A Whale For The Killing (11 page)

“Maybe. But why did those chaps come all the way up here to tell us about it and then go all evasive when I started asking questions? Something’s going on. I think I’ll slip over to Sim’s and see what he can tell me.”

Although I was inclined to agree with Claire that the whale (if it existed at all) would turn out to be a pothead, I thought there was just a chance it might be a killer. The remark about the “girt big fin” suggested this and, too, some local dragger men had recently met pods of killers not far from the Burgeo Islands. Anyway, my curiosity was aroused.

Sim Spencer was alone in his little store, laboriously working up his accounts. Rather reluctantly, it seemed to me, he admitted to having heard something about the Aldridges whale. When I asked him why he hadn’t told me before, knowing how interested I was in anything to do with whales, he was embarrassed.

“Well,” he said, fumbling for words. “They’s been a lot of foolishness... a shame what some folks does... wouldn’t want to bother you with the likes of that... but now as you knows, I thinks ’tis just as well.”

The implications of this escaped me at the time, but soon became clear enough. The reason I had not been told about the whale was that many of the people were ashamed of what was happening and did not want to talk about it with outsiders; and even after five years I was still something of a newcomer in their midst.

Sim took me to see the Hanns. They were reticent at first but they did describe the whale in fair detail; and I now realized there was an excellent if almost unbelievable chance it might turn out to be one of the great rorquals. Having seen Aldridges Pond in the past, I knew it to be an almost perfect natural aquarium, quite large enough to contain even a blue whale in some kind of comfort.

The prospect that, for the first time in history, so far as I knew, it might be possible to come into close quarters with the mystery of one of the mighty lords of the ocean was wildly exciting. I was in such a hurry to rush home and tell Claire about it that Kenneth Hann’s concluding words did not quite sink in.

“They says,” he warned, “some fellers been shooting at it. It could get hurted, Skipper, an’ they keeps it up.”

Probably some damn fool has been taking pot shots at it with a .22, I thought, and put the warning out of mind. As I hurried across Messers bridge in the gathering darkness, my thoughts were fixed on tomorrow, and my imagination was beginning to run away as I contemplated what could happen if the trapped whale indeed turned out to be one of the giants of the seas.

EARLY NEXT MORNING I TELEPHONED Danny Green, a lean, sardonic and highly intelligent man in his middle thirties who had been the high-lining skipper of a dragger but had given that up to become skipper, mate and crew of the little Royal Canadian Mounted Police motor launch. Danny not only knew—and was happy to comment on—everything of importance that happened on the Sou’west Coast, he was also familiar with and interested in whales. What he had to tell me brought my excitement to fever pitch.

“I’m pretty sure ’tis one of the big ones, Farley. Can’t say what kind. Haven’t seen it meself but it might be a humpback, a finner or even a sulphur.” He paused a moment. “What’s left of it. The sports have been blasting hell out of it this past week.”

As Danny gave me further details of what had been happening, I was at first appalled, then furious.

“Are they bloody well crazy? This is a chance in a million. If that whale lives, Burgeo’ll be famous all over the world. Shooting at it! What the hell’s the matter with the constable?”

Danny explained that our one policeman was a temporary replacement for the regular constable, who was away on leave. The new man, Constable Murdoch, was from New Brunswick. He knew nothing about Burgeo and not much about Newfoundland. He was hesitant to interfere in local matters unless he received an official complaint.

At my request, Danny put him on the phone.

“Whoever’s doing that shooting is breaking the game laws, you know,” I told him. “It’s forbidden to take rifles into the country. Can’t you put a stop to it?”

Murdoch was apologetic and cooperative. Not only did he undertake to investigate the shooting, he offered to make a patrol to Aldridges Pond and take me with him. However, Claire and I had already made other arrangements with two Messers fishermen, Curt Bungay and Wash Pink, who fished together in Curt’s new boat. They were an oddly assorted pair. Young, and newly married, Curt was one of those people about whom the single adjective “round” says it all. His crimson-hued face was a perfect circle, with round blue eyes, a round little nose and a circular mouth. Although he was not fat, his body was a cylinder supported on legs as round and heavy as mill logs. Wash Pink was almost the complete opposite. A much older man, who had known hard times in a distant outport, he was lean, desiccated and angular. And whereas Curt was a born talker and storyteller, Wash seldom opened his mouth except in moments of singular stress.

A few minutes after talking to Murdoch, Claire and I were underway in Curt’s longliner. I was dithering between hope that we would find a great whale in the Pond, alive and well, and the possibility that it might have escaped or, even worse, have succumbed to the shooting. Claire kept her usual cool head, as her notes testify:

“It was blowing about forty miles an hour from the northwest,” she wrote, “and I hesitated to go along. But Farley said I would regret it all my life if I didn’t. Burgeo being Burgeo, it wouldn’t have surprised me if the ‘giant whale’ had turned out to be a porpoise. It was rough and icy cold crossing Short Reach but we got to Aldridges all right and sidled cautiously through the narrow channel. It was several hours from high tide and there was only five feet of water, which made Curt very nervous for the safety of his brand-new boat.

