Call of the Whales Read online

  Matulik and the captains of the other crews had had a meeting, and decided not to stay at the camp and try for a second whale. They were happy with their catch and they didn’t want to run into trouble with the quota people. Some men from the other crews came to help with the butchering. The others set off back to the village to bring news of the success of the hunt and to pass on the message to the neighbouring villages that Matulik’s crew had caught a whale and that none of the village crews would hunt any more, because of the quota. This was in the days before mobile phones, of course.

  Meanwhile, a member of one of the other crews was building a snow house.

  ‘Oh, an igloo!’ I said, remembering ‘I is for igloo’ from my alphabet book when I was small. E is for Eskimo, I thought. And U is for unicorn. Crazy words those alphabet people used, I thought. Xylophone. Yak. Zebra.

  ‘Yes,’ said Henry. ‘Isaac is the last person in the village to know how to do it properly, like in the old days. We don’t use snow houses much any more, but Isaac likes to build them, and we can use this one to store the whale meat till we’re ready to go back to the village.’

  We watched from our coffee-station as Isaac worked, cutting blocks of frozen snow right out of the landscape and shaping them with his snow knife. He worked alone for most of the day, but occasionally other men came and helped. By evening, he had made a beautiful dome-shaped house with a long, low entrance-crawl.

  Henry asked him if we could go inside.

  ‘Well, jus’ for a moment,’ Isaac said, ‘but don’ go foolin’ aroun’, this here’s meant for the whale meat, not for boyers.’

  ‘We just want to take a look,’ said Henry.

  ‘And don’ go breathin’ in there!’ Isaac warned us. ‘You’ll heaten it up if you do.’

  ‘Does he expect us to hold our breaths?’ I asked Henry.

  He laughed. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘He just means not to spend too long in there. Snow houses get very warm once there are people inside for any length of time. But he wants it to be cold, to keep the meat in.’

  ‘Why not just leave it lying around in the snow, then?’ I asked.

  Henry looked at me once again as if I was mad.

  ‘You want every polar bear in the country to come by and eat our catch?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, the bears,’ I said, sheepishly.

  We wriggled into the snow house on our stomachs. It was cold in the entrance-crawl, and cold inside, just like being in a fridge, and dark too. But it was very still, because we were suddenly sheltered from the endless arctic wind and after a while, being out of the wind, it began to feel quite balmy, in comparison with the constant chill outside. We were insulated from the noise of the butchering also. It was a bit like being in a low, icy cave.

  ‘You have to imagine a lamp, see,’ said Henry’s voice out of the icy darkness. ‘A whale-oil lamp or a seal-oil lamp.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘because there’s no window.’

  ‘But mainly for heat,’ said Henry.

  ‘For heat? A lamp for heat?’

  ‘Yes, in a snow house, an oil-lamp gives out enough heat to make it really snug.’

  ‘My,’ I said.

  ‘I know a story about an igloo,’ Henry said. ‘You want to hear it?’

  I didn’t know then that Henry was beginning to earn a reputation as the village storyteller. I suppose that’s the skill he developed in later years when he took up journalism.

  I didn’t really want to hear Henry’s story. I wanted to get out of that cold, eerie little building. But I thought I’d better listen. It was the sort of thing my dad would probably want to know, so I said, ‘OK.’

  ‘There was a real bad hunter, see,’ said Henry’s voice out of the dark. ‘He never managed to catch any game. One day when he was out looking for something to hunt, he spotted a polar bear and he crawled over the ice to try and get it. But the bear said, “Don’t shoot me. If you spare my life and do as I say, I will make you a great hunter.”

  ‘The bear told the man to climb on his back and close his eyes, and then the bear dived down into the sea, with the hunter on his back, down, down, down into the depths.

  ‘Then they swam back up again, and landed on another shore, where there was an igloo at the edge of the ice. Inside the igloo was another bear with a spear stuck into his haunch. The first bear said, “If you take that spear out of my friend, you will become a good hunter.” And so the hunter broke off the shaft and eased the spear point out of the bear’s haunch.

