Call of the Whales

by Siobhán Parkinson

  He wiped his streaming face with the handkerchief and then he held it out to me.

  ‘Yuck!’ I said, and pulled away from it.

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ he said with half a smile.

  He trailed the hanky in the water, wrung it out and wiped his face with it again. He bunched the wet hanky up then and threw it in the bottom of the boat.

  ‘That’s better,’ Henry said, and picked up a paddle.

  ‘You OK?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ll live,’ he said and leant over the side of the boat to help me manoeuvre it away from the ice floe. We paddled furiously, but without co-ordination, and so instead of moving the boat away from the island, we rammed it back against the edge of the ice with double-force, and, with a sickening scrunch, the prow of the boat wedged itself into a crevice in the ice and we were stuck fast.

  Henry pushed against the ice with his paddle, but the boat wouldn’t budge. I leant over and we both pushed and heaved with all our might, but we didn’t have much strength left between us, and the umiaq had embedded itself in the ice. It wouldn’t give an inch.

  ‘What’ll we do?’ I wailed. My teeth were chattering now, with fear as much as cold, and my body was shaking from the efforts I was making to shift the boat.

  ‘One of us is going to have to get off the umiaq and back onto the ice floe,’ said Henry, ‘and use the paddle to lever the boat away from the ice.’

  ‘Not me,’ I said quickly. I knew my own limits. I’d probably slip, I’d probably fall into the water, I’d probably die. I knew what a spill into the arctic waters could do. I could feel the pain of the freezing water gripping my limbs without so much as a splash getting on my skin.

  ‘Me then,’ said Henry.

  I stared at him, and he stared back. I couldn’t see how he was going to muster either the strength or the courage to get back off the boat, having just made it aboard. I’d have cowered in the boat and refused to move.

  ‘But it’s moving!’ My voice was thin and high with anxiety. I couldn’t believe this was happening to us, that my dad and Henry’s dad were less than a quarter of a mile away and here we were going to be lost at sea.

  ‘Yup,’ said Henry, his eyes scrunched up in concentration. ‘Still, that’s the only way we can get the umiaq loose. Otherwise we’re going to drift off all the way to the North Pole.’

  Something about the idea of the North Pole froze my heart. I imagined a maypole, spiralling red and white like a barber’s pole, and me and Henry slumped at the bottom of it, waiting for a polar bear to come along and gobble us both up.

  Henry stood up unsteadily and then, with a sudden spurt of energy, he leapt off the boat and back onto the ice floe. He stood on the ice floe again and kicked the edge of the umiaq with all his force. Nothing happened. He kicked again and again, and then he prised his paddle into the crevice and at last, with a groan, the boat released itself and bobbed out, away from the ice. Henry took another flying leap and landed in the boat as it floated away. There was another awful moment as the boat rocked and rocked and rocked, steadying itself from the impact of Henry’s leap, but it settled as it had before. Henry lay slumped against the side of the boat for a while, gathering his strength.

  ‘You OK?’ I asked again.

  He nodded wearily, then sat up straight and picked up a paddle.

  With two of us paddling, the umiaq moved more swiftly and in a perceptible direction. I felt my heart begin to lift as the shore came closer. We were going to survive. It was only when I thought that, that I fully realised how close we had come to not surviving. I looked at Henry, and he was looking at me.

  ‘Hey, Henry,’ I said again.

  ‘Hey, Tyke,’ he said and grinned.

  But we weren’t home yet. We still had an expanse of water to cross, with only a flimsy boat between us and the freezing ocean. We paddled away for a bit, saying nothing, concentrating on keeping the boat moving.

  I looked over the edge into the water and thought about how many miles down it was to the depthless bottom and how many tons of water were under the boat, and as I looked, a shadow nudged by, a huge, huge shadow, like a submarine only much swifter and more graceful.

  ‘Henry,’ I said, in as low a voice as I thought he could hear. ‘There’s a whale on this side of the boat. It’s close enough to touch.’

