the season; of the thirty to forty they were set to catch this year, the crew of the Höðr had none.
Minke whales are the smallest of the baleen whales and can remain submerged for twenty minutes at a time. They barely breach when they come up for air, nor do they bring their flukes from the water when they dive. It makes them difficult to spot. For a species so apparently great in number—enough, at least, to be considered sustainable—they were proving to be frustratingly elusive this year.
Sebjørn checked his watch. Another day would soon be over. Another night. He clapped his gloved hands together a couple of times and rubbed them. Not because he was cold but because the gesture felt decisive. Come on now, he thought. Show us something. Give us something to take home.
Nils, standing close beside him, chose that moment to begin singing. Not a whaling song, but a traditional fishing song. His father, he’d said, had been a fisherman, but then every whaler was a fisherman in the winter.
The men on the Höðr knew the song.
Brage turned and smiled at Nils, smiled at Sebjørn, and added his deep voice to the chorus. Sebjørn mouthed the words as well, quietly at first but gaining enthusiasm with the others. Aaron, at the cannon, waved his arms to conduct an imagined orchestra and they sang of the rise and fall of the sea, of the catch and the haul, driven by a rhythm meant to ease hard work, though they had none.
A sudden whistle, brief and shrill, cut the song short. Sigved had the binoculars at his face but was holding them with only one hand; with the other he pointed.
There. A small cloud of spray. The mist of a blowhole, spouting. It settled quickly on such a windless day, drifting just enough to indicate a direction of movement.
Sebjørn offered Sigved a thumbs up. The man nodded, unclipping the radio from his belt and calling through to the captain, but Osvald was already steering the boat around. The men cheered as the vessel turned. This was it. At last, the thrill of the hunt.
There was another eruption of spray ahead and a dark shape emerged from the water before slipping back under.
There were two of them.
Aaron readied himself at the harpoon cannon. Brage took one of the rifles from the nearby rack. He wouldn’t need it. The harpoon was grenade-tipped, designed to explode inside the whale’s brain, and Aaron was a good shot.
The blast of the cannon shuddered through the deck. The Höðr was a small vessel and all of it trembled when the gunner fired. Sebjørn, resting against a rail, felt it thrumming as he watched nylon wire unravel behind the harpoon. Heard it hiss its sizzling echo to the sudden thunder that had launched it.
The whale turned and, with a final wave of fin, it rolled. Raised its side to the sky. Its pale underbelly.
Brage lowered the rifle.
“Eight meters,” said Nils beside Sebjørn. Sebjørn nodded. Twenty-six, twenty-seven feet. Half the size of the Höðr. About average. But average was good. Small would have been good. Average was very good.
Sebjørn looked to the wheelhouse. Osvald, usually so serious, was smiling. Sebjørn was glad to see it.
A metallic whine from the winch signalled the men to their stations. The nylon cord yanked its slack out of the water, flinging seawater skyward as it pulled taut with the weight of their whale, and Sebjørn clapped his hands together.
“Let’s get to work!”
The minke laid sprawled across the deck, a ragged pulp of meat and blubber where the harpoon had exploded close to the thorax. A good shot. Sebjørn inspected it briefly, nodded at Aaron, and with the others began to carve the animal into pieces.
They would strip several tonnes from the carcass, reducing it to a head and a tail with only bones in between. The tail had been nearly severed already in coming out of the sea, the winch pulling cord through flesh as the whale’s own weight split skin and blubber and muscle down to the bone. The deck was awash with blood. The men were red to their elbows, rubber suits smeared about the chest and waist. Boots sliding in the mess that spread around them.
Sebjørn was in charge of the flensing. He carved blubber into thick strips, handing them to Nils to send below where Brage packed them in ice. Whale blubber was not like animal fat. It was not soft; cutting it demanded strength. Sebjørn was still strong. He enjoyed the work. It was greasy, stinking work, and he was slick with fat and fluids, but it was men’s work and he was happy.
Sigved and Aaron followed Sebjørn’s progress. They drew their knives through meat and muscle, laying each thick chunk on the deck ready to go below. They all worked in focussed silence, save for the grunts and exhalations of their exertions. There were plenty of songs they could have used to accompany, even ease, their efforts, but by some unspoken agreement they worked without them. As if a song would make this routine when the catch was far too special: they would honour it with quiet efficiency. There was chorus enough, anyway, from the birds that had appeared from nowhere, circling and diving and crying their impatience, calling at each other in battle over whatever scraps made it to the sea.