  ‘Then the first bear took off his bearskin parka and turned into a man. After the other bear’s wound was healed, the bear-man put back on his bearskin parka, told the poor hunter to climb on his back and close his eyes, and back they went down into the sea again.

  ‘When they came out of the sea and the hunter opened his eyes, he was back where he had started from. And from that day on, the man was always a good hunter.’

  ‘Hey, I’ve heard a story like that,’ I said, ‘only it was a deer, not a bear.’

  ‘An Irish story?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do your people hunt?’

  ‘Not any more,’ I said. ‘In the past, I suppose, they hunted deer for food. But nowadays, we don’t believe in hunting in Ireland.’

  ‘What do you mean, you don’t believe in it?’ asked Henry.

  ‘I mean, we don’t like to kill wild animals.’

  What a whopper! I’d very conveniently omitted to mention fox-hunting.

  ‘Only tame ones? Like, pets? Animals you know?’ Henry sounded shocked.

  ‘Well, farm animals,’ I said. ‘It’s not the same.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Henry. ‘I don’t see that.’

  I felt uncomfortable, as if I was lying. I wasn’t exactly, but I wasn’t being honest either. We were all in this killing business together, but I wasn’t prepared to admit it.

  ‘It’s wrong to kill whales,’ I said sanctimoniously.

  ‘Why?’ Henry sounded completely mystified.

  ‘Whales have families. They love each other.’

  ‘All animals have families,’ said Henry. ‘All creatures love their young. But we gotta live.’

  I hated Henry then, just as I’d resented my father, for being right. But I didn’t have the energy to fight, so I changed the subject.

  ‘Let’s get out, Henry. We’re breathing too much.’

  ‘Right,’ said Henry. ‘And we have to get after them polar bears.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’

  Henry Goes Missing

  After a few days, when the poor old whale had been completely dissected, and even the bones had been disassembled and packed up, we got ready to break camp and set off back to the village. There was even more commotion making ready to go home than there had been on the way out to the camp, because the people were jubilant at their success, and their busyness was infused with joy.

  I never noticed that Henry was missing, not for ages. I was too busy helping to pack and chattering to my dad about the hunt. But just as we were loading our tents onto the snowmobile, I realised I hadn’t seen him for hours. Was he avoiding me? I wondered. Was he annoyed at what I’d said about killing whales?

  ‘I bet he’s in the snow house,’ I said to Dad. ‘He really likes it in there.’

  ‘But the snow house is full of whale meat,’ said Dad.

  ‘No. It’s been packed up for going home,’ I said. ‘It’ll be empty again by now.’

  ‘Well, but it’ll smell of whale, it’ll be bloody and greasy. I can’t imagine him going in there just to play.’

  Play! Really, adults haven’t got a clue, have they? If Henry had gone into the snow house, it would be because he liked it in there. He wouldn’t be playing house!

  Anyway, we went looking for him, me and my dad, but he wasn’t in the snow house. I crawled in, and Dad was right, it stank in there, but there was no sign of Henry.

  ‘Would he have gone on ahead with one of the other crews?’ Dad suggeste
d.

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘He’s very responsible about being a boyer. He’d never just go off home and not say. Anyway, his dad is part of this crew and his older brother. He’d hardly want to go home with a different family, would he? Dad?’

  Dad grunted.

  ‘You don’t suppose a polar bear got him, do you?’ I still wasn’t sure if there really were polar bears about, but I didn’t like the thought of them all the same.

  ‘No! I don’t suppose so, not for a minute.’

  ‘Well, they keep going on about bears.’

  ‘Yes, but if a bear came to the camp, we’d know all about it. We’d hear it, see it, there’d be tracks. A bear couldn’t just happen by and run off with a boyer and nobody notice.’

  ‘You sure?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course I’m sure,’ said Dad.