  I remember thinking as I said that, that this was the realisation of my dreams, to be within touching distance of a bowhead whale. I never thought I ever would be, and I certainly never thought that if I was, I would be alone on the ocean with another boy in a skin boat and in danger of being capsized at any moment by a casual flick of the whale’s tail.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Henry, his voice also low, hardly more than a whisper, ‘there’s one on this side too. But whatever you do, don’t touch it, Tyke. Pull your paddle in.’

  I didn’t need to be told a second time. I drew my paddle in as calmly and quietly as I could, and we both sat huddled together, our paddles dripping ice-cold sea-water onto the flat floor of the boat. We sat silently, drifting casually, like two people out for a little leisurely boating and taking a break from the hard work of making the craft move, but knowing that we were in danger of being flicked over at any moment. Even if we didn’t drown, we would probably die of hypothermia if we hit the water and down our bodies would go, cold and twirling, to the bottom of the sea. I shuddered at the thought.

  We practically held our breaths, allowing the air to escape from our bodies only very slowly and quietly, desperate to make ourselves invisible, inaudible, not there. Occasionally a whale breached, its huge body suddenly ungainly out of the water, lumbering as a hippopotamus. One whale let out its giant blow so close that we were both drenched in the warm, salty, fishy mist of its breath, and we could hear its soft whining calls, as if it was talking, complaining, to itself. But still we sat motionless in our boat, and waited for all the whales to swim by.

  They kept coming, pod after pod of them, with short gaps in between, swishing and flickering, always avoiding the boat, though they swam very near to it. It was as if they were aware it was there, and they were swimming around the obstruction it caused on the surface. We could see the swift movements of their tails as they swam, displacing the water and propelling them forward, and occasionally we saw a whale nose an ice floe out of the way.

  Still they came, and still we sat, and the sky started to get that flushed look I now knew was the beginning of the sunset. My shoulders ached, partly with the effort of paddling, but mostly with the effort of sitting still. My feet were like two overgrown ice cubes slithering about in the bilge-water on the floor of the boat. And still we sat and still the whales swam by.

  At last, they passed on, but even after we ceased to see the great underwater shadows and to hear their whines and soft screeches, we sat still for a long time, just in case, in the air that seemed to reverberate with the whales’ yearning hoots even after they’d swum out of earshot.

  Henry shifted beside me and expelled a long, sighing outbreath. He stretched then and picked up his paddle. I did the same, and soon we were moving to the shore again, our aching limbs urging the boat forward as the sky deepened.

  ‘Wasn’t that …’ I cast about for a word. ‘Scary’ came to mind, but although it had been scary, that wasn’t the word I wanted. ‘… weird?’ I finished, though ‘weird’ wasn’t really the word I wanted either.

  ‘Weird,’ said Henry. ‘Almost … what’s that word? Mystical.’

  A little shiver went through me when he said it. That was the word I’d wanted, but I’d probably have been embarrassed to say it even if I could have thought of it.

  I nodded, but then the spell was broken and I laughed. It was all too much, and we needed to break the terrible tension.

  ‘Verrry myshticle,’ I said, exaggerating my Irish accent. ‘Verry, verry myshticle indeed. That was a very myshticle shower of whale blow, wasn’t it. Myshticle and mishty, ahh!’

  Henry laughed too and his shoulders shook.
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br />   We laughed, but then we were only boys. We didn’t know how to talk about it, but we knew it was true. It had been mystical.

  We paddled on for a bit, and then I said: ‘I wouldn’t blame them if they’d killed us.’

  ‘Who?’ asked Henry.

  ‘The whales.’

  ‘Why would they want to kill us?’

  ‘Because we killed one of them.’

  ‘Yes, but that was a hunt,’ said Henry. ‘We didn’t kill the whale out of anger.’

  ‘What difference does that make? You kill it, it’s dead.’

  ‘All the difference. If we were fighting the whales, if we were killing them for fun or because we wanted to get rid of them, then they would be angry. But when we hunt, we pray for the whale, we ask the whale to give itself up to feed the people. We release its spirit. There’s no need for anger. That’s just how things are. The whales know that.’

