Call of the Whales Read online

  Flying to Thule

  I knew before we even went. I knew this was going to be my last trip. It wasn’t exactly that I was getting too old for trips with my dad, but that I needed my summers for my own stuff. Going off like that all the time, I missed out on what was going on. Arctic trips are time-consuming. They don’t really come into the same category as a weekend camping in Glendalough.

  I think Dad sort of knew too. Neither of us said anything – we were being careful of each other’s feelings – but there was a kind of sadness about it all, before we even started.

  ‘We’ll be fine,’ Mum said, as I kissed her goodbye. ‘Just come back in one piece, love.’

  It hadn’t occurred to me before that maybe she worried about us when we were away. She probably guessed the sorts of adventures we had, even though we didn’t tell her much. She wasn’t stupid, my mum. Dreamy yes, stupid no. She always looked surprised to see us when we came home from football matches, fishing trips, arctic expeditions, as if she’d forgotten these people lived here too, but sometimes I wondered if she put on a surprised look because she didn’t want to look anxious or lonely.

  ‘You mind yourself,’ I said, and gave her an extra long hug.

  We had organised that my aunt and my grandad were going to take it in turns to sleep over so Mum wouldn’t be on her own, and the babies were going to go to a crèche in the next street every morning, to give her a break. She’d be OK, I thought.

  ‘This is going to be spectacular,’ said Dad, as we settled into our seats on the plane. ‘This is the farthest north we’ve ever been. It is practically the most northerly inhabited place in the world.’

  The vision I’d had years before of me and Henry slumped at the foot of a North Pole that looked like a stick of rock suddenly wafted in front of my eyes. I wondered about Henry, where he was now, what he was doing, and I thought about Turaq too, and I was filled with nostalgia. I wondered if I’d make a friend this time. But perhaps I was getting too old for those intense yet casual friendships that children make.

  ‘Spectacular’ was not the sort of word my dad usually used about the north. It had that ring of tourism about it that he was so opposed to. That was the funny thing about this trip. Dad was bursting with excitement about it, but he didn’t treat it like our other trips. He brought along his tape recorder, of course, but he didn’t fuss about it the way he used to. It felt more like a holiday, this time, than a field trip. I think he meant it as a sort of gift to me. That touched me, but it also made me feel a little uneasy, as if I was under pressure to enjoy myself. Enjoying yourself is like sneezing. You can’t do it to order.

  ‘I’m looking forward to it, Dad,’ I said reassuringly, as I buckled my seatbelt.

  ‘You think you’ve experienced the Arctic, but I tell you, you ain’t seen nothing yet. You don’t know cold till you’ve been to Thule.’

  Until Dad had mentioned Thule that day back in May, I’d scarcely even heard of it, and I hadn’t really thought it actually existed. I thought it was a sort of northern fairyland, like the Ice Queen’s palace, not a place with an air-strip and a shop and telephone cables.

  ‘How cold, Dad?’ I asked, thinking of the levels of cold I’d experienced before on these trips with my father.

  ‘Well, it’s summer now of course,’ said Dad, evasively.

  ‘How cold?’

  Dad didn’t answer.

  ‘Dad!’ I said. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Maybe six, seven degrees,’ he said.

  ‘Seven degrees! In summer! Dad – are you trying to torture me?’

  ‘Sometimes it’s warmer,’ he said sheepishly.

  ‘Oh great, so sometimes it’s maybe as warm as the average winter’s day in Dublin.’ I said. ‘Fantastic. Pity I didn’t bring my swimsuit.’

  ‘It can get up to ten or twelve degrees,’ Dad said defensively.

  ‘With lots of wind chill factor, I take it? Like I said, Dad, fantastic. I can’t wait.’

  ‘Then again, it can get very cold,’ Dad admitted, ‘even in summer. Like freezing. Or down to minus five, minus seven maybe. But you’ve got your snowsuit, haven’t you?’

  Our old joke seemed a bit washed out by now. It didn’t raise a smile in me anyway.

  ‘If it really is minus seven,’ I said, ‘not even a sealskin will be much good. Well, that’s just great, Dad.’

