Call of the Whales (6 page)

11

Sharing the Whale

A
lready the camp was alive with celebration. The women and girls emerged from the tents, carrying buckets and long knives and tarpaulins, and hurrying to the edge of the ice. The fishy, oily, metallic smell of whale and whale blood filled the air.

Matulik was already ‘ashore’ on the ice, and he and his crew members were working at an enormous winch they had set up as near as they dared to the edge of the ice. Members of other crews hurried to join them, to help with the work of bringing the whale ashore.

As the men worked, the sky started to pinken again, and all through the spreading blush of dawn Matulik’s whaling crew and the other men worked the ropes and the winch and tackle. We boyers hurriedly cut lumps out of the ice with our snow knives, to melt down for water, and we made coffee on our little oil stoves for all we were worth. We took it in turn to run with cans of coffee to the edge of the ice and pour it steaming into mugs for the men as they worked.

They were glad of it, as much for the chance to warm
their hands, slippery with blood and ice and cold, as for the drink itself, and we were thrilled with the chance to get close to the action, even for a few moments.

We couldn’t stand around for long, though, watching the men at their hauling and winching, for our job was still to man the camp and keep at bay any curious bears that might wander by, by banging saucepan lids and waving torches. Just because our crew had – miraculously – landed a whale on our very first night at camp, it was no excuse for us to leave our posts and gather round the catch.

All through the dawn the men worked, my dad among them, to raise the whale out of the water. The rising sun gilded their bodies, so that they looked, from our vantage point at the edge of the camp, like some sort of shining gods landed down on the ice to direct operations – rather squat gods, it has to be admitted, bundled in their hooded parkas and with their polar-bearskin leggings and long leather boots.

By the time the sun was high in the sky, the whale had been hauled out of the sea and lowered onto the ice bank and the butchering was about to begin. I ran forward, grabbing a coffee-pot as my excuse, to see the magnificent animal while it was still intact, with just a rivulet of blood running down from its huge, grimacing mouth, and congealing on the icy floor.

My eyes filled with unexpected tears. All these months bowheads had lived in my imagination, and now here I was looking at one for the first time – but it was dead. Sadness possessed me, and I turned away from the sight of the poor, destroyed beast.

‘I’ll have a swig,’ said one of the men, thrusting an enamel mug under the spout of my coffee pot.

I stared at him. It took a moment to register that he wanted coffee.

‘Oh!’ I said, and took the cup from him.

There was blood on the handle, but I grasped it firmly, to counteract the shake in my hand, and poured the coffee, black and acrid, and thrust it towards the whaler. Then I ran back to the camp, bashing my face with my arm as I ran, pretending I wasn’t soaking up tears.

Children swarmed over the dead whale, now, singing and flinging their arms about, as if they had caught it themselves. Some of the mothers were taking photographs of the kids dancing on the whale, and the men were out with measuring tapes, trying to work out how long the whale was.

But soon the merrymaking had to let up because the work of the butchering had to begin. They cut a huge belt of meat from behind the head of the whale and divided it up into portions to be shared by the village families. This first cut of meat, from what they call the captain’s belt, has to be given away. Everyone gets some except the whalers themselves.

‘Why?’ I asked Henry.

It seemed to me very odd to go to all that trouble to kill a whale and then give away the meat.

‘Because that is the tradition,’ Henry said.

‘Yes, but why?’

‘So that the whalers don’t become greedy, I suppose,’ he said. ‘The whales are for everyone to share. If the whalers took the first meat for themselves, then they would not be sharing. The sharing is the important thing. That’s how our people have always survived. If we didn’t share, we died.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know that.’

That cheered me up a bit.

Soon the chief boyer came by and sent me and Henry to bed. We’d been up all night, though I’d hardly noticed, there’d been so much happening. Now it was the turn of the younger boyers, who had been sent to bed at sunset, to get up and take their turn at the boyers’ work.

It was only when I finally climbed into my sleeping bag that I realised how exhausted I was. It had been a long, exciting, confusing, distressing day and night, and now I needed desperately to sleep. The last thing I thought as I drifted off was that I hoped the younger boyers would be as efficient as we were at scaring off the polar bears. That bloody smell in the air would be sure to attract them.

12

The Igloo

T
he polar bears held off. I don’t know whether it was good luck or the good efforts of the other boyers. Or maybe there were no polar bears at all in that area. Maybe the grown-ups just wanted us to feel important.

I woke up feeling stiff and giddy. I rubbed my eyes with my hands and smelt the smell of stale blood. I looked at my hands. My left hand was smeared still with the dried blood of the whale, which I had picked up off the coffee mug of the whaler I had served. I shuddered. I was implicated in this butchery, whether I liked it or not.

Outside, an impromptu feast was going on. The whalers had taken a break from their butchering work and the women had set up stoves beside the whale and were cooking maktak.

‘What’s that?’ I asked.

‘Whale skin,’ said Matulik, handing me a piece. ‘It’s delicious. You should try some, Tyke.’

I stepped back.

‘No,’ I said, horrified at the idea of eating boiled whale
skin. ‘Anyway, I thought you had to give it away to people not in the crew.’

‘Well, you’re a guest,’ said Matulik, licking his fingers. ‘But anyway, this is maktak, it’s the skin, not the meat. My favourite. You sure you don’ want some?’

But I drew the line at actually eating the whale.

The rest of the day was spent in feasting and celebrating, but also in working. The whale had to be divided up into pieces for distributing to all the village families and for storing in icy cellars, so it could be eaten later in the year. There were several days’ work in that, and even though they had been up all night catching the whale, the crew worked hard all day dealing with their giant catch, the men cutting and butchering, the women packing and labelling. They took it in turns to slip away for a couple of hours’ sleep, but the work never stopped. Meanwhile, Henry and I were back on coffee-duty, and we were kept busy running around the crew with steaming cups.

