North of Boston (31 page)

“Have you heard of anything like that before?” I prompt.

“I've heard of lots of things. Few years ago, a hunter got caught under the ice and came up at a seal breathing hole a good distance away. He pulled himself onto the ice, took off his wet sealskin coat, and walked back to the village without freezing. Others drown—maybe from cold or exhaustion, or being sucked down by the weight of their clothes. Why some return and others don't is a question that doesn't get asked much around here. There are no answers for it, at least not ones that we can know.”

“I survived,” I tell him urgently. “I'm one of the ones who survived.”

He looks at me tenderly and simply nods.

T
here are four of us in the droning single-engine plane. Russell Parnell and I are thigh to thigh in the cramped backseat. Martin's up front, next to the pilot, Jimmy, who is thin, toothless, and grinning like this is the most fun he's had in a long time. A screw-cap silver flask peeks out from under a pocket flap of his canvas jacket. Since Jimmy smells OK and Martin seems at ease, I decide to ignore what would be cause for criminal charges in the States. We have no luggage other than the cameras Parnell brought, a cooler, some sleeping bags, and a small tent Martin stowed in the back.

Parnell replied to my e-mail, giving me his cell number and the flight he would be coming in on. We embraced when we met at the airport, then stepped back and said hello awkwardly, realizing that we'd gotten the order of greetings wrong. It was overly nice to reacquaint myself with his tense smile and restless eyes, and feel the strength in his good hand when he decided to cover over the embrace by squeezing my shoulder in a companion-like way. There's a lot for us to say, but we're hushed at the moment, watching the sharp peaks of the Torngat mountain range passing beneath the plane, and the shimmering Labrador Sea expanding eastward to a gently curved horizon. Small ice floes dot the brilliant water, and the distant sun bleeds a cold yellow stain.

“There it is,” Martin says, and Parnell and I peer out the front window at Baffin Island, a huge misshapen gray-green mass. Its mountaintops are snowy; their slopes plunge to fields of grass, rock outcrops, and sparkling streams. Jimmy heads the plane northwest along the Cumberland Sound, low enough that the crash of the surf against the cliffs is audible over the engine drone. He says we're lucky because the island is often shrouded in fog. Today the settlement of Pangnirtung is visible to the north, a scattering of low buildings huddled along the shore. Jimmy says that some of the buildings are rooted to the ground with steel cables because of the harsh winds. There are a couple of ships in port—a supply ship and some kind of fishing vessel.

In a few minutes we're approaching the offshore islands Captain Lou showed me on the chart. They're gentle green mounds in the blue water. As we come over the top of the largest island, the
Galaxy
appears below us, gleaming white, its anchor line taut in a current flowing between the two landmasses. Two inflatable orange dinghies are bobbing off the stern, and two kayaks that must have been brought up from a storage area are lying on the deck. I don't see anyone on the yacht or nearby shores. If anyone hears our small plane, they'll probably think it's only a local pilot out for a sunny-day spin. Still, I lean my face away from the window.

We pass over the yacht, bank eastward over an inlet that has a rocky mouth, a low cliff on its northern side, and a sandy beach at the far end. The plane climbs higher, heading out across a vast tundra, a steep mountain rising to the south. Jimmy glances at Martin and asks, “What's the game plan, boss?”

Martin looks back at me.

I say, “Let's land out of sight of the yacht and head back along the inlet on foot and find a place where we can see what's going on.”

“OK. But we can't land here,” Martin says.

“Over there.” Jimmy nods toward a lake with a smooth wide shore nestled at the base of the mountain.

“Looks good,” Martin says.

Soon we're stretching our legs on damp gravel in the chilly shadow of Mount Duval. The lake is glassy, pristine. I'm told the water is OK to drink. Martin and Jimmy say they'll stay back to set up camp, so Parnell and I grab the cameras out of the back, ready to trek across the uneven ground to where the
Galaxy
waits. It looks like about a half mile, and I'm suddenly eager to get there. It's one o'clock in the afternoon. Martin says the sun will set at around a quarter to five.

