A Whale For The Killing (8 page)

“Was that the whale?” I asked in astonishment.

Sim’s intent face wrinkled in puzzlement.

“Never heard no whale blow like that before. But if ’twarn’t he, what do you suppose it were?”

We watched and listened and after a minute or two the sound came again, deep and vibrant; but this time the surface of the Cove remained unbroken. It was four or five minutes later before the whale rose and blew, with no more than his normal whooshing exhalation. Although Sim and I continued to stand there, half frozen, for the better part of an hour, we did not hear that otherworldly sound again. A year was to pass before I would hear it once more and certainly identify it as the voice of the fin whale.

WHILE CLAIRE AND I were away in the winter of 1966–67, the whales’ friends in Burgeo awaited the annual visit of the finners with foreboding. It was common knowledge that 1966 had been a very good year for the Karlsen catchers and that no great whales had been seen “in passage” by any of our local draggers throughout the autumn months. However, during the first week in December, Uncle Art was delighted to discover they had returned.

It was a sadly diminished band—a single family numbering five individuals.

Throughout most of December these five spent their time, as of old, in the runs among the islands; but during Christmas week their quiet occupancy was challenged by several big British Columbia herring seiners. These great steel vacuum cleaners began sucking up the herring with a relentlessness that was terrifying to behold. Working so close to land that they several times swept away nets belonging to local fishermen, they roused the wrath of Burgeo; but the intruders did not care about the nets, the wrath, or about whales either. On one occasion Uncle Art reported seeing a seiner make what looked like a deliberate ramming run at a surfacing finner. If it was deliberate, then it was also foolhardy, since a collision between ship and whale would have been disastrous to both.

The whales did not take to the newcomers. According to Onie and Uncle Art, they seemed uneasy in their presence. This is understandable since seiners and whale catchers are driven by diesel engines that must sound ominously alike.

A few days after the arrival of the seiners, the fin family abandoned the island runs and shifted eastward to a little fjord called The Ha Ha, which not even the insatiable seiners dared enter because of many rocky outcrops that might have damaged their costly nets. The whales stayed close to The Ha Ha and the nearby mouth of Bay de Loup, except when the seiners were absent delivering their catches to the reduction plant at Harbour Breton. It was on one such occasion, when only a single seiner was present, that Uncle Art and I stood on Messers Head and watched the whales demonstrate the superiority of their fishing techniques.

The whales were not alone in The Ha Ha. They shared it with several Burgeo fishermen working cod nets from open boats. When the whales moved in, these men were concerned for the safety of their nets. Two among them, the Hann brothers, Douglas and Kenneth—small, quiet, foxy-faced men from Muddy Hole—even considered moving their gear to some safer ground.

“’Twarn’t as we t’ought they’d tear up our gear a-purpose-like,” Douglas Hann remembered, “but The Ha Ha is a right small place and not much water at the head of she. We t’ought, what with six fleets of nets scattered round, them whales was bound to run foul of some of them... couldn’t help theirselves. Well, sorr, they never did. Sometimes when we’d be hauling a net they’d pass right under the boat close enough you could have scratched their backs with a gaff. First off, when they did that, we used to bang the oars on the side of the boat and yell to make them veer away; but after a time we sees they knowed what they was about, and was going to keep clear without no help from we.

“Still and all, ’twas scary enough betimes. One evening our engine give out. We had the big trap skiff and no thole-pins for the oars so we had to scull her along. It were coming on duckish* and we was alone in The Ha Ha and them whales begun coming up all round. They was only six fathom of water where we was to, and they was after the herring like big black bullets. We could hear the swoosh when they drove by, and foam would fair bile up where they took a big mouthful out of a herring school.

* Meaning dark.

“I’d as soon have been home in me kitchen, I can tell you, but them whales is some smart navigators, for they never come nigh enough to do we any hurt. We was an hour poking our way to the pushthrough what leads into Aldridges Pond, and them whales stayed right along of we. Toward the end of it they give up fishing and just come along like they knowed we was into some kind of a kettle. Ken, he said maybe they was offering we a tow; but I suppose that’s only foolishness.”

What the Hanns told me of their experience reminded me of a story I had heard some years earlier from a very old man at Hermitage Bay, many miles to the eastward. As a youth this man had been employed at a whale factory in Gaultois, on the north shore of Hermitage Bay. His home was five miles across the full breadth of the bay, but on weekends he would row over to spend Sunday with his family.

One Saturday afternoon he was homeward bound when he saw a pod of finners. There were three of them, and they were behaving in a peculiar fashion. Instead of briefly surfacing and then sounding again, they were cruising on the top. Their course converged with his, and as they drew close, my friend saw that they were swimming, as he put it, “shoulder to shoulder.” The centre whale was blowing much more rapidly than the rest and its spray was pink in colour.

