05 Whale Adventure (9 page)

In the meantime, Hal, very much alive, was beginning to face the possibility that he would not be alive much longer.

The whale was steadily losing blood. In due time it must roll over, ‘fin out’, as whalers say when a whale dies. Then the sharks would close in and make a dinner on the carcass, with Hal as dessert.

Even if the whale lived the prospect was not bright. It would plough on far away into unknown seas. Its rider would bake in the heat of the tropical sun by day and, always wet to the skin, would shiver in the cold night wind that sweeps across the ocean after dark even on the Equator. He would endure the agonies of hunger and thirst until his mind would fail, his grip on the iron would loosen, and he would slip off into the sea.

The masts of the Killer had disappeared. There was nothing to be seen but a million humping waves, He felt terribly alone.

Then he remembered that he was not alone. Beneath him, inside this animal submarine, there was another human being.

Suppose this modern Jonah was alive. What dreadful thoughts he must be having as he found himself imprisoned in this living tomb.

Was he fighting to get out? If he could escape from the stomach through the gullet into the mouth, what were his chances? The muscles of swallowing would force him back into his prison. Or he would be crushed by the huge teeth. At the very best he might slip out of the mouth whenever it opened, but then he would only be the helpless prey of the sharks.

More likely there was no breath of life left in him, and Hal was truly alone.

He was startled to hear a deep groan.

Had he really heard it, or was his own mind beginning to give way? Then it came again, a sad and painful sound. He realized that the mournful voice he heard was the voice of the suffering whale beneath him.

He felt at that moment that he would never want to kill another whale.

Hal was not merely imagining that he heard the voice of the whale. Whales are not dumb. They have no vocal chords, yet they make a great variety of sounds. Some naturalists believe that whales ‘talk’, or at least signal to each other by means of sounds. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has recorded the sounds by tape recorder. The zoologist Ivan T. Sanderson says in Follow the Whale: ‘It is now known that all whales, and especially porpoises and some dolphins, keep up a tremendous racket underwater, lowing like cows, moaning, whistling, and making chuckling sounds … Belugas have an enormous vocabulary of different sounds, which gives rise to their popular name among seamen of “sea canaries”. They twitter, whistle, scream, gurgle, chuckle, hoot, and make strange popping and puffing noises.’

And it is not surprising that the whale has a voice. After all, it is not a fish, but a mammal like a cat or dog or the reader of this book.

Some millions of years ago it had four legs and waddled about on land. Perhaps it could not get enough to eat on shore to fill its great body and took to swimming after food. It became more and more used to the water, and after thousands of years its useless legs dwindled away.

The remains of them are still there. The front legs have changed into flippers, but inside each flipper may be found five toes left over from the time when whales walked the earth. And deep in the rear part of the whale are two useless bones, the remains of what were once hind legs.

So, thought Hal, this fellow is my cousin.

It helped a little. He did not feel quite so lost and lonely in this watery waste when he remembered that the creature below him was, like himself, warm-blooded, breathed air, had a skeleton, brain, heart, and blood vessels much like his own, and could feel pain, grief, or joy as he could.

The whale frequently changed direction. When south did not get him away from his misery he tried west, then east. If only he would head back towards the ship!

Hal wondered if there was any way to steer a whale. The whale is one of the most intelligent of beasts. Hal had seen, on his father’s animal farm, how less intelligent animals than the whale could be guided here and there,

A horse even without a bridle could be steered by pressure of the rider’s knees. A camel could be turned to the right or left by the rider’s bare toes tickling his neck on one side or the other. The mahout on an elephant’s back could make this mountain of flesh go to one side or the other by touching one of the big ears with his pole. And Hal had seen a rhino mother push her young one along ahead of her and direct its course by pressing her horn against its withers on the left side or the right.