  But I laughed to show him I was only teasing.

  Meeting Leon

  Whenever I try to describe Thule, even to myself, it comes out like a brochure from the Greenland tourism board. You know the sort of thing: ‘a crystalline landscape carved out of ice, sparkling and glistering in the high arctic summer sun’. You can’t use words like that in real life to tell people what a place looks like, because they will say, ‘yeah right, glistering, lovely’ and will go away thinking you are daft or have overdosed on poetry or have got a job as a copywriter for a ski resort. But I promise you, this is a place that actually does glister. You have to use exotic words for Thule, because Thule itself is so outlandishly, fabulously, astoundingly exotic. In fact, there aren’t words exotic enough to describe it.

  ‘Wow!’ I said when I looked out the window of the plane, as we flew north. That was as exotic as I could manage. ‘Wow!’

  It was like flying into an ice-cream sundae, a knickerbocker glory. The sky stretched and stretched, endlessly streaked with delicate colour, turquoise and pink, and the icy plain of snow-encased land and frozen sea stretched under it, the purest white, so white it wasn’t white at all but almost blue, and here and there where crags of ice rose out of the landscape they threw pale mauve shadows on the snow. It was as if we had catapulted off the face of the earth altogether and shot away into an icing-sugar paradise, rolling and stretching and just being itself, white and glistering, over acres and acres and unimaginable acres. In fact, I wondered at first if we weren’t above the cloudline; I thought maybe I was looking not at the earth at all but at the sunstreaked topsides of the clouds, the floor of heaven itself.

  ‘Breathe out,’ said my dad anxiously at my elbow.

  ‘What?’ I said, unable to take my eyes off the icy world spread out under the aeroplane.

  ‘Whew!’ said Dad. ‘I thought you’d forgotten to breathe there for a minute, you were so rapt.’

  He looked pleased.

  ‘Hmm,’ I said. I was breathing, but I couldn’t speak. I understood now what it meant when people said something was unspeakably beautiful. When they said they couldn’t find words to describe it.

  ‘I told you it was spectacular,’ Dad said smugly.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, my tongue loosened at last, ‘but this … this …’ And again I couldn’t speak. The words just wouldn’t come.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ said Dad. ‘It’s just … this. It’s the … thisness of it, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, smiling, ‘that must be it, the thisness.’

  It wasn’t perfect, though. There were blots. The settlements, the few meagre, oily grey spots that human beings had managed to smear on this landscape, were like blemishes on the perfection of the ice. And it was into one of these human artefacts, one of these villages, that we landed.

  Thule wasn’t exactly camping country, unless you’re a snowman, and we didn’t have a contact like Matulik who might offer us a room, so we found this friendly place they called a hotel but was really more like a guest-house and that’s where we stayed. We’d never stayed in a hotel before. That’s part of the reason it felt more like a holiday, I suppose, this time round. And there was the language thing too. Danish is the main European language spoken in Greenland, and we didn’t know much of it. People had some English, but it was broken, hesitant.

  The hotel was built on blocks and the toilets were chemical. They don’t have flush toilets up there, because you can’t lay sewers under the ice. Nothing goes underground, not even the electricity and telephone cables – they all have to travel through the air instead of under the ground, which is part of th
e reason the place looks a bit ramshackle. That’s also why the houses are built on blocks. You can’t dig foundations, obviously, in permafrost, and you have to keep the bottom of the house out of direct contact with the ice or it might start to shift when the top layer of ice goes mulchy in the summer. And because the houses have no foundations to keep them steady, they have to weigh them down with great walloping metal drums full of bricks so they don’t blow away in the arctic wind. But we had comfortable beds and they gave us food when we asked for it. Dad was in heaven.

  We hung about the village for a bit, trying to find people to talk to, but the ice-breaker had just opened up the harbour, and ships were berthing day after day, and everyone who was able to work was down at the docks unloading supplies. The harbour only stays open for a few weeks, and then it starts to freeze over again for the winter, so everything the villagers are going to need for the whole year has to be landed in these few weeks. And the people that weren’t busy at the harbour seemed to be building. They have a joke up there that there are four seasons: nearly winter, winter, still winter and construction. I’d heard that joke about the Arctic before, only with mosquitoes instead of construction. But that was one thing about Thule – too cold even for arctic mosquitoes.

