Call of the Whales Read online

  Call of the Whales

  ‘An adventure with attitude’

  THE IRISH TIMES

  ‘A captivating coming-of-age tale with a

  distinctive narrative voice’

  THE IRISH INDEPENDENT

  ‘Parkinson’s reputation as one of Ireland’s most talented storytellers for the young can only be enhanced by this powerful, yet wistful work, which will illuminate the imaginative lives of its readers, no matter what the age’ BOOKS IRELAND

  Call of the Whales

  Siobhán Parkinson

  Because books should where possible be dedicated to those who love them, this one’s for you, Liz.

  GLOSSARY

  Eskimo: A controversial, collective term for many arctic peoples, including Inuit and Inupiat. Many people, particularly in Canada, find the word ‘Eskimo’ offensive, since it is not a word in their language and has been imposed by outsiders, mainly white people. However, ‘Inuit’ cannot always be used as an alternative, because not all the peoples who are sometimes thought of as ‘Eskimos’ are in fact Inuit.

  This makes it a bit difficult to talk about these peoples in general, without using the term ‘Eskimo’. In Alaska, to add to the confusion, some people use the term ‘Eskimo’ to refer to themselves. I’ve tried to avoid ‘Eskimo’ for the most part and to use the correct term for each group in this book, and hope readers will not find it too confusing.

  Inuit: Term, meaning ‘human beings’, used to cover many different groups of arctic peoples, mainly those living in Canada, parts of Alaska and Greenland (although the Greenland Inuit usually refer to themselves as Greenlanders or Kalaallit); the singular is Inuk.

  Inupiat: An Alaskan people who live partly by whale-hunting; the singular is Inupiaq. It means ‘human beings’.

  Kalaallit: The Greenlandic word for Inuit.

  Kayak: Light one- or two-person skin-covered boat.

  Maktak: Whale skin.

  Mukluks: Snow shoes.

  Nalukataq: Major festival held at the end of the spring whaling season to celebrate the success of the whaling.

  Pod: A family group of whales. A pod can be as few as two or three whales, or as many as thirty or forty, depending on the type of whale, the season and where they are.

  Taig: A variant spelling of the Irish name, Tadhg, meaning ‘poet’. Throughout the book Taig is known by his nickname, Tyke.

  Umiaq: Light wood-framed boat, covered in walrus skin or seal skin, large enough to take a whole whaling crew and the whaling equipment but light enough to carry over the ice on a sled.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I have taken liberties with my research material, transposing stories and names and words from one part of the Arctic to another, for the sake of the fiction, but I have tried to be as accurate as I can without overloading the novel with detail. I hope I have managed to respect the spirit of the Arctic and that Arctic experts will forgive a certain amount of fictional licence.

  I believe that it is the right of peoples of all cultures to tell their own stories in their own way. This doesn’t mean that outsiders may not sometimes, with respect, tell other people’s stories too, but it is of course much trickier to do that well. For this reason, I have deliberately told this story of Arctic life from the point of view of an Irish narrator. And that is all this novel is meant to be: an outsider’s perspective on a rich and fascinating way of life in a place of great beauty.

  I would like to acknowledge a detailed account of present-day Inupiat whaling by the Danish television journalist Adrian Redmond; several documents by the anthropologist Norman Chance; some fabulous photographs and a most interesting account of his time spent at Thule airbase in the far north of Greenland by Larry Rodrigues; and some terrific material on the official Greenland government tourism Internet site, www.greenland-guide.gl.

  The story of Sedna is retold here from a version I read on the site www.cancom.net/~sedna (accessible through about.com). The polar bear story is adapted from one of Norman Chance’s articles.

  I am grateful for the support of the Irish Writers’ Centre and Dublin Corporation Arts Office, where I held a joint residency during the time this book was being written, and of An Chomhairle Ealaíon/The Arts Council who part-funded the residency.

