Call of the Whales

by Siobhán Parkinson

  ‘Gee …’ said Dad, not letting on how ecstatic he was at the thought of actually living in an Inupiat house.

  ‘OK,’ said Matulik, and walked off with a vague wave.

  ‘What’s a boyer?’ I asked.

  ‘A boy who helps at the whaling camp,’ said Dad. ‘It’s a great honour to be a boyer. It’s a sort of apprenticeship for joining the whaling crew. You’re very lucky.’

  ‘How do you mean, “helps”?’

  ‘Makes coffee. Gets snow to melt for water. Keeps the stove going. Watches out for polar bears.’

  ‘Polar bears!’

  ‘Uh-hmm,’ said Dad.

  ‘Dad! They’re dangerous.’

  ‘Oh, not usually,’ said Dad, airily. ‘They’re like all bears. They don’t bother you if you don’t bother them.’

  All I could think of was the big warning sign by the polar-bear enclosure at Dublin Zoo.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Dad. ‘There’ll be lots of boyers. They’ll know what to do. You’ll have a fine time.’

  Sometimes Dad could be magnificent. Sometimes he could be plain irresponsible. I wasn’t sure which he was being just then.

  The Man in City Shoes

  The busyness continued for days. Everywhere you looked, people were packing things and checking things and getting things ready. There was a buzz about the place, and the children were in a state of high excitement. They were too excited even to stare much at me, which is what they usually did.

  Then one morning a helicopter landed, right in front of Matulik’s house. It wasn’t the village helicopter. It was a government one, I think, or something official-looking anyway, green with brown markings – not very good camouflage colouring for this blue-and-white landscape.

  A man wearing polished city shoes, a suit and a puffy anorak jumped out, his hair standing up like a shocked hedgehog in the whirl of the choppers.

  ‘Matulik?’ he bellowed, over the roar of the machine.

  Matulik came out of the house, his hands clamped to his ears against the noise.

  ‘Send it away!’ he shouted, taking one hand off his head and gesturing wildly at the helicopter.

  The city-dressed man gestured to the pilot, and the helicopter lifted and whippa-chunk, whippa-chunk, whippa-chunked away.

  As soon as the noise dropped to a level where people could hear, the city man spoke to Matulik.

  ‘The whale run this year has been unusually heavy,’ he said, without greeting.

  ‘Uh-huh?’ said Matulik, his hands on his hips now.

  ‘The next two villages down the coast have already caught more than their quota.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well, that means you can’t go whaling this year. You people have already taken more than you’re allowed. Don’t you talk to each other? Can’t you work it out between you?’

  Matulik said nothing, just nodded and shook his head, nodded and shook in turn, his mouth twisted in an ungiving grimace.

  ‘Well?’ said the man.

  ‘I got a telephone,’ said Matulik in the end.

  ‘What?’ said the man.

  ‘You coulda phoned me.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the man. ‘I didn’t have your number.’

  ‘How many gallons of fuel you use to come tell me this?’ asked Matulik, waving in the direction the helicopter had gone.

  The man didn’t reply. He slid his thinly shod foot along the ice underfoot and said nothing.

  ‘You don’ seem to me to be too concerned about the environment,’ said Matulik, ‘if you can ride up here in a chopper to tell me a message you coulda telled me by phone.’

  ‘I told you,’ said the man. ‘I didn’t know you had a phone. I don’t have your number.’

  ‘Well, next time, why don’ you check the phone book?’ said Matulik, and turned back towards his house.

  ‘Do I take it that you’ll cancel the hunt from this village?’ called the man.

  ‘Take what you like,’ said Matulik. ‘And take yourself outta here pretty damn fast.’

  He didn’t look back. He walked right into his house again and shut the door.

  I didn’t see any of this. I was over the other side of the village working with some of the boyers from the other crews to get our tents ready for the camp. I heard the helicopter, but I thought it was the one the villagers used for checking the ice. It was only when I got back to Matulik’s house for lunch that Dad filled me in on what had happened. He was brimming with excitement.