  ‘Patience,’ Dad said. ‘We’ll just have to wait for a bit.’

  I didn’t know what he meant. I wasn’t feeling impatient, or at least I didn’t think I was. I wasn’t expecting anything in particular.

  One evening, we met an oldish man at the hotel, a shrunken, weather-beaten sort of a person with a scar across his face and running down into his neck. He came in for a cup of tea and to watch the news on the TV. Dad got talking to him. His name was Leon and he told us he was a hunter. Dad started to squirm with excitement. He nodded to me, as it to say, Here it comes, now, didn’t I tell you!

  Leon liked to live the old way of life, he said, and to catch what he could to make a living. He didn’t hold with all the developments in the area, distracting the men from the real work of the Greenlander, which is fishing and hunting and finding food. And selling the other produce of the animals, like oil or pelts.

  ‘I see they get job,’ he said. ‘That good, they got money in they pocket. But they trap’. They can’ go hunting when weather right. They can only hunt weekends. So they take a time off to hunt, then the boss, he get mad, he say Inuk worker lazy, no good.’

  He was just like any old man you meet anywhere, shaking his grey old head and giving out about change, but Dad found his views very interesting. He sat up late that night writing things in his notebook.

  Leon complained a bit more about development and about how the price of sealskins had slumped on the world market because of pressure from animal lovers. He complained about how you couldn’t export ivory products either. I thought he was thinking on a global scale, comparing the sealskin problem here with the ivory harvest in India or Africa or somewhere like that. I really didn’t want to get into the ivory debate, so I sat still and said nothing, but I was churning up a bit inside. It reminded me of how uneasy I had felt about the bowhead hunt. I thought I’d resolved my feelings about that, but evidently I hadn’t, not completely.

  Leon was going hunting the next day, he said, him and his team of dogs. I could see that Dad was practically expiring with the desire to ask him if we could go along, but he wasn’t sure if the old man would think that impolite. Dad always said that other peoples had different standards for what was polite, and so you never just went by your own feeling for it. You had to watch the behaviour of people around you to find out what was acceptable.

  But I didn’t have my dad’s finely tuned anthropologist’s sensibilities, and I thought I could probably get away with being more forthright, since I was young. So I just came straight out and asked.

  ‘You have a team of dogs, Leon? Gosh! And you’re going hunting tomorrow. Could you take a couple of passengers, do you think?’

  Dad looked at the ceiling, looked at the floor, looked anywhere but at Leon in case he had the wrong expression on his face.

  Leon nodded. ‘Sure,’ he said.

  Dad beamed.

  ‘I drive tourists, often,’ Leon went on complacently.

  Dad’s face fell. Tourists! He opened his mouth, I am sure, to explain to Leon that we weren’t tourists, but then he must have thought better of it, because he closed his mouth again. Then he opened it for a second time and said, ‘Well, that’s settled then. Mange tak, Leon. Will we see you here at the hotel then, tomorrow?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Leon again.

  ‘Now you’ll see,’ said Dad later. ‘At least, I think you will.’

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘What I promised,’ said Dad.

  I didn’t know what he was talking about. I’d forgotten all about the unicorn hunt, and if he’d mentioned it, I’d have thought he was romancing.

  Hunting the Narwhal

  We waited for Leon the next day, but he never arrived. Dad was disappointed, but he put a brave face on it. He said maybe it had something to do with the weather conditions, and that Leon would probably come the following day. But he didn’t. Nor the next day. By the end of a week, I’d given up on old Leon. Dad was tense – I could see he thought the whole expedition had been a bit of a failure – and in the end, he gave up on him too.

  ‘We’ll go soon,’ he said, noticing my restlessness. ‘Next week. Or maybe the week after.’ He sounded sort of wistful, like a child trying to negotiate a later bedtime, but not expecting to have much luck.

  I didn’t say anything. It really was time to be thinking about getting home. The nights were drawing in, and the temperature was already starting to drop sharply at sunset. I had to get back to school, and besides, I missed Mum and the twins.