  He sounded very sure of himself, but I couldn’t agree. How could the whales know a thing like that? It didn’t make any sense. And I noticed that for all his talk, Henry had been just as anxious as I was not to disturb the whales when they swam near our boat. But I didn’t argue. I just kept paddling.

  ‘Like the bear in the story,’ Henry added.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The bear in the story. The story is about how the people and the animals help each other.’

  Yes, but that’s a fairytale, I thought to myself, but I didn’t say so out loud.

  We made much better progress with the umiaq now that there were two of us and pretty soon the ice shore seemed reachable. There were figures standing about on the ice, watching us. They seemed to be getting umiaqs ready to come out to meet us, but I think when they saw that we were making good progress, they held back. As we came closer, I saw that two of the people were my dad and Henry’s dad and they had a pair of binoculars that they kept passing from one to the other. When they could see us getting closer, they started punching each other encouragingly on the upper arms and hallooing and roaring and waving their arms at us.

  ‘How on earth did you manage an umiaq on your own?’ asked Dad, as he put out his hand to help me ashore.

  ‘I have … absolutely … no idea,’ I said, putting my foot on ‘dry land’. The words came out like washing from a wringer, all stretched and squeezed. It seemed to hurt my chest to talk.

  That’s the last thing I remember, my dad’s hand under my elbow and my feet touching the pack ice. My dad said I collapsed at his feet. Exhaustion, he said. I don’t think so. I think it was sheer relief.

  The Whale Feast

  I don’t remember the next bit, because I was out of it, but Dad and Henry told me what happened. I went all floppy, Dad said, so they had to give me brandy – they forced it between my lips – and make a stretcher out of whale bones and sleeping bags and put me on it and drag me back over the ice, semi-conscious and hallucinating, on a sled. But I recovered pretty quickly once I got warmed up and got something to eat and drink.

  Now I was sitting up in bed, wriggling my toes in a pair of deliciously warm furry socks Leah had made me put on.

  ‘Dad,’ I said, ‘Mum …’

  ‘… doesn’t need to hear about this, right?’

  ‘Right. It would only …’

  ‘… worry her, I know.’

  It didn’t strike me at the time, but Dad was just as quick to hide my adventures from Mum as I was. Maybe he thought she’d think he wasn’t looking after me properly.

  ‘Well,’ Dad said then, ‘I think Turaq would be proud of you.’

  ‘Turaq?’ I said groggily.

  ‘Turaq. Remember Turaq?’

  ‘Of course I remember Turaq. The guy with the parka. Said nothing much. Saved my life.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Dad. ‘Like you saved Henry’s.’

  I thought for a while about that. It sounded very grand.

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘Of course you did.’ Dad beamed at me and gave me a quick hug, quick enough so I couldn’t squirm out of it. ‘You saved his life, and you risked your own life to do it. You were very brave.’

  Brave? Me? Brave? Maybe I was, I thought, maybe I had saved Henry’s life. Yes, I suppose I must have. You did hear stories about hunters being taken out to sea on break-off ice floes and never being heard of again. I was glad that hadn’t happened to Henry. I liked him.

  ‘So it’s like what Turaq’s grandma said,’ I said.

  ‘Exactly,’ Dad agreed.

  Henry told us later what had happened. He’d gone walking close to the edge of the ice and he’d got engrossed in watching some whales out to sea, and before he knew it, the section of the ice he was standing on broke away and floated off out across the water. He thought at first he might leap off and make it to the shore, but suddenly the channel between him and the shore widened, and he had no chance of jumping. He thought about swimming, but he figured water would be dangerously cold. He knew how quickly hypothermia could set in. So, while he dithered about what to do, the ice floe got caught in a current and picked up speed, and before he knew it, he was practically out to the open sea.

  ‘I don’ know,’ Henry said in his droll way when he called by to visit. ‘I’m the one got stranded on the ice floe and you’re the one gettin’ all the attention. What you gotta do to get noticed round here? – Oh, I know. Collapse.’

  ‘No,’ I said indignantly. ‘You’ve got to be a hero.’

  ‘Oh, so you a hero, then?’

