Call of the Whales Read online

  So we’d set up our tent in the lee of an old wall or an aeroplane hangar – any sheltered place we could find. Then we’d heat up some baked beans on a camping stove – it always seemed to be baked beans on that first night, easy to carry, I suppose – and pump up our air-mattresses, and after we’d eaten and washed up, we’d snuggle up in our tent and lie awake, watching the shadows created by movements outside rippling over the nylon tent roof.

  For the people whose winter is an endless night, the endless days of summer have to be lived to dropping point. Even the children played way past midnight in those few weeks of high summer when the sun never left the sky.

  I’d lie there behind the thin tent walls listening to the children’s voices laughing behind rocks or whooping from the roofs of huts and outbuildings. I couldn’t sleep while they played, and they played, it seemed to me, endlessly. When exhaustion finally overcame them at one or two or even three o’clock in the morning, their older brothers or uncles or dads or cousins came and carried them heavily home to sleep in rooms darkened by drawn curtains, while outside the birds still sang and the poor confused owls hunted in broad daylight.

  It was a strange, upside-down sort of a life for a lad from Drumcondra. And even after the children had finally gone home to bed, I would still lie for ages listening to life being noisily, brightly lived just feet away from our tent in the small hours of the morning, and the strangeness of it all stirred up a small earthquake of excitement in my stomach.

  Looking back, all those trips we took, all that moose jerky and fish we ate, all those freezing places we landed, all those endless summer days – a lot of it has merged into one undifferentiated memory. My father’s research took him all over the Arctic – to Alaska, to the Yukon in Canada, to Labrador, to Greenland, to Siberia, anywhere that there lived peoples of the Eskimo races. Once you’re in the north, and especially the further north you go, you lose the sense of which country you’re in anyway. The Arctic is its own country in a way and has its own weathers and customs and practices.

  But as I say, it all blurs a bit for me now, and I couldn’t tell you an Inuk from an Inupiaq to save my life, though maybe the differences were clear at the time. Nor can I speak a word of those amazing languages my father used to practise late at night in our tent, reading by the light of the midnight sun from a heavy hard-backed book and testing out sounds in Yup´ik or Inupiaq. But I do remember particular incidents and people, and the friendships forged in wild northern places still glow for me like bright beads of experience in the murky shadows of my childhood past.

  Meeting Turaq

  I don’t remember their names, those boys and girls I found dabbling in mud-patches behind hut-houses or lying on their stomachs on icy banks and watching seals following their noses up the food-rich channels between the breaking ice, except that they had strange, sharp names for a strange, sharp part of the world. But I do remember Turaq.

  ‘Where you from?’ he asked, the first time we met.

  I think it was Canada, the Yukon, though I really couldn’t be sure. I couldn’t tell you the year, either, though I imagine I was about ten or eleven. But the details I remember with great clarity.

  He didn’t say hello. He had broken away from a group of younger children who were playing some sort of game I didn’t understand.

  ‘Ireland,’ I said, pointing in a direction I imagined to be south. It sounded to me as if this boy didn’t speak much English, so I spoke carefully and used the minimum number of words to explain myself. ‘Long way away. Europe.’

  ‘Ah.’ He nodded and smiled, and then he went back to join his friends.

  He was shorter than me, but Inuit are shorter anyway, and I reckoned he was about my age or maybe a bit older. He didn’t play much, but he seemed to be in charge of about three smaller children. He spent a lot of his time picking them up and swinging them in the air and helping them to catch up with bigger children in the games.

  The local children played oddly, it seemed to me. I’d never really seen kids play together in that way before. Where I came from, kids played against each other. Play was a sort of continuing battle, everyone wanting to win, everyone wanting to be king of the castle. Those were the rules I understood. I didn’t know how to play their way, and I watched and watched, trying to get the hang of it, but I never did really work out how the rules of Inuit games went.

  After a bit, Turaq came over to me again. I thought maybe he was going to ask me to join the game, but that didn’t seem to occur to him. He said nothing for a time, just stood beside me and watched the younger children. Then he asked: ‘You fish?’