The heavy bulk before the men, thick under their hands and firm against their bodies, uncurled piece by piece until the body was an open wet cavity, red and white and steaming in the cold air. The grey-black whale, skin shining like an oil-slick, was swiftly becoming a length of bones. These would be thrown back to the sea; today’s whaling was concerned only with the blubber and the meat beneath. The blubber would be rendered down to oil. The meat would be eaten.
Sebjørn cut away one of the fins, let it d
rop to the deck, and kicked it overboard. The sea had fed the whale, the whale would feed the sea. He cut into the sagging swell of whale belly and reached inside, pushing bones aside to locate the stomach. Cut it loose. He hefted it overboard like a shot-put, startling the birds with its heavy splash. For a moment it rose again, buoyant, but it wouldn’t float for long. The birds were already pulling it to pieces, screeching their excitement, fighting. Tossing their heads back to swallow whatever chunks they managed to scavenge while smaller scraps sank for the fishes.
Behind Sebjørn, somebody swore. Somebody yelled. He turned to see Sigved throwing a punch at Nils, who sprawled across the whale carcass. Nils lashed out in return. Sigved turned the blow aside with an open hand but hissed in pain. Sebjørn yelled at both of them. One held the curved blade of a flensing knife, the other a metal hook for dragging slabs of butchered meat, but he stepped between them and shoved them apart. He didn’t ask what the fight had been about because it didn’t matter. Men would always fight.
Sigved snatched up one of the hoses and washed blood from his palm. A smile gaped there, filling with more blood as he flexed his fingers.
“Get it bandaged,” Sebjørn said.
Sigved gestured with a quick jab of his head to where the meat was piling up beside Nils. “He’s clumsy,” he said. “And he’s slow.”
Nils was new. He had worked a couple of other boats previously but there was some truth to what Sigved said, Sebjørn had to admit.
“If we don’t find another whale for a while you can take it out on each other then.”
Sigved twisted a bandage around his hand. He nodded.
Sebjørn looked at Nils. The man was working his jaw, probing his cheek for loose teeth. “Fine by me.”
“There’s at least one more out there,” Aaron said. “I saw it.”
“Good,” said Sigved, “because I’ve got more meat hanging between my legs than we’ll get off of this one.”
Aaron laughed. Sebjørn too, after a moment. Nils slammed his hook into another steak and dragged it away.
The radio at Sebjørn’s belt crackle-spat to life and Osvald told him that the next man to strike another would be thrown overboard. Sebjørn acknowledged the statement and showed the men his radio as if the captain’s words were still coming from it. The captain of a vessel was its law. Sebjørn looked to the wheelhouse but Osvald had already put them out of mind.
The Höðr carried them further north.
The men ate together in the cramped galley, bunched around a scarred table, hunched over their meals like hungry convicts. The room was warm and thick with the smell of whale meat fried in garlic and butter. The briny smell of drying clothes. The smell of hard work. And there was beer. They carried very little on board, but there was always something for celebrating the first catch. The men were loud with good humour. Laughing, shoving each other with boisterous banter. Drumming on the table. Around them, on the walls, on cupboard doors, were pages torn from magazines. Centrefolds. Celebrities in varying states of undress. The women had been renamed several times over. They had each been girlfriends, had each been wives. Many of them had been graffitied from boredom. Tattooed in pen, enhanced, made monstrous. Aaron, leaning in his chair, added a geyser gush to one of the ladies, swearing and shaking at the pen dying in his hand, but laughing with Brage’s encouragement. Old men being boys. The captain always ate separately from the rest of the crew. It allowed them such freedoms.
Sebjørn shoved his plate aside as soon as his meal was done and grabbed for cigarettes that hadn’t been in his shirt pocket for over a year. What he found there instead was the postcard he had replaced them with. He knew all of the words but he read them again anyway, faded though they were. On the other side, a familiar picture. The image cracked, white lines like scars where the card had folded. It was the Snøhuit facility where his son worked, flames spouting hundreds of feet into the air from the gas plant’s chimney, higher than any of the mountains behind and casting a fiery glow over the town below. “There she blows!” his son had written across it. A joke, but also a sharp reminder of how times had changed.
“Hammerfest,” Nils said, looking over from beside him.
Sebjørn nodded.
“Who do you know there?”
“My son,” Sebjørn said, though he didn’t really know the boy any more. Didn’t know the man. As a father he had always been more elusive than any whale.
“It is a good place,” Nils said. He took another mouthful of beer.
It probably was. Anna had always said so, back when she used to try to make Sebjørn feel better. Hammerfest had been a dying town before the gas plant. Now it was not only rejuvenated but expanding. Yet it had been a fishing town once. Sebjørn couldn’t help wishing it was still.
