Call of the Whales

by Siobhán Parkinson

  Anyway, when Mum asked, of course I’d say I had a snowsuit. It would keep her happy, and having asked the question made her feel she was doing the proper mother-stuff. She didn’t really know much about the mother-stuff, but every now and then she’d act like a mother. I mean act, not behave; act, like on stage.

  I didn’t really have a snowsuit. I wasn’t three, and anyway, there wasn’t usually much snow the places we went to in the summer time – at least, not in those early days. There was lots of snow on the horizon and pack ice to the north. But in the coastal settlements where we went to meet the people, the summer temperatures were mild to cool, but not cold, and the main problem was the mosquitoes.

  The first time Dad showed me the tent we were going to take with us, I laughed when I saw that it had a built-in mosquito net. I thought mosquitoes were things you got in hot countries. How wrong can you be? We were eaten alive by the arctic mosquitoes, who were clearly thrilled to find some nice fresh Irish blood – a lovely change for them from the arctic blood they were used to. We were walking gourmet meals, me and my dad, in the arctic summers. It was the lakes that did it. The tundra is always pocked with lakes and boggy pools in the summer time. You could see that as you come zooming in by plane. It’s because the ice melts and there’s nowhere for all the water to go. Some of it finds its way into streams, but some of it just lodges in hollows and it can’t seep away into the earth, because the subsoil is frozen solid all year round. So the water just sits there and creates a lovely damp environment for the mosquitoes to lay their eggs in.

  Anyway, we agreed we wouldn’t tell Mum, so as not to worry her. Dad didn’t worry – or not so’s you’d notice. He understood about risk – that’s the good thing about Dad – and he knew I hadn’t been foolish, just unlucky.

  He said we had to go to Turaq’s house, though, to thank him for saving me.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I can’t do that.’

  ‘You have to,’ Dad said. ‘We are guests here, and we have to be very careful to be polite. Anyway, it’s the right thing to do. He saved your life.’

  ‘Don’t keep saying that,’ I muttered, embarrassed. But I combed my hair and brushed the twiggy bits out of my jacket and off we set that evening after dinner. I remembered to take Turaq’s sealskin parka with me. We’d dried it out by hanging it inside-out over the tent ridge. I was glad I’d thought of it. It gave us an excuse to be going to his house. Saying thanks for saving my life was not my idea of a reason to visit someone.

  I noticed Dad looking longingly at his tape recorder as we got ready to go, but I said, ‘No way, Dad! You are not going to tape Turaq.’

  ‘He might have a grandmother,’ said Dad, wistfully.

  ‘I’m sure he has,’ I said, ‘but she is Turaq’s grandmother, not a “source” for you, not a “subject”.’

  I’d picked up a bit of anthropological jargon over the years. I knew that the way of life Dad was interested in was quickly fading and that the old people were the only ones who could tell him about the traditional way of life, but I drew the line at Turaq’s family being used like that, for research purposes. He was my friend. It was different from just any family.

  ‘You’re right,’ said Dad. ‘It would be rude.’

  ‘It certainly would be,’ I said sniffily. I didn’t often get a chance to tell an adult off. It’s a nice feeling.

  As it turned out, Turaq did have a grandmother. Turaq’s father was away at the caribou hunt, but his mother invited us in. My dad was in heaven. His first invitation into an Inuit home that year.

  I liked the inside of Turaq’s house. Nothing matched. Even the two curtains on the living-room window were in different fabrics and of different lengths. It gave the house a lovely topsy-turvy, haphazard, colourful feeling that I liked, like being in a caravan. My mother thought she was dead unconventional, being an actress, but she liked her curtains to match and she was for ever ‘picking up’ the green in a picture with a scrap of matching green in the carpet or the little red stripe along the rug with a sofa-cushion in the exact same shade. It was what she liked to do, but I always thought it made our house feel stuffy.