We hike along the cliff on the northern side of the inlet. At the end, we are able to look down with relative security upon the
Galaxy
floating calmly in the protected water between the offshore island and the mainland. Now there's some more activity. Bob Jaeger is leaning against the stern rail, gazing across the water. Margot stands beside him, wearing big sunglasses and a mauve scarf wrapped loosely around her head and neck. Jorn Ekborg and Richard Lawler sit at a table, conversing in an animated way.

More time passes. Nothing happens. I'm getting restless. What if we're waiting here for days? By three o'clock Parnell and I are seated on the cold ground, our backs to a rock face, out of reach of a brisk wind. Martin and Jimmy still haven't joined us. I'm dozing with my head on Parnell's shoulder and the coat Tiffany lent me buttoned up to my chin. Suddenly he rouses me. “Listen to that.”

It's the chug of a motorboat coming down the sound.

We scramble back to our lookout. On the yacht's deck, Yevgeny Petrenko, overdressed in a fur-trimmed parka, is chatting with Jaeger. Margot is gone, and no bimbos are in sight. The usually reclusive American filmmaker, Alan Stempel, has appeared and is seated at a table, sipping a glass of wine. He has his eyes on the horizon in the direction of the approaching motorboat. Brock, Dennis, and another crew member stand at the rail. The two kayaks are now in the water, tethered to the stern of the
Galaxy
. Ekborg and Lawler are in the two orange dinghies, floating close by.

Now the motorboat rounds the north edge of the island: it's a sleek fiberglass about twenty feet long with an Inuit man at the wheel and another facing backwards, binoculars around his neck. This man gestures with a wide sweeping arm. Jaeger turns with excitement and gives the same signal to Ekborg and Lawler in the dinghies.

The Swede and the Scotsman spark their engines. Dennis and Brock lower themselves into the kayaks and paddle out to join them. The third crewman is pulling another rubber dinghy onto the dock. This one is compressed into a large, ungainly square. He unfolds it until it is full size, lying flat, and begins to inflate it with an electric foot pump whose cord snakes behind the service bar.

Petrenko claps Jaeger on the back. Stempel gets up and stands beside them. Their heads turn toward the motorboat and the flotilla of small craft.

I hear a scrambling behind us and turn to see Martin at last. He says Jimmy decided to stay with the plane. I wonder if this had anything to do with the flask in Jimmy's pocket.

So far no one on the
Galaxy
has looked up to where there are now three of us clustered among the rocks at the top of the cliff. I grow bold and set up the tripod at its shortest height. Parnell has the handheld camera ready. The sun is low, casting a rosy light, and the ocean has darkened and become choppier in the wind. Far out in the sound, ice floes drift by like misshapen swans, and flat pack ice close to the shore gives off a pale blue gleam.

Martin, scanning the horizon, shakes his head. “There aren't any whales up here.”

The Inuit man in the back of the motorboat has his binoculars trained up the coast. Now he raises his right arm hesitantly to the sky. He pauses, brings his arm slowly down, and firmly points in the direction of whatever he is looking at. The motorboat, orange dinghies, and kayaks spread out across the water until they are positioned about thirty yards apart in a curving line that leads from the sound into the sheltered bay. The third orange dinghy has been inflated and lowered into the water. It's occupied by Alan Stempel, who is paddling to a position farther along, at the mouth of the inlet.

It is impossible to see what they're waiting for. Parnell, Martin, and I are stiffly silent.

Finally there appears a dark roiling under the water in the sound, and the Inuit man signals again. The motorboat's engine commences screaming at its highest pitch, but the gearbox is obviously in neutral, because the boat doesn't move. Ekborg, Lawler, and Stempel take up their dinghies' aluminum paddles, plunge them into the sea, and begin banging them with short metal pipes. The roiling veers to avoid the boats and enters the bay, where it slows and seems to stop, becoming a great black underwater mass that creates a chaotic pattern of bubbling waves around the
Galaxy
.

As the roiling near the
Galaxy
becomes denser, what appear to be man-sized twisted toothpicks pierce the surface of the water at different angles, some low to the water, some as high as ninety degrees. They point in different directions, rising and sinking without apparent agency.