Matulik and the captains of the other crews had had a meeting, and decided not to stay at the camp and try for a second whale. They were happy with their catch and they didn’t want to run into trouble with the quota people. Some men from the other crews came to help with the butchering. The others set off back to the village to bring news of the success of the hunt and to pass on the message to the neighbouring villages that Matulik’s crew had caught a whale and that none of the village crews would hunt any more, because of the quota. This was in the days before mobile phones, of course.

Meanwhile, a member of one of the other crews was building a snow house.

‘Oh, an igloo!’ I said, remembering ‘I is for igloo’ from my alphabet book when I was small. E is for Eskimo, I thought. And U is for unicorn. Crazy words those alphabet people used, I thought. Xylophone. Yak. Zebra.

‘Yes,’ said Henry. ‘Isaac is the last person in the village to know how to do it properly, like in the old days. We don’t use snow houses much any more, but Isaac likes to build them, and we can use this one to store the whale meat till we’re ready to go back to the village.’

We watched from our coffee-station as Isaac worked, cutting blocks of frozen snow right out of the landscape and shaping them with his snow knife. He worked alone for most of the day, but occasionally other men came and helped. By evening, he had made a beautiful dome-shaped house with a long, low entrance-crawl.

Henry asked him if we could go inside.

‘Well, jus’ for a moment,’ Isaac said, ‘but don’ go foolin’ aroun’, this here’s meant for the whale meat, not for boyers.’

‘We just want to take a look,’ said Henry.

‘And don’ go
breathin’
in there!’ Isaac warned us. ‘You’ll heaten it up if you do.’

‘Does he expect us to hold our breaths?’ I asked Henry.

He laughed. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘He just means not to spend too long in there. Snow houses get very warm once there are people inside for any length of time. But he wants it to be cold, to keep the meat in.’

‘Why not just leave it lying around in the snow, then?’ I asked.

Henry looked at me once again as if I was mad.

‘You want every polar bear in the country to come by and eat our catch?’

‘Oh, yeah, the bears,’ I said, sheepishly.

We wriggled into the snow house on our stomachs. It was cold in the entrance-crawl, and cold inside, just like being in a fridge, and dark too. But it was very still, because we were suddenly sheltered from the endless arctic wind and after a while, being out of the wind, it began to feel quite balmy, in comparison with the constant chill outside. We were insulated from the noise of the butchering also. It was a bit like being in a low, icy cave.

‘You have to imagine a lamp, see,’ said Henry’s voice out of the icy darkness. ‘A whale-oil lamp or a seal-oil lamp.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘because there’s no window.’

‘But mainly for heat,’ said Henry.

‘For heat? A lamp for heat?’

‘Yes, in a snow house, an oil-lamp gives out enough heat to make it really snug.’

‘My,’ I said.

‘I know a story about an igloo,’ Henry said. ‘You want to hear it?’

I didn’t know then that Henry was beginning to earn a reputation as the village storyteller. I suppose that’s the skill he developed in later years when he took up journalism.

I didn’t really want to hear Henry’s story. I wanted to get out of that cold, eerie little building. But I thought I’d better listen. It was the sort of thing my dad would probably want to know, so I said, ‘OK.’

‘There was a real bad hunter, see,’ said Henry’s voice out of the dark. ‘He never managed to catch any game. One day when he was out looking for something to hunt,
he spotted a polar bear and he crawled over the ice to try and get it. But the bear said, “Don’t shoot me. If you spare my life and do as I say, I will make you a great hunter.”

‘The bear told the man to climb on his back and close his eyes, and then the bear dived down into the sea, with the hunter on his back, down, down, down into the depths.

‘Then they swam back up again, and landed on another shore, where there was an igloo at the edge of the ice. Inside the igloo was another bear with a spear stuck into his haunch. The first bear said, “If you take that spear out of my friend, you will become a good hunter.” And so the hunter broke off the shaft and eased the spear point out of the bear’s haunch.

‘Then the first bear took off his bearskin parka and turned into a man. After the other bear’s wound was healed, the bear-man put back on his bearskin parka, told the poor hunter to climb on his back and close his eyes, and back they went down into the sea again.

‘When they came out of the sea and the hunter opened his eyes, he was back where he had started from. And from that day on, the man was always a good hunter.’

‘Hey, I’ve heard a story like that,’ I said, ‘only it was a deer, not a bear.’

‘An Irish story?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do your people hunt?’

‘Not any more,’ I said. ‘In the past, I suppose, they hunted deer for food. But nowadays, we don’t believe in hunting in Ireland.’

‘What do you mean, you don’t believe in it?’ asked Henry.

‘I mean, we don’t like to kill wild animals.’

What a whopper! I’d very conveniently omitted to mention fox-hunting.

‘Only tame ones? Like, pets? Animals you
know
?’ Henry sounded shocked.

‘Well, farm animals,’ I said. ‘It’s not the same.’

‘Hmm,’ said Henry. ‘I don’t see that.’

I felt uncomfortable, as if I was lying. I wasn’t exactly, but I wasn’t being honest either. We were all in this killing business together, but I wasn’t prepared to admit it.

‘It’s wrong to kill whales,’ I said sanctimoniously.

‘Why?’ Henry sounded completely mystified.

‘Whales have families. They love each other.’

‘All animals have families,’ said Henry. ‘All creatures love their young. But we gotta live.’

I hated Henry then, just as I’d resented my father, for being right. But I didn’t have the energy to fight, so I changed the subject.

‘Let’s get out, Henry. We’re breathing too much.’

‘Right,’ said Henry. ‘And we have to get after them polar bears.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’