  Turaq’s mother made us coffee, using a proper electric kettle – not very Inuit that, I could see Dad thinking – and offered us chewy meat to eat with it. I’d never had coffee with meat before; actually, I’d never had coffee. The combination tasted strange, but I suppose it was sort of … interesting. Dad said later it was jerky, which is a sort of dried meat. It was like gnawing leather, but tasty leather. Dad thought it might have been caribou or moose. The coffee was dreadful. I’ve always been more of a tea-man, myself.

  Anyway, we said we had come to say thank you to Turaq. At least Dad did. I nearly died – again. Turaq smiled and bowed stiffly and his mother looked pleased. His grandmother smiled too.

  Then Dad got all flowery. ‘I don’t know how we can ever thank you properly, Turaq. There is nothing we can do to repay you for your ki…’

  I glared at him. You didn’t talk to a ten-year-old about their kindness. That was too grown-up a concept. It sounded soppy to kids. I could never understand how adults could forget that sort of thing about being a child.

  ‘For your … help,’ Dad finished, glancing at me.

  Turaq just nodded and smiled again.

  Then his grandmother made a little speech. She leant forward and said to my dad: ‘You don’t need to repay Turaq. What you do is, when you see someone in trouble, you help them. That’s how you repay a kindness. By helping the next person. And then they can help another person. And so it goes. That is the Inuit way.’

  ‘A very wise old lady,’ my dad said to me afterwards.

  Load of philosophical old codswallop, I thought, but I didn’t say it. I could see he was delighted with what Turaq’s grandma had said. She was right, of course, though I didn’t realise it at the time.

  ‘That’s the Inuit way,’ Dad said to himself.

  ‘Aren’t you going to write it down in your notebook?’ I teased him, snuggling into my deliciously warm sealskin parka. Turaq had refused to take it back. He said he had another one, and that I needed this one more than he did. I had reason to be glad of it, for many an arctic summer afterwards. I still have it somewhere, though of course it doesn’t fit me now.

  ‘Write what down?’ Dad asked.

  ‘What Turaq’s grandma said. About the Inuit way.’

  He laughed. And he didn’t write it down. I couldn’t work him out. But that’s anthropologists for you. You never know what they’re going to find interesting.

  Shortly after that visit to Turaq’s house we left and I never met him again. I never really got used to that – the way I would be just making a friend and then suddenly it would be the end of August and we’d have to go back to dreary, grey old Dublin and back to school and to other kids talking about their holidays in Courtown or Llandudno or trips to Old Trafford or stays in the Gaeltacht. It all seemed a bit … well, ordinary to me. But of course I couldn’t say that. I’d say, ‘Oh, Canada’ or something very general like that when they asked me where I’d been.

  ‘Ah yeah, Canada,’ they’d say. ‘Great. You’re dead lucky. Rory has an uncle in Toronto.’

  ‘Yeah, Toronto,’ I’d say, secretly scratching my mosquito bites through the wool of my school jumper, and I’d nod as if I’d been there.

  I never mentioned arctic char or midnight sun or hypothermia or names like Turaq. They’d think I was making it up.

  Dreaming of Whales

  My dad got a book about bowhead whales out of the library and we studied it together during that next winter. My mother had gone all dreamy and distant – I mean, even dreamier than usual. She took no notice of us and our books, just lay about a lot on sofas and ate cornflakes with hot milk.

  They are magnificent creatures, those bowheads, forty, fifty, sometimes as much as sixty feet long, and forty to fifty or sixty tons in weight. Enormous is too small a word to describe them.

  I couldn’t get ove
r the size of the whales. I kept looking at big things like a bus or a bungalow and saying to myself, ‘A bowhead whale is bigger than that.’ (And bowheads weren’t even the biggest whales. There are much bigger ones.) It freaked me out that an animal could be bigger than a house. Not just taller than a house, like a giraffe, but actually bigger, much bigger. Bigger than two houses. Longer than a garden. (Longer than our garden anyway.) It was like trying to imagine a world full of Tyrannosaurus Rex, except that these creatures weren’t prehistoric. There they were, in their hundreds, in their thousands, swimming their slow, undulating ways through the icy waters of the Bering Sea, swishing their enormously powerful tails, strong enough to make matchsticks of a boat. Right now, at this very minute, they were living and breathing and whooshing out their great V-shaped blows from their huge double blowholes, swimming and diving, lunging and plunging and waiting for spring. I couldn’t get over it.