  Well, I’d fished in the Royal Canal, and I’d even fished once or twice for mackerel on Dún Laoghaire pier, but I knew that wasn’t what Turaq was talking about. Around here, fishing was a serious business. It wasn’t something you did on a Saturday afternoon between lunch and the match. It had to do with food. So I shook my head.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Turaq said, ‘you come fishing?’

  I shook my head again. I didn’t have the equipment, for a start.

  ‘You come,’ he said, and he went off and gathered up his three young charges.

  Turaq to the Rescue

  My dad said of course I should go – it would be a great experience, he said – just so long as I promised to let Turaq take charge. I had no intention of doing anything else. I knew who the expert was around here.

  So the next morning I went to the place behind the schoolhouse where I’d seen the children playing, only half expecting to find him. We hadn’t made a proper arrangement. Nobody’d mentioned time, for example. But there he was, hunkering over his fishing equipment. He smiled at me when he saw me, and he handed me two large fishing nets. He carried a big wooden contraption that was designed for a traditional method of trapping fish.

  ‘Turaq,’ he said to me.

  I shrugged my shoulders, thinking he was saying something in his own language.

  ‘My name,’ he said carefully. ‘It’s Turaq.’

  It was quite a big deal for someone like Turaq to give his name away like that to a complete stranger, though I didn’t understand that at the time. I concentrated on trying to pronounce my own name as clearly as I could, but he didn’t quite get it.

  ‘Tyke?’ he tried.

  That was pretty close. For a foreigner. Goodness knows what sort of fist I would make of Turaq.

  I repeated my name.

  ‘Tyke,’ he said again.

  That would do. I liked it. I smiled, and we set off for the spot at the mouth of the stream where Turaq wanted to set up his trap. We were fishing for arctic char, though I didn’t know that at the time. Turaq told me the local name of the fish, but I couldn’t even pronounce it then, never mind try to remember it twenty years later. It was my dad who told me they were char, and they tasted wonderful, like trout only much, much more so. They swam in the freshwater lakes and they crowded down the fast-flowing meltwater summer streams and spilled joyously out into the frigid waters of the sea, and it wasn’t long before we had trapped several of them. Turaq showed me how to use the net to lift them out of the trap and how to tap them on the head to stun and kill them, so that they didn’t thrash about and leap back into the water. We laid our catch into a light canvas bag that Turaq had brought along for the purpose. There were far too many fish for one family to eat, but Turaq told me his mother would freeze or dry most of them for winter food.

  What happened next, I can’t really explain. It wasn’t that we were fooling around. We were just standing about, talking. At least, I was listening, and Turaq was talking in that funny, hesitant way of his. It wasn’t that Turaq didn’t speak much English, though that’s what I thought at the time. Even then, English was the language of the state and of school, and everyone except the old folk spoke it. It was that he didn’t speak much at all. None of the Inuit people went in for long speeches. They communicated much of the time in some mysterious other way that I couldn’t work out, no matter how hard I wat
ched them at it.

  Anyway, we’d finished fishing for the day, and I know I was standing on a rock with my back to the water. Nobody pushed me. It just seemed to happen all by itself. I suppose I must have lost my footing on the slippery rock, though I don’t remember that part, but suddenly I felt myself jerk backwards, my arms outstretched and my legs flailing helplessly. It felt as if I had gone briefly into suspended animation: I could picture myself, like an upside-down spider, all limbs, and then my body just dropped. I knew I was falling, but I couldn’t prevent it. Next thing I knew, I hit the water. It wasn’t deep, but I had been standing right at the point where the racing, meltwater-swollen stream came seething down from the narrow riverbed and shot into the sea, and I was pushed several yards out into the freezing waves by the furious force of the stream.

  I will never forget the iciness of that water. It was cold beyond cold, so cold that I experienced it not as cold at all but as pain. Down I sank into inky, salty, freezing pain. And then I blacked out.