  We sat with Matulik and Matulik’s wife Leah for lunch in their kitchen. It wasn’t as interesting as Turaq’s kitchen – the curtains matched in that boring way – but I liked it anyway. It had a familiar feeling about it, even though we’d only been there a few days.

  Matulik was still quivering with rage about the visit from the government man or whoever he was.

  ‘You people,’ he said to my dad, ‘don’ you got no manners? Comin’ here like that, shouting orders to me.’

  ‘Well…’ said Dad.

  I could see he wanted to assure Matulik it had nothing to do with us, but he didn’t want to say anything that would make things worse.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Matulik then. ‘I know it’s nothing to do with you. You’re not from the government, right? Or the International Whaling Commission.’

  ‘We’re not even from the same continent as your government,’ said Dad vehemently.

  There was a silence for a while, except for the sound of knives and forks and people chewing quietly.

  ‘So, what are you going to do?’ Dad asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Matulik.

  ‘You mean, you won’t go out on the ice?’

  ‘No, I mean do nothing different.’

  ‘But the quota. What happens if you exceed the quota?’

  ‘We don’t exceed the quota. We never do. We agreed to the quota, we think it’s right not to take too many whales – we’ve always known that.

  ‘But we fix up the quotas between ourselves, see. We don’t need a man in city shoes come in a helicopter to tell us. If the other villages have taken extra whales, they tell the folks at the main whaling centre, a few miles up along the coast, and they fix it so nobody takes any whales in the fall, that’s all. It’s not a spring quota, it’s a year quota. We can even it out over the year, simple. We know how to manage these things.’

  ‘I see,’ said Dad. ‘Well, that’s good.’

  ‘You people!’ Matulik said, but he was saying it to himself, almost like a curse.

  I didn’t know then about all the conflict there’d been between people like us and people like Matulik, over whaling, over sealing, over trading, over prices for produce, over land. I hadn’t a clue, really.

  A Decision

  I tackled my father later.

  ‘Dad, what’s all this about?’

  ‘What’s all what about?’

  ‘The quota. A quota for what?’

  ‘For whales. The people are only allowed to kill a certain number every year. It has to do with conserving the whales, so they don’t die out like they almost did in the last century from over-exploitation, only of course that was by European whalers.’

  Conserving, exploitation … I hardly heard those words. Only one word leapt out at me from what my father said.

  ‘Kill! Dad, do they kill the whales?’

  My wonderful bowhead whales! I must have known. I must have known, but I’d been fooling myself. We’d been using words like ‘whaling’ and ‘whale camp’, all along, even ‘taking whales’. But nobody’d actually used the word ‘kill’ before. Even so, surely I must have put two and two together. But I was so excited, so mesmerised by the splendour of these beasts that at last I was going to see, I didn’t really allow myself to admit that this was all about hunting. About life and death, as my dad had said.

  ‘Well, of course they do. What do you think they go whaling for?’

  It felt as if the floor of my world had shifted and a hole had opened under my feet. />
  ‘Dad,’ I said softly, ‘I don’t think I want to go on the hunt.’

  ‘But we’ve come all this way! All the other boys are going. I thought you were so thrilled about it.’

  I couldn’t tell him I’d had some sort of naïve idea that I was just going whale-watching, like some tourist. ‘Tourist’ was a word my dad used like a swear word. So I pretended it was just that I’d changed my mind.

  ‘Now that we’re here,’ I said, ‘I don’t think I could face it.’

  Dad put a hand heavily on my shoulder.

  ‘Well, I can’t make you come if you don’t want to,’ he said. ‘I know how you feel about the bowheads …’

  He couldn’t. He couldn’t possibly know how I felt about the bowheads. Nobody could, because I’d never told anyone. In my head, they had become magical beasts, wondrous, enchanted creatures, creatures so magnificent and huge and powerful and venerable that it would be verging on murder to kill them.

  ‘So think about it, OK?’ Dad was saying.