But how to apply this knowledge to the problem of steering a whale was quite beyond him. Perhaps if he pulled out the lance and used it to stab one of the whale’s ten-foot cheeks it would turn the other way.

ft was not a bad idea and quite possibly it might have worked - but Hal couldn’t do it. The big bull had become a person to him, almost a friend. He could not add to its suffering. ‘The Cap is right,’ he said to himself. ‘I’m a softie.’ Hal still held on to the harpoon with one hand. His other hand held the rope which trailed away from the harpoon back over the waves, its end having been torn loose from the broken boat.

Could he use this rope? The idea appealed to his sense of humour. He laughed aloud at the notion of putting a bridle on a whale. His laugh frightened himself, it seemed so out of place in this desolate silence.

Well, anyhow, he could try it. He gathered up several fathoms of the line, looped it as he had so often done for lassoing animals on the farm, and threw it twenty feet forward so that the bight dropped just beyond the animal’s head and was drawn tight at the mouth. Hal held two reins in his hands. He felt like Neptune, lord of the sea, driving his chariot over the waves.

According to the sun, he calculated that the ship was a little east of north. He must pull on the right rein. As he began to do so the bull, annoyed by this thing like the tentacle of an octopus that rubbed across his lips, opened his jaws and took the line firmly in his teeth.

Hal pulled manfully on the right rein. It might have worked on a one-ton horse, or even on a seven-ton elephant. It had no effect whatever on the one-hundred-and-twenty-ton bull of the sea.

No effect except to annoy still more the whale which bow savagely bit the rope in two. Hal hauled in the rope and looked at the place where it had been cut apart as if with a knife. He had had ho idea that a whale’s teeth could be so sharp.

All right, that was no good. But Hal’s inventive mind did not give up. He must try, and keep on trying - his life depended upon it. What else could he do?

He might entangle the left fin in the rope so that it could not work properly. He had once seen in the aquarium a fish with a disabled ventral fin. Because only one fin was working the fish tended to turn in one direction.

But a whale does not swim like a fish. A fish uses its fins as well as its tail to propel it through the water. The whale uses only its enormous twenty-foot-wide tail. The fins are used merely for balancing. Hal saw that they were quite motionless. He gave up the idea of lassoing a fin.

What else did a whale have that might influence his direction? It had ears.

Hanging on to the harpoon rope he slid down to one of the ears, very small for a brute of such size. He plugged the ear with rope and waited for results. There were none. The whale continued steadily in the same direction. Hal removed the rope from the ear.

But the eyes. Why hadn’t he thought of them before?

A whale’s eyes are planted in the sides of the head, not the front. The whale can see nothing behind him and very little ahead. He sees to the left with the left eye and to the right with the right eye.

Like a bird, thought Hal. Or a horse.

He had once owned a horse named Right. He was called that because he always had a tendency to go to the right. He was blind in the left eye. Any animal likes to see where it is going, and since this horse could see right he went right.

It was always necessary for the driver to keep a tight left rein if he wished to go straight. A normal horse would continue straight even if the reins were dropped. Not so Right. As soon as the reins went slack he would begin to shy away slightly from the world he could not see and which might contain any number of dangers and edge over into the world that his good eye told him was safe.

The ocean, too, has its dangers. The sensible whale would want to avoid them - dangers such as rocks and shoals, schools of sharks or swordfish, the giant cuttlefish with his horny beak, and men in boats. If the whale could see only to one side, his instinct for safety should cause him to favour that side.

Hal put his theory to the test. He stripped off his blood-caked shirt and let it hang from his hand so that its folds covered the whale’s left eye.

The great bull seemed to take no notice. He had been going due west and he kept going due west. Hal persisted for a good five minutes, but there was no change.

Bitterly disappointed, he was about to haul up his shirt when he happened to glance again at the sun. It was not quite where it had been. Yes, the whale was veering ever so slightly to the right. His direction was a shade north of west, then a definite west-north-west, then full north-west.