  When I came to, I was in an agony of cold. I was lying on the tiny scrap of beach where Turaq had been standing, tidying away his fishing gear, moments before. It must have been only moments, but it felt as if weeks had passed since I’d laid my last char, still thrashing weakly, into Turaq’s canvas hold-all.

  I opened my eyes and instantly closed them. My eyelids were amazingly heavy and felt caked with salt. When I managed to prise them painfully open, the sunlight stabbed the surface of my eyeballs. I could feel the earth shuddering with great thudding shakes, as if a huge goods train was chundering along just feet away. I knew there couldn’t be, but I wondered briefly if there had been an earthquake. Perhaps that was what had tossed me off my rock.

  Turaq’s voice came to me, and I could feel his thin, stringy arms wound tightly around my torso, as if he was holding me down, like a mad person or someone having a seizure. Cautiously I opened my eyes again, and sure enough he had flung his body diagonally across mine and he was holding my arms tightly to my sides and we were both rattling away like nobody’s business. Gradually, I realised that what was causing the rattling was me. My whole body was shuddering and trembling in a frantic effort to fight off the effects of the cold, and my teeth were chattering so hard, I kept biting my tongue and the pink, fleshy insides of my cheeks. Turaq was breathing warm, fish-flavoured air onto my face and down my neck and throat, into the top of my sopping shirt.

  The rattling eventually subsided into a steady tremor, and Turaq rolled off me. He stood up and quickly pulled his sealskin parka up over his head and rammed it over mine. He didn’t bother to try to jam my arms into the sleeves, just pulled it right down over my shoulders and tightened it in to my wet body. Then he yanked my head off the ground and pulled the furry hood around my ears. Warmth immediately settled around my aching head and shoulders, a seal-smelling, oily, fishy sort of warmth.

  I became aware of the wet now, as well as the cold, and I wanted to tell Turaq to get my wet clothes off, but although I could make my mouth open, I couldn’t get my jaw to work enough to allow me to speak.

  Suddenly I didn’t care about the pain, the cold, the wet. All I wanted to do was to let my poor numb limbs rest and to sink into sleep, but Turaq wouldn’t give me peace to sleep. He flung his body onto mine again, and started that fishy breathing of his. I turned my nose away from him, and I could hear him give a soft laugh, but then I slipped off back into unconsciousness.

  Next time I woke, I was still on the beach. Turaq lay beside me now, but still right up against my body, and though I felt miserably wet and cold, the dreadful numbing pain had eased and I was able to open my eyes and work my jaw.

  ‘You wake, Tyke?’ he said hoarsely.

  I nodded.

  ‘Uhh-kay. You stan’ up now.’

  Stand up! I couldn’t stand up for a million pounds. I shook my head.

  ‘You stan’ up now, ’n’ we go home.’

  I shook my head again.

  He pushed his hands under my back and started to lever me up. I resisted.

  ‘You don’ stan’ up, you die,’ he said matter-of-factly.

  ‘I die,’ I said, wearily. It came out as ‘Aye-aye,’ but Turaq understood.

  ‘Uh-huh, not with me you don’ die,’ he said, and he levered some more, so that I was in a sitting position. Then he hauled me to my feet. I swayed. My body felt about as mobile as a sack of potatoes. I groaned as a wave of nausea washed through me.

  Turaq grabbed me around the waist to prevent me falling over, and then he leant across my body and yanked one of my legs forward by grabbing a fistful of wet trouser-leg. Then the other one. And the first one again. And the other one. This way, he walked me back to the village like a giant wooden doll. Well, not quite all the way. After a while, I got the hang of this walking business, and I was able to move my legs myself, just so long as Turaq kept me upright.

  Going Visiting

  My dad said afterwards that Turaq had saved my life.

  ‘I wouldn’t have drowned,’ I said indignantly. ‘The water was only waist-high.’

  ‘You can drown in a puddle if you’re weak enough,’ said my dad.

  ‘I wasn’t weak. Turaq said he didn’t rescue me from the sea. I managed to pull myself out.’

  ‘I know that,’ Dad said, ‘but he saved you from death by hypothermia.’

  ‘Hyper-what?’