  I hadn’t even been listening to whatever argument he was putting. The usual one about how whales aren’t really so specially intelligent after all, probably, but that didn’t matter to me, because my feelings about the bowheads were feelings – I had developed an emotional relationship with them, without ever having laid eyes on one of them, and it had nothing to do with whether they were intelligent or not, although I was sure they were, anyway.

  The floor seemed to shift under me again, and again I fell. And this time the problem was that I knew I wanted to go on the hunt. I knew it, because as soon as I thought about not going, disappointment rose in my throat with a bitter taste. I was utterly confused. I wanted desperately to go, and yet I didn’t want to have anything to do with whale-killing.

  ‘OK,’ I said, defeated. ‘I’ll think about it.’

  But thinking about it didn’t help. I’d been reading, studying, thinking, dreaming about bowhead whales for months now. They seemed to live boisterously inside my head, almost as if I’d invented them all by myself. My whole winter had been an anticipation of this trip. The more I thought about them, the more I longed to see them at last, the more confused I got, and the more torn between wanting to see the whales and not wanting to have anything to do with killing them.

  I tried common sense. I said to myself that if I just made coffee and scared away polar bears, I wasn’t really part of the killing team. I told myself that I’d come all this way, I was missing half a term at school, just for this, and I would be foolish to turn my back on it. I told myself that the whales were going to be killed anyway, whether or not I was part of it.

  That was the trickiest bit to think about. If you can do nothing to prevent something you don’t agree with, if it’s going to happen anyway, well then, can you allow yourself to benefit from that thing? It was all so miserably confusing. In the end, I didn’t so much decide as succumb.

  ‘Made your mind up, son?’ Dad asked me later.

  I shook my head, feeling sickened inside, as if my thoughts were headaches, chasing each other around my skull.

  Dad sat down beside me.

  ‘OK,’ he said, drawing up his chair closer to the table where I sat with my head in my hands. ‘Let’s try to think this through. Let’s think for a minute about your sealskin parka.’

  ‘I’m wearing it,’ I said warily, half-aware where this argument was going to lead.

  ‘Somebody had to kill a seal – several seals – to make it.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I had been right about where this argument was going.

  I thought about seals, their sleek bodies, their innocent whiskery faces, their silly honking noises, the way they play on the rocks.

  ‘I suppose nylon jackets could be just as good,’ I said at last, reluctantly, though I knew from experience that it wasn’t true.

  ‘Well,’ said Dad, ‘that may or may not be true. But you know, nylon comes from oil.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, wearily, ‘which has to be mined from the earth, which creates environmental pollution and destroys communities.’

  Damn! I thought.

  ‘Plus it’s a non-renewable resource. We get nothing for nothing in this world, you know.’

  I shook my head. ‘It’s not the same,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘It’s not. Animals are different. They’re like us.’

  He was changing sides! He saw it my way!

  ‘That’s it,’ I said excitedly. ‘That’s the problem, Dad. They have feelings.’

  ‘And then, apart from the skins,’ Dad went on, ‘there’s the meat, which is probably even more valuable. Vegetarianism isn’t really an option in the Arctic, you know. Not too many vegetable gardens around here. Meat is what you eat up here, or you die.’

  He wasn’t changing sides after all. He was just being reasonable. I looked around at the bleak snow-covered landscape, and I could see for myself he was right.

  ‘But …’ I said.

  ‘And where do you get meat in a place like this?’ Dad went on. I wished he would stop, but he kept on, relentlessly pursuing his argument. ‘Not too many chicken farms round here either.’

  ‘But …’ I said again, lamely, casting about for some argument to throw at him, to stop him in his tracks.

  ‘And it’s not just us that live off dead animals,’ he said. ‘All of nature does. The whales themselves live off other sea creatures.’

  ‘Plankton,’ I said dully.

  ‘Yes, bowheads eat plankton, but other whales eat fish. Octopus. Herring. It’s how life works. We live off each other. The best we can do is to do it with a minimum of cruelty.’