“He works there,” Sebjørn told Nils, though the man had not asked. “My son.”
He had gone away to school, and though he had returned he did not stay long. The young never did. They took work in the cities. Tourist jobs, and the oil industry. They left the island communities behind them. The fishing, the whaling. The winter seas and the challenging summers. When Sebjørn was a boy there were nearly two hundred whaling vessels working the waters off the north of Norway. He worked those same waters now on one of maybe twenty.
“Your son works at Snøhuit?” Nils asked. “Good! That’s good!” He slapped at Sebjørn’s arm a few times in celebration. “The world’s cleanest petroleum project.” Nils tried to explain how the company owning the plant separated carbon dioxide from the natural gas. How the carbon dioxide would be injected into the seabed. Some way of helping with global warming. Sebjørn barely listened. He had heard it before.
“Why do you not work in the city?” he asked Nils. “You’re young.”
“My father.”
It was answer enough. Nils’s father had been on the Lofotofangst, lost last year. Sebjørn had already assumed it must have been something to do with that. Assumed that was why Osvald had hired someone so green. Only last month, the Bjørn had gone down with all hands, too. There had been experienced men on both of those vessels but it hadn’t made any difference. The sea was like that sometimes.
“We never really got on,” Nils said. Sebjørn thought that was probably true of most of the men here. Their own fathers. Their own sons. Nils grinned and said, “I never really liked whaling,” and raised his bottle to toast the apology. The challenge.
Yes, he was like other sons.
“It is the same as farming,” said Sigved. “They are like cows. It’s like slaughtering cows.”
Nils nodded. “Like cows, of course. Yes. Except people still eat beef.”
“People still eat whale meat.”
“People buy whale meat. It is tradition. They respect the tradition.”
“You just ate whale meat,” Sebjørn noted. In amusement, not to encourage argument. His own view depended on his mood. He was a fisherman, and whales drove the fish closer to shore. Made fishing easier. It was good to have them around. But they also ate the fish, and so he wasn’t against culling them either. Sebjørn was a fisherman, but he was also a whaler. It only depended on the time of year. They were all of them hunters. Only the prey changed.
Aaron, who had been blowing a melody over the tops of beer bottles, joined in to say, “Sustainable.” It was a word he liked to use.
Brage agreed. “Japan and Iceland do it, too.”
“Last year we caught more whales than Japan and Iceland combined,” Nils said.
“Didn’t feel like it.”
“And it’s not even legal, not really. There are international treaties and—”
Sigved stood abruptly. He knocked the table hard enough that bottles bounced on their bases. “You don’t understand,” he said. “You’re too young.” He nudged Nils more than was necessary in leaving. Men like Sigved built their arguments on experience. Young men, like Nils, used statistics and what they’d read elsewhere.
Sebjørn looked again at the photo in his
calloused hands and relished the day’s ache in his arms, his back. His old bones. There she blows! He looked at that plume of fire. Looked at the buildings of the Snøhuit and the town around it. He tried to imagine working in such a place and was glad when he could not.
Sebjørn woke suddenly, thinking of the harpoon cannon. He could still feel its shudder through the boat.
Across from him, Nils stirred in his bunk. He turned to one elbow and rubbed at his face. He started to say something but there was another vibration, a thrumming through the boat from beneath.
Sebjørn leaned out to see Aaron nursing his head in the bunk below. “What was that? We shooting something?”
It wasn’t the harpoon cannon. The reverberations were stronger.
Osvald appeared in the doorway. He held both sides of the frame for a moment—“Get up.”—and was gone again. Sebjørn called after him but there was no answer to his question. He swung his legs out from the bunk, dropped to the floor, and staggered as the boat suddenly shifted. He fell into Aaron emerging from his own bunk and the two of them grabbed at each other and the bunks to stop from sprawling.
The vessel shifted again. A protracted list to starboard. It righted itself afterwards but was slow doing so.
“Something’s wrong.”
One of them said it. All of them knew it. Sebjørn pulled himself straight and used the momentum to hurry out to the passageway. The Höðr was sitting lower in the water. He could feel it. Could feel the sea pressing in on all sides. They were held in a grip of high water.
Brage was hurrying towards him.
“Where’s the captain?”
But Brage pushed past. “We’re abandoning ship,” he said. Sebjørn grabbed him, caught a bunch of his clothing in his fist as the man pressed between him and the wall, but there was nothing else to say. The clothing in his grip told him everything; Brage was in his waterproofs. He had a life jacket hooked over his head. Sebjørn let him go.