  ‘Leon leave a message for you, Mr Jim,’ Bebe said one morning, about the time we were thinking of leaving. Bebe was the woman who ran our hotel. It tickled Dad no end the way she called him ‘Mr Jim’.

  ‘Leon?’ Dad’s eyes lit up. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He say to tell you, they all goin’ to the narwhal hunt over to the fjord. He thought you might like to go watch.’

  Dad’s excitement was obvious. He instantly forgave Leon for not having appeared to take us hunting.

  ‘This is it, son! The narwhal hunt!’

  ‘Narwhal?’ I said. ‘What’s a narwhal, Dad?’

  ‘You don’t know what a narwhal is?’ Dad looked shocked, as if I’d said I didn’t know that Paris was the capital of France or my five times tables.

  ‘Should I?’

  ‘The narwhal,’ said Dad, standing up from the breakfast table and pushing his chair in with a grand gesture of impatience, ‘is the u….’ Suddenly he dropped his grand tone, as if he thought I might think he was being silly. ‘Well, actually,’ he said, in a more ordinary tone of voice, ‘it’s a rather small whale. Unusual though, very unusual. Just wait and see.’

  He was making it all very mysterious. I shrugged, but for some unnamed reason, an image of myself in a velvet cloak, lined with stars, floated through my mind.

  ‘Did he say he would come for us?’ Dad asked Bebe. ‘Leon, I mean.’

  She shook her head. Dad’s face fell.

  ‘You want I ask my sister’s boy to take you over there?’ Bebe asked. ‘Leon say Michael can take you if you like.’

  Dad practically whimpered with excitement. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘oh please do. And you,’ he said to me, ‘do I take it that you want to come?’

  Poor Dad. He knew I wasn’t very keen on whale-hunting. But he desperately wanted me to come – and to want to come. He was right. I didn’t like it, but after the bowhead hunt, I’d come to some sort of an arrangement in my head about it, an agreement with myself to tolerate it. I decided I’d go with him, this one last time, and I wouldn’t argue about it.

  When Bebe’s nephew arrived, he had polar-bearskin trousers for us to wear. I looked at the shaggy things, and I looked at Dad, and I said: ‘Do I have to?
’

  ‘You will be so glad of these trousers, you know. Polar-bearskin is the warmest fur in the world.’

  Michael nodded. ‘Keep out the cold, keep out the wind, keep out the water.’ He was about my age, I think, but he had a wise air about him, like an old man.

  ‘But it looks like I’m wearing a sheepskin rug. I look like a caveman.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what you look like,’ Dad said, ‘but what you actually look like is a Kalaallit hunter.’

  So we bundled up in all the skins and furs Michael had brought us, and we waddled, like two walking haystacks, down the hotel steps. Tied up at the porch was a sled with a team of ten creamy white and dashingly handsome huskies. They looked all freshly brushed and as soon as they saw us emerging, they set up a whine of welcome. I went to pat their heads, but Michael shouted at me.

  ‘Don’t! These dogs aren’t pets. They wolves.’

  ‘Oh!’ I said, and pulled my hand back.

  ‘These are Leon’s dogs,’ he went on. ‘They good dogs, well trained, but they can turn nasty.’

  ‘Nasty?’

  ‘Yup. Leon attacked by a husky once out on the ice. The food ran out. The dog went mad with hunger. Leon still got the scar.’

  ‘Ouch!’ I said. ‘But how come you don’t use snowmobiles or scooters?’

  ‘Ach,’ said Michael, ‘snowmobiles break down. Your snowmobile breaks down, you’re out on the ice, what you do? Walk home? Dogs don’t break down.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Dad, looking pleased as punch. ‘Dogs don’t break down.’

  They just go mad and attack you, I thought, but I didn’t say so. I just kept a wary eye on the dogs as I climbed onto the sled.

  Suddenly, almost before we had settled, Michael had whisked up the dogs’ attention with a shouted command, and we were off, skimming over the ice, like the Snow Queen, watching the cloudy mists of the dogs’ breath rising up in the still air before us.