  ‘Of course I am,’ I said. ‘Tiger Tyke the Life-Saver, that’s me!’

  ‘Well, I suppose I have to admit you did save my life. You can call that being a hero if you like. Some people think the village’d be better off without dreamers like me.’

  ‘Are you fishing for compliments?’ I asked, ‘or are you just running yourself down to make out I’m not a hero?’

  ‘Umm,’ said Henry. ‘I’m not sure. But if it makes you feel better, thanks for saving my life.’

  ‘You don’t sound very sincere,’ I said.

  ‘What you want, I gotta lick your mukluks?’

  ‘No. Just make me a nice cup of tea, maybe.’

  ‘You and your tea! You’re a tea-addict, you know that? But OK, life-saver, only then you get up. We’re going to have the whale feast soon. You can’t miss that.’

  The whale feast happened after the whaling crews all came home and the meat was distributed, first among the villagers in general, and then among the crew that took the whale. Every family got enough so they had meat to put in the ice for eating in the winter when food was scarcer. But not all the meat was stored for later. Some of it was eaten fresh, at the whale feast, which was held in Matulik’s house, because it was Matulik’s crew that caught the whale. I was still feeling bad about the poor bowhead whale, and I’d rather not have gone to the whale feast, but I didn’t really have a choice. It was pretty unavoidable, given that we were living in Matulik’s house.

  I have to admit that I did try just a little of the meat at the feast, but I didn’t like it. The local people all thought it was the most delicious thing they’d ever eaten. They ate every bit of it, even the blubber. I felt ill looking at the greyish-yellowish wobbly stuff. They laughed at me for not liking it, but I was kind of glad that I didn’t enjoy it. I felt it was more principled of me not to like whale meat, considering how I felt about the whales.

  The Story of Sedna

  Dad got talking to Henry. He’d found out that Henry was well known in the village for his stories. Henry’s grandfather had told him some of the old tales and a lot about the old way of life, before he died, and he’d told Henry it was up to him to remember, so that the next generation of people would still have the stories. To me it was pretty obvious why the grandfather had told the stories to Henry – because he was the biggest chatterbox this side of the Arctic Circle, and so it was a good bet that he’d pass the stories on.

  Dad said the stories Henry had were already known to anthropologists, but he said he wa
s still interested in hearing Henry’s versions of them and talking to him about what he thought the stories meant. So when Henry said, one day after the whale feast, that he wanted to tell me the most important story about whales and whaling, I asked if I could call Dad.

  It was evening time, and I’d already gone to bed when Henry called round, but I wasn’t asleep. So Henry sat at

  the foot of my bed and said he’d tell me his story, since I was all tucked in for the night.

  Henry was delighted when I said I wanted Dad to hear the story too, though he pretended not to be. He said, ‘Aw, if you have to,’ when I asked, but I could see that his mouth had turned up at the ends. He couldn’t hide it. So I yelled for Dad, and Dad came in and sat on his bed, which was a campbed and lower down than mine – I had the proper bed, belonging to Matulik’s son – and we both listened.

  ‘Once there was a beautiful girl called Sedna,’ said Henry. ‘She lived with her father, and she was old enough to be married, but she didn’t fancy any of the young men who came to woo her. She thought she was too beautiful for them. She was waiting for an exceptionally handsome young lover to come and claim her, but he never came.’

  I giggled at this bit, and Henry glowered, so I sobered up and listened.

  ‘Time and time again she turned down the men who came to her camp wishing to marry her. In the end, her father got tired of her choosiness. It was time she had a husband. They were running out of food, and if she didn’t find a husband to take care of her, they were going to die of hunger. So he decided that he would make her marry the next man who came looking for her. Sedna just brushed her beautiful long, midnight-black hair and ignored her father.

  ‘Soon her father saw a man approaching their camp. He was dressed in fabulous, wealthy-looking furs, with his rich, furry hood drawn right up around his face. Here was just the man for his daughter, Sedna’s father thought, so he offered Sedna to the wealthy-looking man.

  ‘“She is beautiful,” he assured him, “and she is a good worker. She can cook and sew and she will make a good wife.”