  CONTENTS

  Reviews

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Glossary

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  1 The Unicorn Horn

  2 Arctic Summers

  3 Meeting Turaq

  4 Turaq to the Rescue

  5 Going Visiting

  6 Dreaming of Whales

  7 Meeting Matulik

  8 The Man in City Shoes

  9 A Decision

  10 Whaling

  11 Sharing the Whale

  12 The Igloo

  13 Henry Goes Missing

  14 Tyke to the Rescue

  15 The Whale Feast

  16 The Story of Sedna

  17 Good News and Good News

  18 The Great Unicorn Hunt

  19 Flying to Thule

  20 Meeting Leon

  21 Hunting the Narwhal

  22 Whistling to the Aurora

  About the Author

  OTHER BOOKS BY SIOBHÁN PARKINSON

  Copyright

  Prologue

  The song of the whale is like a call to the north. I hear it in my sleep. Eerie and sonorous, it pervades my dreams, so that I am drawn down into the deep, where huge sea beasts roll slowly in the inky-cold seas, wailing for their lovers over acres of waters.

  I wake, gasping for air, from these whaley dreams, but even though I wake, I cannot seem to shake off the dream. All day the whales are with me, as I work my way through my city schedule – breakfast, train, work, lunch, work, drink, train, dinner, TV, bed – swishing their powerful tails, diving uproariously to the seabed, drifting in the depths and then slowly, slowly, like the air leaking out of a tyre, ballooning up and up and up to crash onto the surface once again and exhale their fabulous fountainy breath.

  They are with me always, the whales, and yet they aren’t, not the way they were when I was a child. But what can you do? You grow up, things change, you settle into your own particular you-shaped groove in the great economic machine that is modern life. You do your best to live up to the ideals you had as a youngster, but you can’t linger for ever in that blue-lit, dreamy childhood world of the arctic north. It’s not practicable. It doesn’t pay the rent. And it’s not your world. It belongs to other peoples. If there are rents to be eked out of that icy waste, it is for those people to do it, those tough and hardy, broad-faced, wide-eyed, dark-haired people whose bloodlines go back and back and back into the lost and snowy worlds of the arctic past.

  It was meeting Henry last month that started it all. Geneva is not my favourite city, I have to say, but it’s where a lot of these international conferences get held, because it is neutral territory. I’d slipped out of a plenary session to get a cup of tea. They don’t make proper tea on the Continent, so I try to stick to the coffee. But there comes a point when you just have to have tea, even if it’s lukewarm, served without milk and has a stout little teabag in it, anchored to the cup-handle by a string and a paper tag.

  There was no one else in the canteen – they were all still at the meeting – so I was able to explain to the Swiss attendant how I wanted my tea made. ‘Boil the water,’ I pleaded. He looked at me as if I was mad, but I added, ‘I’m Irish,’ and he nodded, as if that explained everything – which it did.

  Then I heard the laugh, coming from somewhere behind me. My body did a little on-the-spot leap, as it does when I am startled. I spun around. I’d thought there was no one else in the canteen, but I
could see now that there was a large black leather sofa with high sides facing the window. Slumped in one corner of the sofa, so that he was almost hidden from view, was a man dressed entirely in black and with hair so black it matched his black T-shirt and his black jacket and the black leather of the sofa.

  ‘Irish!’ he spluttered, shaking his head. ‘The Irish and their tea!’

  What do you know about the Irish? I wanted to ask, noticing his wide, dark-eyed, delicately boned, oriental-looking face, scrunched up now with laughter. He looked like people I’d known years ago, people I’d met in the Arctic. I could see he was enjoying the joke so much – what joke? I thought – that I couldn’t bring myself to snap at him. I just smiled and waved vaguely and went to sit down at a table where I wouldn’t have to look at this laughing man in black.

  I’d just settled in my chair, resolutely facing the wall, with my back to the window, when I felt a tap on my shoulder. Not my friend again, surely. It wasn’t like an Inuk or an Inupiaq to interrupt a person who clearly wanted to be left alone. They are a polite and silent people. But then I heard my name, or rather my old nickname, a name I hadn’t heard for years, not since I was a boy.

