The Final Frontiersman

by James Campbell

  The Russian Otto von Kotzebue was the next European, or laluramka (literally, “people from the bearded clan”), to explore the island— in 1816—but he was similarly unmoved. Judging its commercial potential to be almost nothing, he, too, sailed on, leaving the island to its isolation until American whalers discovered in the waters off the island one of the last great populations of bowhead whales, or aghvook.

  Both fashion and necessity fueled the pursuit of the bowhead. Baleen from the bowhead’s jawbone was used to produce a fiberglasslike material that was used in upholstery, umbrellas, women’s skirt hoops and corset stays, and carriage wheels and springs, and whale blubber provided lighting oil for a booming population. A bowhead was worth its weight in gold, $10,000 per whale. In the second half of the nineteenth century, whalers rushed north—they would leave Hawaii in spring and follow the melting ice pack—and the western Arctic became the country’s most profitable whaling grounds and the scene of colossal butchery. In a forty-year period, more than 3,000 voyages were made.

  The whalers soon discovered that the islanders were enthusiastic traders. The whalers traded rifles, shotguns, whaling guns, gunpowder and ammunition, tobacco, matches, molasses, and whiskey for walrus ivory, baleen, fur, and women. When the bottom dropped out of the whale oil market, whalers headhunted, taking only the bowhead jawbones, and leaving their headless corpses to rot in the sea. Whalers also killed hundreds of thousands of walrus for their skin, blubber, and ivory tusks. The two mammals revered by the Eskimos of St. Lawrence Island, on which they had depended for thousands of years for food, shelter, and clothing, were quickly disappearing from their waters. By the mid-1870s, disease (flu, measles, syphilis), famine, drunkenness, and a rash of bad weather conspired against the islanders. Between 1878 and 1880, St. Lawrence Island lost two-thirds of its population, leaving all but two of its eight original villages—Gambell and Pugughileq (Southwest Cape)—completely decimated. On an island for which the sea had always provided, the period came to be known as the Great Starvation. Accessible game was scarce and once-heroic hunters sold their seal nets and hunting guns for alcohol. Historian Dorothy Jean Ray, in her book The Eskimos of Bering Strait, 1650-1898, claims that the Eskimos “drank excessively from the first sip of liquor.” She writes that they enjoyed it as a stimulant and also used it as a temporary escape from the strict behavioral codes that governed Eskimo life. Even the hunters who abstained from alcohol met with disaster. They were thwarted by fierce winds, which prevented them from reaching their hunting grounds by foot or by boat. Many died of exposure attempting to find food. Some took chances on thin ice and fell through and drowned. When a hunter did successfully kill an animal, he was often too weak with hunger and disease to carry it home. People were forced to boil and eat their walrus tents and eat their dogs and skin ropes. Only 300 islanders remained by 1890. By the early 1900s, when the price of baleen climbed so high that steel carriage springs were being used instead of baleen the whalers fled the Arctic in search of new waters, the bowhead numbers having been reduced to 3,000, one-tenth of its prewhaling population.

  By the time Heimo reached St. Lawrence Island in early December 1975, the Bering Sea had rebounded, and Heimo was hunting regularly on the pack ice with Herman Toolie. Despite Herman’s expertise, venturing far out onto the ice was always a calculated gamble. In March 1977, that gamble nearly cost Heimo and Herman their lives.

  Heimo and Herman were two miles out on the ice. They’d each shot young bearded seals and were dragging the one hundred-pound animals behind them when Herman signaled for Heimo to stop. “Wait!” Herman said, and Heimo knew immediately that something was wrong. Herman yelled, “Ohook! Hurry. Black smoke. Open water.” Then Herman began to sprint, his eight-foot hunting stick in one hand and the rope, which was tied through a hole cut into the seal’s jaw, in the other. Heimo followed, but he was unable to keep up. Herman was small and agile, and he was used to navigating the uneven ice. A quarter of a mile from shore, Heimo discovered Herman waiting for him. The south wind had broken up the shore-fast ice. Their only hope was to jump.