“We slid into the pretty little Pond under a dash of watery sunlight. It was a beautifully protected natural harbour ringed with rocky cliffs that ran up to the 300-foot crest of Richards Head. Little clumps of dwarfed black spruce clung in the hollows here and there along the shore.

“There was nobody and nothing to be seen except a few gulls soaring high overhead. We looked eagerly for signs of the whale, half expecting it to come charging out of nowhere and send us scurrying for the exit. There was no sign of it and I personally concluded it had left—if it had ever been in the Pond at all.

“I was ready to go below and try to get warm when somebody cried out that they saw something. We all looked and saw a long, black shape that looked like a giant sea serpent, curving quietly out of the water, and slipping along from head to fin, and then down again and out of sight.

“We just stared, speechless and unbelieving, at this vast monster. Then there was a frenzy of talk.

“‘It’s a
whale
of a whale!... Must be fifty, sixty feet long!... That’s no pothead, not that one...’

“Indeed, it was no pothead but an utterly immense, solitary and lonely monster, trapped, Heaven knew how, in this rocky prison.

“We chugged to the middle of the Pond just as the RCMP launch entered and headed for us. Farley called to Danny Green and they agreed to anchor the two boats in deep water near the south end of the Pond and stop the engines.

“Then began a long, long watch during which the hours went by like minutes. It was endlessly fascinating to watch the almost serpentine coming and going of this huge beast. It would surface about every four or five minutes as it followed a circular path around and around the Pond. At first the circles took it well away from us but as time passed, and everyone kept perfectly still, the circles narrowed, coming closer and closer to the boats.

“Twice the immense head came lunging out of the water high into the air. It was as big as a small house, glistening black on top and fish-white underneath. Then down would go the nose, and the blowhole would break surface, and then the long, broad back, looking like the bottom of an overturned ship, would slip into our sight. Finally the fin would appear, at least four feet tall, and then a boiling up of water from the flukes and the whale was gone again.

“Farley identified it as a fin whale, the second largest animal ever to live on earth. We could see the marks of bullets—holes and slashes—across the back from the blowhole to the fin. It was just beyond me to even begin to understand the mentality of men who would amuse themselves filling such a majestic creature full of bullets. Why
try
to kill it? There is no mink or fox farm here to use the meat. None of the people would eat it. No, there is no motive of food or profit; only a lust to kill. But then I wonder, is it any different than the killer’s lust that makes the mainland sportsmen go out in their big cars to slaughter rabbits or groundhogs? It just seems so much more terrible to kill a whale!

“We could trace its progress even under water by the smooth, swirling tide its flukes left behind. It appeared to be swimming only about six feet deep and it kept getting closer to us so we began to catch glimpses of it under the surface, its white underparts appearing pale aqua-green against the darker background of deep water.

“The undulations on the surface came closer and closer until the whale was surfacing within twenty feet of the boats. It seemed to deliberately look at us from time to time as if trying to decide whether we were dangerous. Oddly, the thought never crossed my mind that
it
might be dangerous to us. Later on I asked some of the others if they had been afraid of this, the mightiest animal any of us was ever likely to meet in all our lives, and nobody had felt any fear at all. We were too enthralled to be afraid.

“Apparently the whale decided we were not dangerous. It made another sweep and this time that mighty head passed right under the Mountie’s boat. They pointed and waved and we stared down too. Along came the head, like a submarine, but much more beautiful, slipping along under us no more than six feet away. Just then Danny shouted: ‘Here’s his tail! Here’s his tail!’

“The tail was just passing under the police launch while the head was under
our
boat, and the two boats were a good seventy feet apart! The flippers, each as long as a dory, showed green beneath us, then the whole unbelievable length of the body flowed under the boat, silently, with just a faint slick swirl of water on the surface from the flukes. It was almost impossible to believe what we were seeing! This incredibly vast being, perhaps eighty tons in weight, so Farley guessed, swimming below us with the ease and smoothness of a salmon.

“Danny told me later the whale could have smashed up both our boats as easily as we would smash a couple of eggs. Considering what people had done to it, why didn’t it take revenge? Or is it only mankind that takes revenge?”

Once she accepted the fact that our presence boded her no harm, the whale showed a strange interest in us, almost as if she took pleasure in being close to our two forty-foot boats, whose undersides may have looked faintly whale-like in shape. Not only did she pass directly under us several times but she also passed between the two boats, carefully threading her way between our anchor cables. We had the distinct impression she was lonely—an impression shared by the Hann brothers when she hung close to their small boat. Claire went so far as to suggest the whale was seeking help, but how could we know about that?