“’Twarn’t hard to know what was the trouble,” the old man remembered. “Yon middle whale had been harpooned and the iron had drawed and he’d got clear of the catcher boat. The bomb must have fired, but not deep enough for to kill he.

“I laid back on me oars, not wantin’ to get too handy to them three, but they never minded I... just steamed slow as you please right past me boat, heading down the bay and out to sea. They was close enough so I could near swear the two outside whales was holding up the middle one. I t’inks they done it with their flippers. That’s what I t’inks.

“When they was all clear, I rowed on home. Never t’ought no more about it. About the middle of the week a schooner puts in to Gaultois and the skipper was telling how he come across three whales outside Green Island. They was right on top of the water, he says, and never sounding at all, and making a slow passage to eastward. The skipper, he held over toward they; but when it looked like they was all going to go afoul of one another he had to alter course, for they had no mind to sound no matter what he did. When he passed alongside he saw the middle whale had a girt hole in his back.

“I made certain ’twas the same three I come across and ’twas agreed by all hands ’twas the same whale was harpooned by one of our boats that Sunday morning and got away. They two other whales took the sick one off someplace... some said ’twas to the whales’ burying ground... but all I knows is they kept that sick one afloat somehow for five days, and close onto sixty miles.”

ALDRIDGES POND IS a saltwater enclosure about half a mile in length, and nearly as broad, lying in the centre of the rocky isthmus which separates The Ha Ha from Short Reach. There is a narrow and very shallow “pushthrough” between it and The Ha Ha, passable only by small boats and then only at high water. However, a wider and deeper channel connects the Pond to Short Reach by way of a rather large entry cove. It was the habit of the men who fished The Ha Ha to pass back and forth through Aldridges Pond to save themselves the long and, in dirty weather, dangerous outside run around the head of the peninsula. Each morning at daybreak they would cross Short Reach, enter and cross the Pond, pole through the pushthrough, and set to work hauling their nets in The Ha Ha. In mid-afternoon, when the haul was finished, they would bring their loaded boats back into Aldridges and moor up to the shore in the Pond’s protected waters to gut their catch.

During our years in Burgeo, Claire and I had only once visited Aldridges Pond; but before we had been home two weeks, the Pond became the centre and the setting for an event which was to change our lives.

THE WEATHERMAN WAS PREDICTING A sou’easter for Friday, January 20—the worst kind of storm on the Burgeo coast—and the Hann brothers were in a hurry to get clear of The Ha Ha. Working under a lowering sky with snow squalls flickering around them, they hauled their last net and cleared it shortly after noon. Beating the ice from their homespun mittens, they cranked up their little five-horsepower Atlantic and began chugging homeward toward the pushthrough leading into Aldridges Pond. They had seen no whales all day and, as they cut the engine and began poling the boat through the shallow entrance, Kenneth remarked to his brother that the whales must have heard the weather report too.

“They knows the seiners has sheltered up, I wouldn’t doubt. It’ll be clear fishing for them whales ’mongst the islands.”

“They’s welcome to it,” Douglas replied, with a concerned glance at the ominous overcast.

The Hanns let their boat drift westward across the Pond while they hurriedly gutted the small lot of fish they had caught. Within an hour they were finished. As their boat puttered out through the south channel into the entrance cove which leads to Short Reach, they found themselves bucking a heavy tidal stream that was racing back into the Pond. The old boat swayed and yawed uncertainly back and forth across the channel until Kenneth had to fend her head off with an oar. As he was doing so, he noticed that the water around him was alive with herring.

“Don’t say as I ever see them so thick,” he recalled, “pretty near enough to float our boat on their backs. They was pouring into the Pond like the devil was on their tails. Maybe he was, cause just after we got into Short Reach we see two spouts just abeam of Fish Rock. It looked to we like the whales was having themselves some right good fishing.”

During the previous several days the Hanns had noticed that, despite its almost landlocked nature, Aldridges Pond was becoming increasingly attractive to the herring. They laid this to the fact that, hard-pressed by the seiners, the little fishes were being driven to seek refuge where the ships could not follow. Whatever the reason, the Pond had acquired a dense herring population which seemed to surge in and out with the ebb and flow of the tides.

Despite the ominous forecast, it only blew a “moderate breeze” that night. The anemometer on our roof registered forty knots and when Claire and I went to bed we could feel the full reverberation of breakers exploding against the cliffs of nearby Mast Cove, but it was a brief blow. Before morning the wind had hauled into the north, the skies were clearing and the sea was falling out.