  But I thought he was being too light-hearted. If polar bears weren’t such a danger, why would the people keep talking about them? I was worried about my friend, and starting to feel a bit guilty too that maybe I’d driven him away with my talk about whale-hunting being so dreadful. This was very unlikely, I see that now. You wouldn’t get rid of Henry that easily. But at the time I was worried and confused. You think daft things when you’re anxious.

  ‘Look,’ said Dad, ‘you keep looking around here. I’ll go around the other camps and see if he’s gone to visit a friend. But I won’t say anything to his dad yet. Don’t want to worry him. If we don’t find him within the hour, we’ll meet back at our tent, and decide what to do. OK?’

  ‘OK,’ I said, but really it didn’t seem a very good plan to me. I couldn’t imagine any place else he could be, apart from in the snow house. There were no trees, no walls, no ditches to hide in. Nothing but snow and ice and sea and emptiness.

  Tyke to the Rescue

  I wandered off along what we thought of as the shore, but was really the point where the frozen sea met the watery sea. I was further up the coast, a bit away from the spot where the whale had been landed and the big clean-up operation was going on. I could hear the murmur of work and the occasional shout on the air, but I was pretty much out of actual earshot. All I could see of the villagers, when I looked over my shoulder, was constant movement up and down the icy shoreline as men and boys and girls and women moved about, packing and readying themselves for the homeward journey.

  In one direction, the ice stretched in a glaring white expanse for miles and miles. It was enough to give you a headache looking at it, there was so much gleaming, retina-stretching white. In the other direction was the indigo expanse of the ocean. Since it was spring and the ice was breaking up, small sections of the icy shore were constantly breaking off and drifting out to sea, so that the surface of the water was dotted with the glittering debris of the break-up, little flat ice islands and odd half-melted lumps of ice like tiny icebergs jostling their way along, bumping off each other, drifting together sometimes, and then floating off again.

  Overhead the sky was the bluest blue you can imagine, an icy, terrifying blue, far bluer than the skies you see in hot places, and streaked with feathery white cloud on the horizon. There was so much ice and so much sea, so much white and so much blue, that I thought we’d never find Henry. You could walk for miles on the icy shore, calling his name, and all you’d see would be blue and white and white and blue, broken only by the huge inky shapes of the bowheads flickering through the sea like giant shadows, making large dark zeppelins under the surface, with an occasional dark shape drifting elephantinely to the surface, its blow erupting through the deep blue water into silvery fountains.

  I walked the endless ice away from the noise and the bustle of the camp and the stench of food and blood and oil and into the icy blue wilderness. I concentrated on Henry, imagining that if I thought hard enough about him, I could conjure up an image of where he was in my head.

  Every now and then, I scanned the horizon, pointlessly as I thought, but then something seemed to flutter on one of the drifting ice floes way out to sea. I screwed up my eyes and sure enough, the flutter came again. Someone was moving about, waving, on one of the drifting ice floes. It had to be Henry. I waved back, throwing all my strength into the movement of my arms, to assure him that I’d seen him.

  I turned then and yelled for my dad. I yelled and yelled till my throat hurt, but it was several minutes since he’d left. He’d evidently walked out of earshot by now. I started to run in the direction he’d gone, but then I stopped. It could take me ages to catch him. By then Henry might have floated off out of sight, and I’d never find him in the huge, heaving expanse of sea and float-ice.

  If I’d had time to think I’d never have done it, but I was in such a panic my body acted on its own. There were umiaqs everywhere about. I leapt into one, loosely tethered to a grappling iron driven into the ice. I undid the rope that held it, and pushed it away from the ice shore. It was only after I’d got it out on the water that I thought to look for oars. The boat was full of things – a small stove, a harpoon, a gun and, thank heavens, paddles.

  I’d never rowed even a little rowing boat, much less manned a boat of this size, heavy with equipment, across an expanse of arctic sea, bobbing with ice islands, but somehow I managed to get it moving roughly in the direction I wanted it to go. I kept my eyes fixed on Henry’s drifting ice floe. He was yelling to me. I could hear his cries floating on the icy air, but I couldn’t hear what he was trying to tell me. I knew I had to reach him. I had to. If I didn’t rescue him, he could go floating off and over the horizon and never be heard of again. It happens to arctic hunters all the time, one of the hazards of their way of life.