I was greatly concerned about the effects of the gunning but, apart from a multitude of bullet holes, none of which showed signs of bleeding, she appeared to be in good health. Her movements were sure and powerful and there was no bloody discoloration in her blow. Because I so much wished to believe it, I concluded that the bullets had done no more than superficial damage and that, with luck, the great animal would be none the worse for her ordeal by fire.

At dusk we reluctantly left the Pond. Our communion with the whale had left all of us half hypnotized. We had almost nothing to say to each other until the RCMP launch pulled alongside and Constable Murdoch shouted:

“There’ll be no more shooting. I guarantee you that. Danny and me’ll patrol every day from now on, and twice a day if we have to.”

Murdoch’s words brought me my first definite awareness of a decision which I must already have arrived at below—or perhaps above—the limited levels of conscious thought. As we headed back to Messers, I knew I was committed to the saving of that whale, as passionately as I had ever been committed to anything in my life. I still do not know why I felt such an instantaneous compulsion. Later it was possible to think of a dozen reasons, but these were afterthoughts—not reasons at the time. If I were a mystic, I might explain it by saying I had heard a call, and that may not be such a mad explanation after all. In the light of what ensued, it is not easy to dismiss the possibility that, in some incomprehensible way, alien flesh had reached out to alien flesh... cried out for help in a wordless and primordial appeal which could not be refused.

During the run home, my mind was seething with possibilities, with hopes, with fears. Only one thing seemed sure: the whale would need more help than I alone could give. We needed allies, she and I.

As soon as we reached home I called the fish plant manager, who, because of his position as “boss,” was one of the most influential men in the community. In rather incoherent fashion I tried to convince him of the importance to Burgeo, and to the world at large, of our having one of the great whales in our keeping. A withdrawn, uncommunicative man who seemed to think of everything in managerial terms, he was not easy to persuade; obviously finding it hard to understand why anyone would be much concerned about the life or death of a whale. However, he finally did agree to post notices at the plant asking everyone to leave the animal alone.

He helped me more than he knew, for his very coolness brought me sharply up against the realization that I would have to marshal some convincing practical reasons why the whale should be saved. The most obvious one I could think of was the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, no human being had ever before had the chance to study closely a living rorqual. That chance was here—was now. I was sure the scientific people would recognize its importance, would be as excited as I was, and would come rushing to help. Science had to be alerted.

This was easier said than done. Our telephone link with the outer world consisted of a makeshift system of radio transmitters and microwave relays, no part of which was even moderately efficient. Even after a connection had been established with the “outside”—a feat which might take several hours—the chances were excellent that neither party would be able to hear or understand the other. I disliked and distrusted the black machine hanging on our wall so much that I refused to have anything to do with it except in case of dire emergency. But this was an emergency.

The first call I placed was to the federal fisheries office in St. John’s, Newfoundland. I managed to conduct a shouted conversation with a senior biologist there who explained, kindly, as one would to an enthusiastic but ill-informed child, that his station only concerned itself with fishes... and whales were mammals.

Cursing his bureaucratic mind, I spent the next three hours trying to reach the central fisheries research station near Montreal. When I eventually got through to its director, I found him sympathetic but no more helpful than his colleague in St. John’s. He told me the department’s whale expert was away in the United States studying whale skeletons in museums. It was apparently out of the question that he should be recalled from his research into the bones of the dead in order to visit Burgeo and study a rorqual in the living, breathing flesh.

By this time it was late at night and I was beginning to suffer from a growing sense of frustration, coupled with a certain feeling of unreality. Could it be, I asked myself, that the world of science would prove to be unmoved by this unique opportunity to gain a little insight into the life of one of the of the most remarkable animals that ever lived?

In something between panic and despair, I now called a tried and patient friend, my publisher, Jack McClelland, in Toronto. Jack resignedly climbed out of bed to spend the next several hours himself trying to interest marine biologists all across Canada. Most of those he reached were outspokenly irate at being roused in the middle of the night, and none of them apparently gave a damn whether or not Burgeo possessed a captive fin whale. One eminent cetologist in British Columbia listened with cold politeness while Jack described the situation, then gave him a little lecture.

Fin whales, he said, do not eat herring; they subsist entirely on plankton. Thus, even if I did have one in captivity, I could not possibly feed it. However, feeding such a captive would be unnecessary in any case because fin whales can easily survive for six months by assimilating their own blubber. Anyhow, the point was not germane, he continued crushingly, because fin whales never come near shore unless they are dead or dying; therefore, the Burgeo whale,
if
it was a fin at all, must be in a dying condition. Since scientists had already studied a good many dead fin whales, they would not be much interested in studying yet another. He advised Jack to forget the whole thing.