The Hann brothers, hard-working men with big families to support, were early getting out to haul their gear and they entered Aldridges before dawn began to break. They noticed nothing unusual as they thumped across the Pond, but as they were leaving the pushthrough they encountered several whales clustered near that narrow entrance. Vaguely Kenneth wondered if they might be waiting for herring to come out with the falling tide, but he was too concerned just then about his gear to give the matter much thought.

The brothers were delighted to find their nets undamaged and even more delighted to find them full of cod. They spent several hours clearing and resetting the nets and when, heavily laden, they started back for the pushthrough, they again passed close to several whales surfacing near the entrance. Paying them no particular heed, they poled through the channel, moored their boat to a rock on the north shore of the Pond and began gutting their catch.

They had been at work only a few minutes when they were startled by what would have been a familiar enough sound outside but which was totally unexpected in the confines of the Pond. It was the explosive
whoooof
of a spouting finner; and it came from “close aboard.” When Kenneth, a voluble and excitable little man, described the discovery some time later, he was still amazed.

“I tells you, we was some surprised. We looked up and not more’n a couple of chains off was the fin of a girt whale just slipping down into the water, and the fog from her spout still hanging in the air.*

* The Hanns did not realize that the whale actually
was
a female, but so impressed were they by her gigantic size that they automatically referred to her in the feminine gender exactly as they would have done had she been a ship.

“’Twas hard to believe a whale that big could get herself into the Pond. Certainly there was no water for her in the pushthrough, and even the south gut never had no more’n two fathom and a half since ever I see it. But there she was, and looking twice as big as life.

“We went on cutting our fish, but I tell you we kept a sharp lookout for that whale. She was down for quite a time and when she come up again she was going like a battleship and right on course for the south gut. I give a yell: ‘Doug, bye! She be going to drive herself ashore!’

“We both stood up to watch her. She never slowed ’til she was fair in the mouth of the gut, and I made sure she was going to end up high and dry. But just at the last of it she changed her mind. She come about so hard she sent a wall of water right out the gut. If they had been a boat inbound, ’twould have been capsized for sure. She turned so quick she heeled right over on her side, and she was
some
big! We figured sixty, seventy feet and maybe more.”

During the next hour, while the Hanns finished cutting their fish, the whale went on making these frantic and abortive rushes, as if trying to nerve herself to dare the shallow channel. Time and again she surfaced near the middle of the Pond, put on a burst of speed and headed for the opening. But each time she gave up the attempt at the last moment. She must have known that not even her great speed and momentum would suffice to carry her across the shoals which barred the mouth of the channel.

“I wondered,” Doug Hann recalled, “was she sounding the rising water ’cause the tide was on the flow. ’Twas near sprinjes* and we thought maybe she might get clear on the top of high water that evening.”

* Spring tides, the highest tides of the lunar month.

Having finished with their fish, the Hanns found themselves in something of a quandary. They had no desire to be caught in the south channel during one of the whale’s impetuous rushes. On the other hand, they did not much relish the idea of taking their heavily laden boat back into The Ha Ha and out around Aldridges Head in the teeth of the heavy swell which was the storm’s aftermath. Eventually they decided to ease their way toward the south channel, holding close to shore, and see what happened.

The whale paid no attention to them until they were within a hundred yards of the channel mouth. Here they discreetly nosed their boat ashore, uncertain what to do next. Then the whale surfaced in mid-Pond and turned in their direction.

“What happened next was the queerest thing I ever see,” Kenneth remembered. “Whenever I see a whale spout before, and I supposes I see a t’ousand, only the top of the head and a bit of the fin and back would come out of the water. But this one... she made a slow start toward me, went under, and next thing we knowed was standing up with her whole head clear of the water, high as a cliff, and staring straight at we out of one big eye.

“I tell you, it scared me some! Her mouth was closed but we could see ’twas big enough to swallow a dory and room to spare. Then she slid back under. We waited and waited but she were gone pretty near twenty minutes and when she come up again she were at the north end where we’d been cutting fish. I says to Doug: ‘Start the engine, bye! I t’inks she’s going to give we a free passage out.’

“We never wasted no time, I’ll tell you. We was out through the gut like a rat out of a red-hot stovepipe! Going back down The Reach we talked about how wonderful queer it was for that whale to get herself into the Pond. ’Twas Doug had the best idea of it: ‘’Twas the herring took she into it,’ Doug says. ‘’Twas the herring tells the tale!’”

ALTHOUGH THE COVE from which the south channel leads into Aldridges Pond is small, it is surprisingly deep, with an average depth of thirty feet over most of its area even at dead low tide. However, at its head, toward the Pond end of the channel, it shoals abruptly to a low-tide depth of five feet, and it narrows equally abruptly to form the mouth of the channel, which is itself some forty yards in length and ten yards wide. Near the inner end of the channel are a number of huge but scattered boulders, some of which are covered by less than four feet of water at low tide.