  ‘Tyke?’

  My real name, Taig, is not easy to pronounce unless you’re Irish. They’d always called me Tyke in the Arctic, and I’d got to like it. I had a campaign going for a while to get my family to use it, but they never really got the hang of it. It was strange to hear it now, all these years later, in this place.

  I turned. At first I didn’t recognise him. I thought he was someone else, another childhood friend. It had been almost twenty years since I’d seen him, after all. People change a lot in twenty years, especially if they were only eleven or twelve when you knew them before.

  ‘Henry!’

  Recognition came in a flood and I leapt to my feet. We stood staring at each other, delighted, but not sure how to act, too embarrassed to hug. Eventually, I slapped him on the upper arm, and he slapped me on the shoulder.

  It turned out we were both attending the same international conference on whaling. I was there as an environmental activist, to make sure the big commercial whaling nations didn’t get away with their plans to strip the oceans of as many sea-mammals as they could kill. Henry was there to plead the case of subsistence whaling, the lifeline of the small arctic communities, environmentally sustainable and essential to the culture of his people. To outsiders, it might look as if we were on different sides of this debate (he pro-whaling and I anti-whaling), but actually we were on the same side against the big boys with their huge killing ships and their money-driven lust for death.

  It was wonderful to meet Henry again after all these years. We’d lost touch since we’d known each other as boys. I’d lost touch with everyone from those days, with some of the best friends I ever had – though it is only now that I realise it.

  Henry had been to Ireland on a visit, he told me. He’d gone there, half-hoping to find me, but he didn’t know my surname, so he couldn’t look me up. We didn’t want that to happen again, so we exchanged phone numbers and email addresses.

  Henry works as a journalist now, in Anchorage, covering Inupiat affairs. It was hard to believe that the spindly, jokey boy I’d known all those years ago was now a respected writer and opinion-maker. I’m sure he found it just as difficult to believe that I am a college lecturer. I teach history, and I have long vacations that allow me sometimes to pursue my other main interest – protecting the world’s whales.

  We rejoined the conference after I’d finished my tea, and we met again for a beer that evening. Next day the conference was over, and with renewed promises to keep in touch, we both flew out of Geneva.

  It’s since meeting Henry again that the dreams have started. I’ve never lost the interest in whales I acquired as a boy, but it was only when I met Henry that I felt again the excitement I’d known in my youth when I used to visit the wide arctic wastes. It was Henry who reminded me of why it was that I took the interest that I did and it was meeting Henry that stirred up the memories which now invade my sleep and arouse in me an unrealisable longing for childhood adventure.

  The Unicorn Horn

  I grew up knowing for sure that unicorns existed. You’ve probably seen pictures of these fabulous creatures: white, horse-shaped, prancing, lowering their fine heads to show off their splendid barley-sugar-twisted horns, with their silken manes flowing in the breeze that is fanned up by their own swift flight. People have told you that unicorns were magical horses that lived in the once-upon-a-time. When you asked where you could find one, they’d say unicorns were extinct now, or that they’d only ever been imaginary beasts, like gryphons and dragons, and the only place to see one was in the coat of arms of the queen of England.

  But I knew they were for real, and the way I knew was that we had a unicorn’s horn at home. My dad brought it back from one of his expeditions years back, before I was born. It was a magnificent giant spiralling ivory object, about five feet long – much longer than I was for most of my childhood. I have no idea how my dad got it home from the northern beach where he found it. He’d have had to lug it back to Dublin, via Copenhagen or Reykjavik or Moscow and Heathrow. It wouldn’t have fitted in the overhead lockers in the aeroplane, and I couldn’t imagine that he would have packed it like a pair of skis and put it in the hold with the rest of the luggage, because it was hollow and quite fragile. If he tried to bring an object like that through customs today, he’d be arrested for importing ivory. But when I asked him how he’d managed it, he never answered. He just tapped the side of his nose with the side of his index finger and winked.