  Heimo clutched his hunting stick and his rope and shadowed Herman. Herman jumped from ice floe to ice floe, and Heimo followed. But Herman quickly outdistanced him. Negotiating the ice floes was something Herman had done since he was a young boy. It was how the boys of the village challenged each other—like Heimo and his friends jumping trains. It was a game of courage and balance. Where the shore-fast ice split into small floes, the boys hopped from one floe to another to see which of them was the bravest, the most sure-footed.

  As Heimo neared the shore, he shuddered when he saw the open water that separated the sheets of ice. Concentrate, he thought to himself. Left, right, left, then drive the knee and spring. It was as if he were diving back in high school again. Herman, who had already made it safely onto the shore-fast ice, saw the floes parting and shouted to Heimo, “Ohook! Ohook!” Heimo made one jump and then another. Before he knew it, he was in the water, the weight of the seal nearly dragging him under. He struggled onto the floe, clawing at the ice for a grip. Then he lay on his belly, trying to catch his breath. He didn’t have the strength for another jump. He couldn’t make it. “Heimo!” Herman yelled. “Hurry.” Heimo fought to get to his knees, and then he stood. Hand over hand, he tugged at the seal rope until he pulled the seal onto the ice floe. Herman was still shouting for him to hurry. Heimo could see it, too. If he waited any longer, the floe would be too far from the shore-fast ice for him to make it.

  Heimo had only one more jump to make. He ran across the ice floe and hurled himself into the air. He hit the shore-fast ice, but the seal rope snapped taut and yanked him back into the water. Terrifed, Heimo struggled to reach Herman’s outstretched hand. “Leave the seal,” Herman screamed, but Heimo didn’t hear a word. When Herman finally pulled Heimo onto the ice, to safety, Heimo’s rifle was still slung across his shoulder and he still clung to the seal rope. In his panic he’d forgotten to let go.

  Whaling was as dangerous as hunting on the pack ice, but still Heimo was eager for the experience. He was a cat with nine lives and had a growing sense that this was all part of his destiny.

  The only problem was that on St. Lawrence Island men went whaling in family groups, and outsiders were not welcome. By March 1978, Heimo had given up all hope of ever seeing a bowhead hunt firsthand. He might have been welcome on Herman Toolie’s brother’s boat, but that boat was already full. The chance of making it onto another crew was almost nil.

  One night, while almost every family in Savoonga was glued to its television set, Heimo was out walking. Television had come to the island only recently, and the entire village was obsessed with The Six Million Dollar Man, which the people called the Bionic Man. For Heimo, who didn’t enjoy TV, the arrival of television was a curse. “People stopped visiting,” he says. “It was hard to get them away from it. They watched for the sake of watching even though many of them didn’t understand a word.”

  Nathan Noongwook was out walking that night, too. Nathan was the captain of a whaling boat. When he was a boy, his father told him how the whale hunt was once preceded by a period called Eghqwaaq, when villagers held ceremonies and sang songs of entreaty, asking Apa to ensure their hunting success. St. Lawrence Islanders no longer held the ceremonies though, so Nathan was out, while everyone else huddled around a televison set, engaged in his own private conversation with God.

  Heimo and Nathan exchanged greetings. Nathan mentioned that he was short a man on his whaling crew, and with the season approaching, he was willing to break with tradition. He asked Heimo if he would like to join his crew. Nathan explained that he would be nothing more than a paddler and a float thrower—after striking the whale, hunters threw out plastic buoys to keep the whale from diving and to slow its flight. Both responsibilitites, however, were essential. In 1978, the International Whaling Commission, concerned about dwindling bowhead whale populations, took over management of the Eskimo bowhead whale hunt and decided t
o cancel it. When the Barrow, Alaska, Eskimos protested and staged a hunt, other Eskimo communities followed suit. The IWC eventually conceded, setting kill and strike limits for each village. The Eskimos bridled at the quota. They argued, but to no avail, that the impact of their hunting was insignificant. To miss only one strike now could be the difference between a season’s success and failure. Nathan explained this to Heimo. Heimo was hardly listening though. He could hardly believe his good fortune.

  Pursuing an animal that can reach sixty feet long and sixty tons in weight in a boat made of walrus hide is perhaps the world’s most dangerous endeavor. The hunt begins unremarkably. Using binoculars, hunters glass the open water, waiting to catch sight of a blow. Sometimes they sit for days, napping or busying themselves drinking tea, telling stories, and playing cards. But after a whale is sighted breaking the surface of the water and the “Puhhh!” is heard, the unmistakable expulsion of air, the men fly into action. They board the angyaqs. If the wind is right, they immediately hoist the sail. If the wind is poor, they paddle vigorously, but silently, in order not to spook the whale.