  ‘I’m coming!’ I yelled, but I knew he couldn’t possibly hear me. Still, it helped to shout it. It kept me going.

  I paddled and paddled, but I didn’t seem to be getting any closer. Was I going around in circles? I thought I must be, because I was only paddling on one side. I grabbed another paddle and tried to use them like oars, but the boat was too wide for me. I couldn’t reach across it to use two paddles at once.

  I stood up and paddled frantically from one side, then, unsteadily, I slithered to the other side of the boat and paddled a bit more on that side. Slowly, slowly, the boat moved in wide arcs. It wasn’t exactly going in circles, but it was zigzagging forward only very slowly. Most of the movement was sideways, in the sweep of the arcs. I could see this was a problem, but it was the only way I could make the umiaq move at all, so I kept paddling, wriggling from one side to the other and paddling, paddling, paddling furiously.

  Every now and then, I looked up to check if I could still see Henry. Every time I looked, he seemed further away, but I could hear his panic-stricken cries and I kept heading for him, though I was getting exhausted.

  At last – it seemed like hours – I started to get closer. Each time I looked up, he seemed a little larger, a little easier to make out. I came close enough to hear his voice, as distinct from just yells, to hear actual words. He was shouting directions. He stood on the edge of his ice floe, which was bobbing along with slow, almost dreamy movements on the swell of the sea, and yelled instructions at me. He understood boats better than I did, so I listened.

  ‘Paddle from the left,’ he was shouting. ‘Keep going. OK now, quickly, from the right. Quick, quick, she’s circling, stop her! Good, good, now a few more goes on the right. Now run to the other side …’

  Slowly, slowly, the boat swung closer and closer to Henry’s ice floe, but every time we were about to make contact, the ice floe drifted tantalisingly away again. It was like trying to catch an ice cube in a sink with wet fingers. I can’t, I thought. I can’t do it. I’m too tired. It won’t do what I want.

  ‘Just keep coming,’ yelled Henry. ‘You are getting closer. You are. Just don’t lose your nerve, don’t panic and don’t tire.’

  My arms were taut as iron rods by now with the effort of paddling, and the constant evasive action of the ice floe was beginning to wear me down, but Henry’s sh
outs kept me concentrated on what I was doing.

  Eventually, I felt the umiaq make contact with the ice with a gentle bump. The mild impact propelled the boat back again, but with the next paddle we made contact again, like a currach nosing in to a harbour wall. On the third impact, Henry’s outstretched arm brushed mine, and on the fourth attempt, he took a flying, floundering leap and landed in the umiaq like a huge, thrashing fish. The boat rocked dangerously with the impact, and hit off the ice floe several times, but I steadied it by bracing my feet against the sides, and gradually it settled on the water.

  Henry scrambled off the floor and, keeping his body bent to prevent overturning the boat, he managed to sit down.

  ‘Hey, Henry!’

  He looked smaller than himself, and his body was shaking, shaking, his face white and thin.

  ‘Hey, Tyke!’ he said, his voice wobbly and small. He looked as if he was trying to smile, but he couldn’t manage it.

  He leaned over the side of the boat then and projected a stream of vomit out over the sea.

  I stared at him, listening helplessly to his retching. It was only when I saw him getting sick that I realised how close he’d been to death, how scared he must have been. I started to feel scared myself, then – up to then I’d felt only panic and unnamed terror, but now it was real, logical, believable fear, fear of death, fear of drowning, fear of never seeing my dad again. Mum, I thought suddenly. Oh, Mum! I felt bile rise in own throat. I swallowed hard and looked away, determined not to join Henry in getting sick. Somebody had to keep upright, and it would have to be me.

  Henry turned to me then, still half-hanging over the side of the boat, vomit-streaked snot hanging from his nose, and I could feel the shaking of his body rocking the boat.

  ‘Here,’ I said, and I threw a hanky at him. ‘Wipe up.’