  ‘Thermia, meaning heat, as in a Thermos flask. And it’s hypo, not hyper. Hypothermia. What old people die of in winter.’

  ‘I’m not old,’ I said stubbornly, ‘and it’s summer.’ I didn’t like to be fussed about. I suppose I felt a bit stupid for falling in the water.

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Dad. ‘It’s summer, but this is the Arctic. The sea is only just above freezing point, and anyone who falls into it can die within an hour unless someone warms them up, especially on a cool day like this.’

  ‘Well, I wish he’d taken off my wet things first,’ I said crossly. ‘I felt like a squashed fish.’

  ‘No,’ said Dad, ‘that’s what you do – put warm dry clothes on top to trap the person’s body heat, not let it escape by taking off their wet clothes.’

  ‘Hmm,’ I said. I knew he was right, that I’d been lucky that Turaq knew what to do, but he didn’t need to keep going on about it. I was starting to squirm uncomfortably.

  ‘And the other thing you do,’ Dad said, looking up from his Arctic survival manual, where he had looked up ‘hypothermia’, ‘is you get as close to the person as you can and let your body heat warm them up.’

  ‘Body heat,’ I said. ‘So that’s what he was doing. I thought he was being a bit … cuddly.’

  ‘Cuddly!’ said Dad.

  We both laughed then, at the idea of brave, silent, efficient Turaq acting cuddly. It was just all wrong. He probably wouldn’t even let his mother hug him.

  ‘Well, call it what you like,’ said Dad, ‘but it worked. You really could have died, you know.’

  And he gave my shoulder a quick, affectionate squeeze.

  ‘Dad?’ I said, in a chokey sort of voice.

  ‘Uh-hmm?’

  ‘Mum doesn’t need to hear about this.’

  This was one of our man-stuff phrases. We said it to each other when we planned to keep our adventures to ourselves. Like the time I found Dad asleep on the sofa surrounded by empty beer cans. And the time I got three detentions in a week for … well, it doesn’t really matter why, but it was not my proudest moment.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Dad gravely. ‘We wouldn’t want to worry her, would we?’

  Not worrying my mother was a great excuse for not telling her things. She had an artistic temperament, or so she said. This meant, as far as I could see, that she could get away with any sort of bad behaviour herself, but the rest of us had to behave impeccably, in case we brought on an attack of temperament.

  She used to object to my dad taking me off on his expeditions with him. She wanted to keep me at home in our little terraced house i
n Dublin, but then she’d get offered work – she was an actress – and she’d be scooped off into that other, occasional world of hers, in a whirl of lunch dates and rehearsals and script-readings and voice sessions and studio days with the other ‘talent’ and she’d give up on the battle to keep me at home. I’d be better off with him, she’d suddenly agree, and did I have a snowsuit?

  A snowsuit. She was thinking about the kind of thing small children wore to play in the Phoenix Park in the winter, to go sliding down the slides in, with bright mittens attached for their blue-cold little fingers. You see them all the time in cold weather on the toddlers. Primary colours and zip-fasteners. That was my mother’s idea of what to wear in the Arctic.

  Mum was the real reason I tagged along with Dad to these remote, icy places. She was a wonderful woman and we both adored her. She had a fantastic wardrobe, full of fabulous witches’ shoes with high ankles and pointy toes and wondrous floaty garments in silver and black and champagne and she had the most marvellous bright red hair, but she was not what you might call reliable. In all conscience, my father used to say, you could not leave a child in her care for months on end. She was liable to forget she had me, he said, get up and walk out of the house and meet some friends and go off for a weekend to London and forget to come home to cook my dinner and send me to school. I don’t know if that was really true – if it came to it, she would probably have shouldered the responsibility – but I suppose he couldn’t take the risk. The safest thing, he always said, was to take me with him. That way I might be exposed to all sorts of dangers, but at least I would get fed and there would be a responsible adult around to look out for me most of the time. At least, that was Dad’s theory. I’m not so sure about the responsible adult bit myself. Turaq was only ten or twelve.