  Once in pursuit, the success of the hunt, at least until the boat is virtually on top of the whale, is entirely up to the captain. He has to negotiate the menacing ice floes and follow the leads, which are at times miles wide and at others are nothing more than narrow channels, while still trying to keep the whale in sight. It is a feat of maneuvering a constantly changing course that puts a captain’s skills to their ultimate test. What a captain also has to do is keep his bearings, even far out at sea, when the fog rolls in, so he can eventually make it back to land. Compasses are nearly useless, since a captain is changing course too often to take frequent readings. Out at sea, a captain reads the wind and the currents. Apart from these guides, he relies on years of experience and an intuitive understanding of where the island lies.

  To encounter a bowhead whale is to learn what fear is. Using its huge head, reinforced with cartilage, as a battering ram, it is able to plow a path through thick pack ice. Yet in order for the striker to make his throw, the captain must be able to maneuver his angyaq within fifteen feet of the beast. At that distance, the whale looks as big as a battleship. You can feel it move through the water, see the whale’s shiny black skin, smell it, and practically choke on its stink. A mere flick of its tail can crush a boat, sending the entire crew plunging into icy waters and to a near-certain death.

  At fifteen feet, the striker stands poised in front of the boat, holding tightly to the harpoon bomb lance gun that hasn’t changed since Captain Ebenezer Pierce invented it in the late 1800s. Prior to the harpoon bomb lance gun, or darting gun, which is equipped with a fifteen-inch, pencil-shaped brass bomb packed with dynamite, Eskimo whalers used ivory-or slate-tipped harpoons. Once the whale was harpooned, sealskin floats were used to keep it near the surface of the water so it could be harpooned again and again until, eventually, it bled to death. But with the darting gun Eskimo hunters could harpoon the whale while simultaneously shooting it with a dynamite bomb.

  When the village of Savoonga was established as a reindeer camp, no one thought about its potential as a whaling site. For decades the men of Savoonga joined the people of Gambell in their pursuit of the bowhead. However, in the early 1970s, with the introduction of the snowmachine, the people of Savoonga, who had long been disappointed with their share of the catch, began their own tradition.

  Sixty-five miles from Savoonga, located on the island’s southwest cape, was an old village called Pugughileq. Pugughileq was a midden of whale bones, bleached a chalk white by the sun, on which the villagers once hung and dried their seal nets. Here the men of Savoonga built rough plywood shacks, heated with oil stoves during the April bowhead hunt.

  “Whaling is a lot of waiting,” Heimo recalls. “I sat next to Nathan—he was the captain—on a hill that looked south. Nathan glassed the open water and watched the wind. He was hoping for a north wind to clear out the ice, so we could chase the whales. He saw a few whales blow, but the wind was out of the southwest and we were locked in by ice. While we waited, Nathan told me that Eskimos were the world’s greatest travelers. He said that an Eskimo discovered the moon by building a ladder of driftwood to it. The only thing he couldn’t figure out was why he didn’t leave behind a sealskin flag to show the world that an Eskimo was there first.”

  Heimo was astounded by Nathan’s ability to stay awake. With fifteen hours of light, the old man glassed tirelessly. Before he finally surrendered to sleep, he joked with Heimo that he slept, always, “with one eye open.”

  The men waited three-quarters dressed, hoping for a favorable wind and Nathan’s cry. They waited for three days, and then finally it came. He had sighted a whale—“Aghvook!” Forty men were ready to go in a matter of minutes. Nathan climbed into the stern of the angyaq. “Oooohooo kkk!” he yelled. “One, two, three!” Heimo and six other men ran alongside the thirty-foot angyaq, pushing it like bobsledders across the ice on its ivory runners. Then, as if they’d been training for this moment for years, the hunters simultaneously leaped into the boat when Nathan barked out the k of “Ohook!” Their timing was perfect, literally flawless. It was as if the men were joined together by some invisible thread. But Heimo jumped late, preoccupied with the spectacle, determined not to miss a detail. The men had already grabbed their paddles and were lunging at the water like racers when Heimo cleared the gunwales. Heimo took his paddle, stroked twice, and then noticed Nathan motion to one of the men to raise the sail. It was less an order than a gesture, a slight nod of the head, like a buyer bidding on a steer at a cattle auction. The sail caught the wind, and the men fell silent.