“Narwhals,” Martin says, his voice a mixture of certainty and disbelief. “Their fall migration. They move from coastal waters into the deep ocean. There can be hundreds in a pod. Even more, I've heard. Sometimes thousands.” Martin is agitated. “Narwhals do everything through echolocation. Those engines and banging tubes will be deafening to them. I guarantee that all they want to do right now is get the hell away from here. But they can't turn around. There are too many following.”

So they go in the only direction left to them—up the inlet. A continuous, churning surge of them passes below our cliff. They swim fast, bodies jostling, nearly touching. They're white, black, gray. Mottled and patched. They have short snouts and sleek shoulders. There are calves among them, squirming to keep abreast. The huge tusks of the males shudder in the refracting water like so many sunken Excalibur swords. I've got my camera trained on them, and Parnell is sweeping his across the bay and inlet, to where it dead-ends at a flat brown gravelly beach like the one we landed on.

“They could overturn those kayaks in a second,” Parnell says, sounding frustrated that they don't. He's right. The largest whales are probably sixteen feet, two tons of muscle and blubber. The largest tusks are long as men and thick as lampposts, swirling and narrowing to honed points.

“They won't, though,” Martin says. “One of the things narwhals are really good at is staying away from humans. They're not going to change that behavior now. My people have been hunting them for thousands of years, usually during these migrations, when they tend to pass by the same places at roughly the same times. We're allowed to take a thousand a year total. Each village has a quota. But there's no one to police it, obviously. I'm guessing your friends paid these local hunters to show them this place and teach them how to do it.”

“They're not our friends,” Parnell says bitterly, to which Martin makes no reply.

We fall silent, watching.

“Incredible,” I hear Martin whisper behind me. “Look over there.”

The narwhals are still coming, a wide coursing river of them, pouring into the sheltered bay from the Cumberland Sound. They fork at the
Galaxy
, flowing on both sides of it, following the others. Petrenko, leaning over the rail, turns his head this way and that, as if he can't decide which direction to look in first. Jaeger's filming the spectacle from the deck of the
Galaxy
.

I grab my camera and tripod, ready to head to lower ground and get closer, better footage, whatever the risk.

“Watch it, Pirio,” Parnell says in a warning voice. “Don't fuck this up.”

He's right. There's nothing we can do. The whales, stuck in the inlet, will perish in any case. I need to keep my head, and focus on getting what we came for.

Ekborg in the orange dinghy is riding right among the whales, almost on their backs at times, looking like a Swedish film version of a primitive hunter, his face gloriously alive. At the mouth of the inlet he breaks away to sidle next to Stempel's dinghy. He takes a rolled fishing net out of the bottom of his boat and passes one end of it to the American.

By now the first narwhals have reached the end of the inlet, where they are unavoidably beached in the shallow water. The migration keeps coming. The fast-moving whales collide and crush one another like cars in a gruesome pileup on the highway. The water is not deep enough to allow them to dive, so some of them ride right over smaller whales in front.

The air fills with a cacophony. Clicks and grunts. Sounds like hammers knocking, squeaking doors, the rattling of a dozen sticks dragged along a dozen picket fences. Human sounds like cranky babies' cries and high, imploring questions. All of it running together and swelling into a chaotic din.

The last of the migration pours into the inlet, and as the creatures jam together, it stops being an inlet at all and becomes a blubbery road of living narwhal meat, with tusks sticking out all over the place.

Ekborg takes his end of the net and crosses the inlet, about fifty feet. Ekborg and Stempel drop the net in tandem, closing off the inlet's mouth.

“That's a seal net,” Martin says. “It goes pretty deep. The kellies anchor it to the bottom, and those cork buoys float on top. They don't really need a net, though. Those whales won't swim back to humans, even if they could turn around.”

Jaeger and Petrenko are yelling encouragement from the rail of the
Galaxy
.

The three dinghies and two kayaks assemble in a line beyond the net. The men in kayaks reach along the narrow bows and unclip something. The men in the dinghies pick something off the bottoms of the boats. Harpoons.