  His arguments were unanswerable.

  ‘Shut up, Dad,’ I said, covering my ears. ‘Just shut up!’

  I hate when the other person is right, and you know they’re right, and still you feel you were right all along too. It makes me feel woozy.

  Give him his due, Dad did shut up. He closed his mouth firmly, in a thin line, and let me think.

  I put my head in my hands again, covering my ears. The thoughts were crowding in on me, getting mixed up with the feelings. I could feel tears starting, but I didn’t want to cry, not about whales, not in front of Dad.

  ‘In the past …’ I said, after a bit, trying to work out what I thought.

  ‘No,’ said Dad, before I’d even got to the end of my sentence.

  I wanted to biff Dad one, the way he was droning on with his clever arguments, interrupting me before I even got started, but we didn’t go in for violence in my family, so I just kicked the leg of the table instead. Hard. My toe ached for ages afterwards.

  ‘It doesn’t matter whether it’s the past or the present,’ Dad was saying. ‘The arctic people don’t have to hunt for a living any more, but does that make their way of life suddenly wrong? So there are other meats, other oils, other materials – all of which have to be imported and paid for, by the way, all of which are bound up in their own moral issues too – but does that mean that the people should suddenly drop their way of life, change everything they have ever known and start living on fish fingers and wearing polyester?’

  I was listening, but I felt glum inside, mixed up and sad and headachy and confused. I banged my fist on the table in frustration and anger.

  ‘And anyway,’ Dad went on, laying his hand over my clenched fist to stop me banging it, ‘what about the fish? How do you think they feel about having their fingers chopped off?’

  ‘Oh Dad! That is such a stupid joke.’

  I could feel tears spurting now from my eyes. Tears of anger, I told myself, pulling my fist out from under Dad’s restraining hand and using it to dab fiercely at my wet face.

  ‘Look, I’m trying to make the point,’ Dad said, more gently now that he saw how upset I was, ‘that everything we put in our mouths comes out of the earth or out of the sea, no matter how processed it is, no matter how far we try to remove ourselves from the way it was produced.’

  ‘Shut up,’ I
said again, through clenched teeth.

  I couldn’t bear the way his logic and his arguments were sweeping over me, washing away my thoughts before I’d even formed them.

  ‘OK,’ said Dad, sitting back on his chair. ‘Think about it for a while, son, but remember, we break trail tomorrow and I need to know if you are going to come with us or if you are going to stay at home with Leah.’

  Matulik’s wife wasn’t going because she had arthritis and needed to keep warm.

  ‘I don’t want to think about it any more,’ I said. ‘Thinking is doing my head in. I’ll come, OK? OK? I’ll come!’

  I didn’t really want to go, but I couldn’t imagine spending several days in a half-empty village trying to make small talk with Leah and the other old people, who would be staying at home to mind the youngest children, and a few other people who would have to stay in the village to keep the shop open and the generator running. Everyone else, all the village whaling crews, along with their wives and the older girls and boys, would have gone to the camp. That’s really why I went in the end, because I couldn’t decide to stay away. I wasn’t proud of my decision, though.

  Whaling

  The next day, almost the whole village got ready to break trail to the place they were going to set up the whaling camp, near where the leads were in the ice. The ice doesn’t break up conveniently close to the land. It’s often twenty or thirty miles out to sea that the leads form, and the whaling crews have to travel out on the sea ice to wherever it is. Helicopters are very useful for spotting the best places, but there isn’t room in a chopper for the whole crew, so they have to follow along on foot or by snowmobile, carrying all the camping and whaling equipment.

  They call it breaking trail, and I began to see why. You do literally have to break a path for yourself across the ice. The pack ice is not all nice and flat and smooth. Very often big mounds of ice form, great towering, fabulous, glittering, crystalline banks of ice, like hard, sharp hills, and you have to break a way through these ice formations to create a path for the sleds and snowmobiles to get through. Breaking trail is hard work.