  I kept trying to imagine what it must feel like to be a whale, how gigantic and lumbering. I wondered how long it would take to turn around in the water, for example – would you have to reverse a bit and then swing around, like an articulated truck? Or how long it would take for a message to get from your tail to your brain. And how much you would have to eat to sustain such a humungous body. It overwhelmed me, the thought of it all. It was like trying to think about infinity or how many miles away other galaxies are. My dad said that if you really were a whale, you wouldn’t feel especially big. I thought that was daft, but he explained that from the point of view of an ant, say, we are enormous, but that we don’t feel enormous to ourselves. I sort of saw what he meant, but I couldn’t give up the idea that whales must know, must somehow have an inkling of how huge they are.

  I read about how female whales made little families with their sisters and their young, and how the males joined them from time to time, but mostly hung about in gangs or lived solitary lives much of the year. I tried to imagine how they organised it all. I thought the females probably had a better deal, but then I tried to imagine a female whale giving birth in the freezing sea, bellowing with the effort of it, and with her sisters and her nieces all coming around to help and give her whaley support, and I almost drowned in the hugeness of it all. I imagined the calf emerging and I wondered how big it would be. Bigger than a cow? Bigger than a racehorse? As big as a camel?

  The thing about sea creatures is, it’s hard to believe they aren’t freezing to death out there in the depths, isn’t it? You try to imagine their lives, and all you can think of is the cold and the wet and the smell of seaweed and the taste of salt and the constant roll of the sea, and it all seems so difficult. It’s very hard to believe that they wouldn’t be more comfortable tucked up in a nice warm den somewhere, especially when you are thinking of mammals. Fish are different. You can accept fish, cold-blooded things, not minding the cold and the wet.

  Dad got hold of a tape of whales ‘singing’. They weren’t bowheads. They were humpbacks. (The bowheads haven’t made an album, it seems. They need a manager, my dad joked, but he said they made pretty much the same types of sounds.) We listened to the whales screaming like enormous, angry violins, accompanied by the steady splodging sounds of their tails thrashing the water, their voices gradually rising to a prolonged, agonising hooting sound. It made the little hairs stand up on the back of my neck. It was like a sick mermaid wailing in a cave, I thought, and the songs repeated and repeated and then repeated with a little variation, and then back came an answering song, from miles away, miles and miles away over the wide, wide ocean, like another distraught violin, lost and languishing and longing for its friends.

  Meeting Matulik

  As the sea ice starts to melt in the spring in the high Arctic, the whale book said, it cracks apart and open leads are formed here and there. This gives the bowheads, trapped all winter by the ice, their chance to pass, shouldering their way through the breaking ice, on their annual migrations to their summer feeding and breeding grounds in the Beaufort Sea.

  ‘We’ll go in the spring,’ said my dad, ‘when the bowheads start to move. To the northern coast of Alaska.’

  ‘What about school?’ I said. It was out before I’d thought it through. I probably should have said nothing.

  ‘This is more important than school,’ said Dad airily. ‘You can miss a term. I’ll help you to catch up later.’

  Sometimes my dad could be magnificent. This was one of those moments. We didn’t say anything to Mum about the whales. We just said we had to go early this year. She didn’t say much. She didn’t even argue that I shouldn’t be missing school. She seemed unusually uninterested in us, come to think of it. She just asked her usual vague snowsuit questions, and we said not to worry, we were well equipped. She’d forgotten I had a fabulously warm sealskin parka, much better than any snowsuit available this side of the Arctic Circle.

  Then she said, dreamily, ‘Well, as long as you’re back by September.’

  I thought she meant for school.