On Friday night, January 20, the predicted tidal rise was just under five feet but the actual rise was nearer six due to the heavy sea driving inshore before the brief sou’east gale. Consequently, at full of the tide that night, there was close to forty feet of water in the cove and ten or eleven through most of the channel itself.

Early friday afternoon the half-dozen seiners which had been working among the Burgeo Islands began to stow their gear and head for port to ride out the coming storm. The last of them left at about three o’clock and the underwater world no longer vibrated to the pound of diesel engines.

With the return of quiet to their world, the family of finners in The Ha Ha decided to try a change of ground. Perhaps the herring had begun to avoid the restricted waters of The Ha Ha, which were being so closely patrolled by the whales, or perhaps the five great, hungry maws had simply thinned them out. In any event, the whales rounded Aldridges Head and entered Short Reach, where two of them were seen by the Hann brothers as they headed up for home that evening.

Short Reach, it happened, was alive with herring, and the whales had good fishing while daylight lasted. However, dusk came early this Friday evening as the cloud came down, dark with the promise of the coming storm.

With the coming of night, the preferred method of fishing, using reflected light from the abdomen to herd the herring, became ineffective, but by then most of the whales had gorged and were no longer hungry. The paterfamilias, a sleek giant only slightly smaller than his mate, and three young but well-grown progeny of other years were content to idle in the depths and wait for another day. Not so the female. She was still ravenous, and she had good reason for her gargantuan appetite; for she was carrying a calf within her vast womb, a new life growing at such a furious pace as to keep her perpetually hungry. So while the rest of her family took life easy, the female continued fishing in the dark, relying now on the high-speed “dash,” directed at the densest herring schools she could find.

Locating such schools posed no great problem because her sonar told her where they were, how dense the schools were and the depth at which they swam. Since she could not use the herding technique, it was to her advantage to choose those schools which would be prevented, by some natural barrier, from scattering at her approach. The many coves and cul-de-sacs along the steep, deep shores of the Richards Head peninsula were well-suited to her purpose and it was not long before she discovered that one of them, the entrance cove to Aldridges Pond, was fairly seething with little fishes.

Her sonar gave her sight in darkness but it was not perfect vision. Although quite capable of defining for her the shape and depth of the cove, it probably did not reveal the existence of the narrow, shallow channel leading into Aldridges Pond. Unaware, then, that the packed mass of herring had an escape route open to them, the female whale came streaking into the cove like the black shadow of Nemesis... only to find that, inexplicably, the school was fading away before her. She would have had no way of knowing that it was pouring like a living river through the channel to seek safety in the Pond.

The cove was deep but it was dangerously small. If the whale had accepted the fact that her attack had somehow failed, she could have halted her rush in time by gaping her enormous mouth and allowing the inrush to distend her accordion pleats so that the resistance of the water would have brought her to a halt nearly as abruptly as if she had deployed a parachute brake. But the hungry female fractionally delayed applying her brakes. When she did decide to stop, momentum carried her into the mouth of the channel, where the water abruptly and horrifyingly shoaled until her belly touched the bottom rocks. She swung frantically back and forth trying to turn, for a whale cannot swim in reverse. But assisted by the fast-flowing inbound tidal current, her struggles only served to carry her farther into the channel.

Now she must have known fear; for a great whale that goes aground at high tide is almost certainly doomed. As the tide ebbs, the tremendous body, no longer buoyed up, becomes its own instrument of death. The ribs collapse under the immense weight and the whale suffocates.

Caught in the tidal stream, and propelled by the frenzied thrusting of her flukes, she moved in the only direction open to her—forward through the channel, contorting herself to squeeze over and between the boulders which partially barred her way. Then, miraculously it must have seemed, the water deepened and she was free.

There is an average depth of five fathoms over most of Aldridges Pond, and nine in the middle. The whale’s relief on reaching apparent freedom must have been exquisite. It must also have been short-lived. It could not have taken her many minutes to scan the shoreline and to realize that she had escaped... into a trap; a trap from which there was no hope of release except through the channel by which she had entered.

Then came a fearful moment of decision! To stay was, eventually, to starve; but to dare that channel on a falling tide almost certainly meant death, a quicker one, before the next day came.

Of course the tide would rise again. Certainly she would know that. But that was not all—and not enough—for this was happening at spring tide and the water would not be so high again for the whole of a lunar month and, even then, it might not be high enough unless accompanied by an onshore gale. Perhaps she knew that too.

The inexorable rhythm of the tide was the whale’s key to freedom. Throughout the rest of that Friday night she waited for the new tide to rise. It reached its peak late Saturday morning... and the peak was almost a foot below the level it had reached the night before. It was not enough. Nevertheless, she was inexorably drawn to the mouth of the narrow channel which was her only path to freedom.