  He said this was quite a small unicorn horn – that he’d seen specimens up to nine feet long. I couldn’t begin to imagine how big a horse would have to be to have a horn that long.

  The other thing about unicorns I knew that other children didn’t know was that they were sea creatures. I knew this because my father said the horn we had at home had come from a beach and was all that was left of a sea unicorn. That made sense to me, because after all, the horses you read about in all the great stories – the fabulous white horse that Niamh and Oisín rode to Tír na nÓg, for example – were able to ride over the seas, and there was every chance that they were really sea unicorns.

  To tell the truth, the horn in our sitting room looked a bit yellowish, like a gigantic, gnarled and twisted old tooth in a way. But I imagined it as the unicorn must have worn it, all bright and pearly white in its youth, gleaming blue-white like a baby-tooth, and maybe – I knew this was a bit of a cheat, really, that I was making this bit up – maybe the spiralling shape was traced with just a thin line of gold, like a seam of gold leaf running along the twisting length of the splendid horn.

  When I was very young, and my father was obliged to stay home from his travels in order to look after me, we would look at the unicorn horn, and my dad would tell me that one day we would travel together to the land where the unicorns ruled the waters. It was many, many years before I discovered what those words really meant. In the meantime, I allowed my imagination to run wild, conjuring up that land of sea unicorns my father visited, and of course I saw myself riding these magnificent creatures, and I was always wearing a long blue velvet cloak lined with stars of gold.

  Arctic Summers

  I suppose I was only about eight or nine when my father first started taking me with him on his expeditions. We always seemed to arrive in a rickety little old propeller-powered plane, skimming in across the treeline – the point beyond which the winds are so harsh that no tree dares to grow unless it’s a dwarfed juniper or birch or willow that slinks sneakily across the rocks, hugging the ground. Over the scrubby tundra landscape we’d glide, coming in to land somewhere north of civilisation. From the plane you could see the whole hummocky flatness of the countryside spread out and rumpled like a badly made bed, the hillocky tundra plains ablaze in sudden masses of blue-spiked lupin, wild crocus, mountain avens, arctic poppy and saxifrage
, and dotted with lakes and rivers. Occasional gigantic lumps of ice would still be hunched here and there, quietly dissolving in the long, lingering summer sun. The villages were huddled, higgledy-piggledy assortments of wooden houses, just dropped any old place, it seemed, facing all directions, with no discernible streets.

  It all looked unkempt and makeshift and not the sort of place a boy like me would want to spend his summer holidays. Not a swimming pool in sight or a cinema, not even a playground or a nice clear surface for roller-blading. But hey, I was going camping with my dad and we were up above the Arctic Circle and anything could happen!

  My father was an anthropologist. That’s ‘a posh word for nosy’, my mother used to say. (My mother was English. They talk like that, the English.) When I was a kid, I thought ‘anthropology’ had something to do with ‘apology’, because my father was always apologising for intruding into people’s lives. (He wasn’t nosy at all by nature, or not in the way my mother meant.) As soon as our plane landed, he’d put me sitting on the rucksacks beside the runway and he’d go and find somebody to apologise to. Depending on how well the apology went down, we could stay or we might have to move on to the next place.

  Nowadays, most arctic people live in houses like the rest of us, and have central heating and spaghetti hoops and hospitals and Coca-Cola vending machines, but in those days there were still places where the people lived a more traditional way of life. Naturally enough, the local people were often a bit suspicious of an Irishman landing among them with a tape recorder and a notebook, but my dad always said I brought him luck when I went with him. When people saw that he had a kid along, they thought he must be OK. They took their kids places with them and taught them stuff, and they thought of it as the right thing to do, so having me with him certainly helped – pardon the pun – to break the ice for my dad. The people usually said it was all right for us to set up camp and live in their villages and for my dad to do his work of observing and listening and writing about the way they lived, even if they thought it a bit odd.