  Nathan negotiated a narrow lead, and then the ocean opened up. When the whale blew again—“Puhhh!”—half a mile out, it was electrifying. Heimo heard the man next to him, Nathan’s sixteen-year-old nephew, draw in a long breath, as if to suppress a desire to yell out loud. Heimo’s whole body trembled, his muscles tensed. The angyaq covered the half mile quickly, and then Heimo saw the whale, swimming languidly, unaware that it was being pursued. No one moved now except for the striker, who drew his arm back. The thirty-ton bowhead was only twenty feet from the boat.

  “Shit,” Heimo says, “it was the scariest thing I ever felt. Aghvook—the word kept speeding through my head. Aghvook, Aghvook. I tasted blood or something in the back of my mouth. That metallic taste.”

  Then the striker struck. Seconds later the bomb exploded, and Heimo felt the whale shudder. It was furious now, flailing in the water. Heimo was ready to throw the float until he saw that the harpoon had not stuck.

  Only seconds after Heimo realized this, another angyaq was over the whale. He saw the striker throw the harpoon and felt the bomb go off and saw the whale shudder again. The whale tried to dive, racing for the ice, but it was too badly hurt. The harpoon had stuck this time, and the throwers tossed out their floats. The whale drifted toward the surface of the water and made a halfhearted attempt to escape, but its blow had turned to blood. When the Yankee whalers saw blood spitting out of the whale’s blowhole, they’d exclaim, “The chimney’s on fire!” knowing that the whale was as good as dead.

  Nathan’s radio crackled at full volume now. The other boats, angyaqs and aluminum skiffs, which would haul the whale to shore, had been alerted, and they were speeding to the site. When the last boat arrived, the whale turned belly up, and everyone cheered. They’d gotten their whale and they still had one strike left.

  Ropes were fastened to the whale and the boats worked together to tow it in. When they arrived back at camp, Heimo couldn’t believe his eyes. Half of Savoonga, it seemed, had been radioed and turned out to see the hunters and their catch. Anyone with a working snowmachine had made the sixty-five-mile trip. Heimo watched as two men from the boat that had delivered the final, deadly strike climbed on top of the whale and began to cut off huge slabs of mungtuk (whale skin with a layer of blubber) with long, twelve-foot, ulu-shaped knives. The juicy, black-and-white mungtuk wa
s then divided among the people.

  In mid-January of 1981, en route to his cabin on the Coleen River after spending the holidays in Fort Yukon, Heimo considered telling the bush pilot that he would not be going to St. Lawrence Island in the spring. At the last moment, just before the pilot returned to Fort Yukon, he reconsidered. What the heck, he thought, I’ll go for one last adventure.

  At the end of May 1981, near the end of the walrus’s summer migration north, Heimo joined a group of hunters from Savoonga. Their destination was a prime walrus hunting spot among the spring’s last, large ice floes just northwest of the village of Gambell on the island’s far western shore. They traveled by what was locally known as a “speedboat,” a wooden V hull with an eighty-horse Evinrude engine. The fog was thick when they left Savoonga, so they took a compass bearing—60 miles west-northwest. Five hours later, confused by the absence of any ice floes, they emerged from a fogbank. Heimo knew something was wrong as soon as he saw the mountains. They were the mountains of Siberia along the Chukchi Peninsula, not far from the Siberian coastal town of Provideniia. The coast was close, which meant that they were in Russian waters. They hadn’t compensated enough for the strong southerly currents. Though Heimo had been living largely without news from the ouside world for over four years, he knew enough to realize that this was bad. It was the height of the Cold War, and he and his friends were in Russian waters.

  The severity of the situation dawned on Heimo when a Russian patrol boat gave chase. There were men in the bow of the boat with guns and another man with a bullhorn. Heimo and his friends could either give themselves up or duck back into the fogbank and make a run for it. They chose to run.