Hal was in an uncomfortable and dangerous position. Huddled part-way down the whale’s left flank, he was hanging on to the harpoon rope with one hand and with the other operating his blinder. It was hard to block the whale’s vision continually because gusts of wind kept blowing the shirt aside. Hal was so close to the water that the sharks took a great interest in him and frequently thrust their jaws above the surface in an effort to reach a leg or an arm.

But the whale was steadily edging towards what he could see and away from what he could not see. From north-west he slowly swung to north. When he had turned a few degrees east of north Hal was satisfied that his black chariot was now headed for the ship. He took away the blinder and climbed up the rope to the higher and safer point beside the harpoon.

But his work was not done. Every once in a while the bull would take a notion to charge off towards another point of the compass. Then Hal would have to slip down and cover sometimes the left eye, sometimes the right, to get his speed-boat back on course.

And wasn’t the speed-boat slowing down? That was new cause for worry. The tips of the Killer’s masts were now above the horizon. But there was still a long way to go. The whale’s enormous flukes beat less rapidly, his groans were more frequent, his spouts more thick with blood and only half as high as they had been. At any moment he might give up and roll over fin out, throwing his rider to the sharks.

Hal focused his tired and poisoned eyes upon the mastheads of the whaling ship. He thought he could make out a black blob near the head of the foremast. Soon he was sure, and his discouragement and fear gave way to new hope. There was a lookout in the foremast rings. Hal shouted for joy. His own voice frightened him, it was so quickly soaked up by the great silence.

Perhaps the lookout would not see the whale after all. The man at the masthead watches for a white spout, but the spout of this whale was a dull red and now so low that it would scarcely appear above the wave-tops. The whale’s body might be seen, or it might not, for the dying bull was not swimming as high out of the water as before and his tiring flukes made no splash.

Hal could not see who was in the rings. He hoped it was a good man, one with keen eyes. Hal’s fate depended upon those eyes.

The whale was weakening fast and the throb of his twenty-foot propeller almost stopped at times. Then with a savage grunt he would make a new spurt forward. These spurts became slower and shorter until at last the monster lay without motion, wallowing in the waves. As a last gesture of defiance, the great bull sent up a column of red mist into the sky.

Hal thought he heard a cry across the sea. It might have been only the scream of a gull - but it might have been the call of the lookout. He listened intently. Now he heard it again and there was no mistake. It came faint but clear:

‘Blows! Blows!’

Thank the Lord for the sharp eyes of that lookout, thought Hal. He had been seen. No, not he, but the whale. He himself would not be visible at that distance, especially since his colour was exactly the same as that of the whale’s back, both painted dull red by the bloody spouts.

He saw another figure climb into the rings. That would be the captain. The lookout went down out of sight.

‘Bless his hide, whoever he is,’ said Hal fervently.

It seemed a very long time before the boats appeared. The men in. those boats were coming after a whale - they could have no idea that a man was aboard.

Hal prepared to give them the surprise of their lives.

He lay flat on the far side so that he could not be seen by the men in the approaching boats.

What a pleasure it was to hear human voices once again, so much more cheering than the groan of a perishing whale.

‘All right. Pull up alongside.’ It was the voice of the second mate. ‘What in Heaven’s name do we have here? Look, he has a harpoon in him! And a lance! I’m staggered if it isn’t that same old bull - the one that gave us all that trouble and then ran out on us.’

Other voices chimed in.

‘Whatever brought him back!’

‘Perhaps he came back to do us in. Look out for him!’

‘No, he’s done for. He’ll roll over any minute.’

Hal thought it was time to make his appearance. He crawled up so that just his head showed above the whale’s back.

‘Am I seeing things?’ cried someone. ‘What’s that?’

They might well be puzzled. Hal’s face and head were caked over with half-dried blood.

Hal stood up, red from head to foot.

The men stared in disbelief.

‘It’s the devil himself,’ muttered one, crossing himself.

It’s Hal!’ cried Roger leaping to his feet. Hal grinned a bloody but happy grin to see his brother whom he had almost feared he would never set eyes on again.