A Whale For The Killing (17 page)

... I dozed, and dreamed vividly of the whale. She had become a veritable monster and I was fleeing from her... drowning in the unfamiliar element. I woke, sweating, and knew the truth.

The whale was not alone in being trapped. We were all trapped with her. If the natural patterns of her life had been disrupted, then so had ours. An awesome mystery had intruded into the closely circumscribed order of our lives; one that we terrestrial bipeds could not fathom, and one, therefore, that we would react against with instinctive fear, violence and hatred. This riddle from the deeps was the measure of humanity’s unquenchable ignorance of life. This impenetrable secret, which had become the core of our existence in this place, was a mirror in which we saw our own distempered faces... and they were ugly.

ON FRIDAY THE GALE BUILT to hurricane strength. By evening the anemometer was registering gusts of eighty miles an hour. During most of the day it was hardly possible to leave the house, let alone visit the whale. We remained apart: she in her prison, I in mine.

I spent the morning considering ways to free her. At noon I telephoned some friends in the Canadian Navy at Halifax. Between us we worked out a scheme. If I could get clearance from Defence Headquarters in Ottawa, they told me, the Navy would be happy to send in a team of frogmen to manhandle the boulders out of the south channel and deepen it as much as possible. (We could not risk using explosives.) With the next spring tide, which would come in three weeks’ time, a section of steel-mesh anti-submarine net, floated by 45-gallon drums, would be rigged across the Pond like a gigantic seine to shepherd the whale toward the entrance. If she refused to attempt the passage on her own, I was prepared to use tranquillizer darts which would immobilize her so she could literally be hauled, or pushed, through the channel by main force.

I knew that the use of drugs would be terribly risky because too large a dose would render her unconscious and she might drown. So I phoned a whale expert in California who had had experience tranquillizing large porpoises. He was appalled by the magnitude of the undertaking.

“It’ll have to be by guess and by God. I can tell you what specific drugs might work and help you get a supply by air, but I can only guess at the dosage. It’s the hell of a chance, but if it’s that or letting her die where she is, I guess it’s worth trying.”

Finally, I again called Jack McClelland in Toronto, explained what I had in mind, and asked him to obtain the cooperation of the Department of Defence. He groaned, but agreed to do his best.

I also called an officer of the Sou’westers Club to ask if they and the town council would put additional pressure on the Newfoundland government to send the
Harmon.
I had heard a radio report, which later proved false, that she had been dispatched to Burgeo but had been recalled because of the storm. Since the forecast called for a fine day on Saturday, I could see no reason why she could not reach us by Saturday evening. The Sou’westers’ spokesman agreed to speak to the council, but when I went on to describe the plans for freeing the whale, he became noticeably cool.

“Why turn her loose?” he asked. “She’s doing good in the Pond. When we get the
Harmon
we can put enough herring into it to feed her for months. We ought to keep her there. No place else in the world’s got a tame fin whale. It’d be a sin to turn her loose when she can do so much for Burgeo.”

I was learning to be cautious, so I only mumbled something noncommittal and rang off. There was no point in my adding more fuel to the fires that were already smouldering in Burgeo.

I tried to shut my mind to what was happening in the community and concentrate on the three essentials: keeping the whale fed; keeping her protected; and arranging to set her free when the moment came.

By midnight Friday there was still no message from Premier Smallwood about the
Harmon
and I was beginning to despair of ever seeing her. However, I hoped we could repeat the seining operation at the cove on Saturday night, and by Sunday I expected to have Marie Penny’s capelin trap in operation.

As for protecting the whale... in the continued absence of any firm orders to the RCMP constable, this would have to remain my personal responsibility and I decided that the only way I could ensure her safety was to camp out at the Pond. The Sou’westers agreed to erect a small tent for me on the shore at Aldridges, and supply it with a stove and fuel. It could also serve as a field headquarters for the scientists if, and when, any of them should arrive. Schevill was still trying hard to reach us. He called at one o’clock in the morning to say the U.S. Navy was now planning to fly him to Burgeo before noon on Saturday.

In the outer world, interest in the whale had flared far beyond anything I had anticipated, and was becoming a nuisance. Radio stations from as far away as Texas and Colorado tried to tape interviews with me on the crackling telephone. There were wires from a Swiss newspaper syndicate and a magazine in Australia demanding information.

DURING FRIDAY NIGHT the storm blew itself out, leaving a silence that was almost palpable. Saturday dawned an arctic day, icy clear and fiercely cold, with near zero temperatures. It was ideal weather, at least in Burgeo, for the ski- and float-equipped planes that were poised in a great semicircle to the west, north and east, ready to descend on us with their loads of scientists, media people and, possibly, even Joey Smallwood himself.

One of the aircraft standing by at Gander had been chartered to pick up Bob Brooks, whose editor had instructed him to get some aerial shots of the whale as he departed. I consented to this on the understanding that the plane would stay at least 2,000 feet above the Pond, and would not make more than two or three passes.

Brooks agreed, and Onie and I dropped him off at the country path leading to Gull Pond before going on to Aldridges. We had to sheer through a skim of cat-ice that was forming in the protected runs between the islands, and the possibility that the Pond itself might freeze occurred to me. It was not an immediate danger since I expected that an eighty-ton whale would be able to break its way through a considerable thickness of saltwater ice.

Near the mouth of Short Reach we saw the spouts of at least two whales and assumed they were members of the family pod returned from their deep-sea sanctuary. As we had come to expect, the Guardian was in his usual place, patrolling between Fish Rock and the cove. We had grown so used to his presence—and perhaps he had grown so used to ours—that when our courses threatened to meet, Onie did not even slow the engine, but the whale sounded in good time to avoid a collision.

Onie smiled his gentle smile.

“That one knows the rules o’ the road, Skipper. Vessel on t’port tack always gives way.”

“Maybe he does, Onie, but I wouldn’t push it too far. I’d hate like hell to have to swim ashore today.”

There were no people at the Pond when we entered. The whale was circling in a counter-clockwise pattern and it was soon clear that something was amiss. Her movements were sluggish, lacking the powerful and fluid grace of earlier days. Also, she was blowing at very short intervals and her spout seemed low and weak. When she lethargically curved her way past our perch on a shoreside cliff, we saw that the full length of her spine showed clearly in a chain of knobby vertebral projections.

Another thing that troubled me was the presence of an irregular pattern of great swellings that showed under her gleaming black skin. Onie thought these might have resulted from bruising contacts with underwater rocks when she was being pursued by the speedboats or when she was trying to escape through the channel. I doubted it, but could think of no better explanation. Those peculiar swellings worried me, so we got back into the dory and rowed out to take a closer look. We let the dory drift directly in her path, for we had no fear that she would strike us, either deliberately or by accident.

On her first circuit she changed course slightly and passed fifty yards away but on her next she came straight for us. When she was about a hundred feet off, she did something we had seen her do only a few times before and then always at a distance. She rose to blow, but instead of breaking the surface with her hump, she thrust her whole head high out of the calm waters. The gleaming white, deep-pleated expanse of her throat, with its curving and apparently endless jaw line, seemed to belong to a creature three times her actual bulk, for such are the proportions of a finner’s head to the rest of its body. That gigantic head appeared to rear directly over us, like a moving, living cliff.

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.