  We’d never been this far north before, and we’d never been in the Arctic at a time when there was still a little bit of night left over from the winter. I’d never seen the sun set up there before. It was like watching slow fireworks. Late, late in the evening, the high, bright, icy blue of the day seeped away into an apparently endless indigo twilight, and gradually the sky went pink and then pinker and pinker and it darkened to deep, deep orangey red, and then the colour faded and the light faded and everywhere was a sort of silver-lined navy, and that went on for a while, and that was the night, and then the sky pinkened up again and it was dawn.

  Everywhere, the people were busy, busy. Every day the village helicopter flew out over the ice that stretched away across the sea, carrying some of the local men to inspect the ice, to see where the leads were breaking, because that was where the whales would be swimming. They hardly noticed us, there was so much to do.

  Dad went straight to find a man called Matulik, as soon as we arrived. He was what they called a whaling captain in the village, and Dad had got his name from one of his colleagues as a good contact in Alaska.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Matulik, when Dad introduced himself, using the contact name he’d been given, by way of introduction. ‘Yes, I heard you’d be coming. What you want?’

  Dad fluffed and bumbled and muttered something non-committal.

  ‘A teacher?’ Matulik said.

  ‘Yes,’ said my dad. He lectured in anthropology, but he always used the word ‘teacher’ to explain himself, because people knew what that meant.

  ‘What you teach?’

  ‘I teach my students about the Eskimo way of life,’ my dad said carefully. ‘About your people’s traditions and stories and ways of relating to the world.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Matulik. He smoked thin yellow cigarettes and his fingers were as yellow as the cigarette paper. I envied him his pungent little cigarettes, because they kept the mosquitoes away. I was scratching already, even though we’d only been here half an hour.

  ‘So you’re an expert on our way of life, then?’ Matulik continued.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Dad.

  I knew he thought he was, so I was pretty surprised to hear him denying it.

  ‘No, no,’ he went on. ‘Not an expert. You are an expert, Matulik. You and your people, you are the experts. I am just learning.’

  ‘So what you want?’ Matulik asked again.

  ‘I want … my son and I,’ said Dad, beaming at me, ‘my son and I would like to come with you to the whaling camp.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Matulik, and he took a deep drag on his cigarette. ‘For why?’

  ‘To learn,’ said my dad.

  I’d never heard him sound so humble.

  ‘You environ-ment-alists?’ asked Matulik suspiciously.

  ‘No,’ said Dad stoutly.

  I had never heard that word before. I could sort of work out what it meant, but the way Matulik said it, it sounded like it was a disgraceful thing to be.

  ‘You scientist
s?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You oil people?’

  Oil was a hot topic in those days in Alaska, with arguments raging between the US government and the native peoples about who owned the oil wells. They’ve sorted it all out now, more or less, and the local people managed to get a share of the wealth for themselves, but in those days it was a sore point. Oil was the last thing Dad wanted to be associated with.

  ‘No,’ he said emphatically, ‘not oil people, not business people, not from the government. We don’t belong to any organisation. We want nothing except to understand.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Matulik. He still seemed a bit suspicious. He seemed like a man who had had bad experiences with strangers. ‘But for why you want to understand? There must be a reason.’

  ‘I’m interested in how peoples live,’ Dad said. ‘I’m interested in what makes societies work. I’m interested in what people tell their children, what they believe, how they explain the world to themselves, how they make sense of life … and death.’

  ‘Life and death, huh?’ said Matulik. ‘I see.’ But still he shook his head doubtfully.

  He finished his cigarette and he stubbed it out carefully in an old cigarette box. Then he squashed the cigarette box in his small brown hand and pushed it into the depths of his pocket.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘You want life and death, next week, when we got all the equipment ready, we break trail to the camp. You can come if you help. Him,’ he pointed at me, ‘he can be a boyer.’

  ‘We’ll help,’ said Dad, beaming. ‘Thank you, Matulik.’

  ‘Where you living?’ Matulik asked then.

  We’d only just stepped off the plane.

  ‘Well …’ said Dad.

  ‘You talk to my wife. My son gone to Anchorage to work. You can have his room, that suit you?’