North of Boston (32 page)

T
he only way to handle what's about to happen is to think of it as a job, to keep my eye behind the lens, and to try not to see the blood. The camera feels heavy in my hand, reliable. Ballast against the horror.

I film the floundering whales, the floating phalanx of harpooners, the spectators on the superyacht anchored in the bay.

“Damn. The yacht's facing the wrong way. I can't get the name painted on the stern,” I say.

“The numbers on the side are enough to identify the boat,” Martin says.

“I want to get closer, down to that beach at the end,” I say.

“Forget it,” Parnell says. “Use your zoom.”

Ekborg's motorized dinghy crosses the submerged net and moves up the inlet into the churn of whales. The skittish narwhals manage to separate, opening up a shallow path. Stempel follows Ekborg. Lawler is next. Brock and Dennis bring up the rear.

Eventually Ekborg has to stop. The whales at the end of the inlet are beached and can't move. He shuts off his motor, gets out of the dinghy, crawls and then walks across their blubbery backs. He's wearing rubber boots that come up to his knees, holding his harpoon aloft. He strides with a deep bend in his knees, as if on a tight trampoline. He manages to get to a strip of beach on the south side of the inlet, splashes across rocks in the shallow water, and turns back to egg on his comrades. Stempel pushes himself up from his boat, rises on wobbly legs like a baby learning how to walk. Less sure of himself, taking cautious, measured strides, he follows Ekborg's trail. The ungainly Lawler unfolds himself from his dinghy and gives whale walking a try. Using his harpoon for balance, he causes bloody gashes as he goes, slipping several times but managing to stay on his feet. Ekborg and Stempel, standing on the shore, hurl taunts like frat brothers at a hazing. Brock and Dennis float quietly in their kayaks, awaiting their turns.

Soon all five men have clambered and splashed their way to the wide beach at the end of the inlet. They gather in a tight group to confer. Then the two crewmen retreat to boulders at the back of the beach, where it meets a slope of tangled scrub. Dennis lights a cigarette behind a cupped hand. Apparently, they are letting the honors go to the paying guests.

The harpooning begins. It goes on and on. The water at the end of the inlet turns pink, then red. In time the sand at the water's edge is stained a deep maroon, and the sea froth is the color of wine.

Like all jobs, killing has its tedium. And its challenges. Ekborg, Stempel, and Lawler have to wade in deeper and deeper to reach still-living whales. Their rubber boots don't go high enough. They shouldn't have left their dinghies where they did.

After some conversation, the two crew members head back along the rocks and narrow beach to collect the abandoned craft and maneuver them closer to shore. Now Ekborg, Stempel, and Lawler are able to continue the killing from the small boats.

The sun is dropping, flattening into pink streaks and a reddish band. The eastern sky has mellowed to deep indigo. Vaguely, stars have emerged.

I have not taken my face from behind my camera, or looked back at Parnell and Martin, who've both on occasion muttered swears. But eventually they fall silent, and now it seems that everything—the whole arctic world—is monumentally hushed. The eerie quiet, I realize, comes from the fact that the narwhals have ceased their clicking chatter. Even the still-living ones are mute.

Finally the hunters head back to shore, using paddles to push their way through the whale bodies, which seem to have spread out and sunk down, opening up more space. They get out of their boats, pull them onto the beach, and pause for a few minutes. Their clothes are blood-soaked, their faces and hair blood-covered. It looks as if about sixty narwhals are dead, roughly half the migration.

Ekborg strides to the back of the beach, where Brock is pulling something long and heavy wrapped in a tarp from among the boulders. The tarp is unfolded to reveal a gleaming metal saw that must have been stowed there earlier. Ekborg picks it up and points the blade skyward jauntily.

He begins sawing off tusks. Due to the animals' positioning and the changing depth of the shallow water in which he wades, he must occasionally adopt a contorted posture—one foot pressing down on a snout, or his torso curved across a melon head to reach a tusk half hidden behind blubber. The men on shore look damp, cold, and tired—less like glorious heathen, more like soft, monied vacationers at the end of a long day in a foreign city, waiting for the tour-guided bus to pick them up and take them back to a good meal in a nice hotel.

They rouse themselves to begin collecting the severed tusks. Along with the crew members, they drag the tusks onto the beach, and begin sticking them upright at regular intervals in the soft sand. Eventually I recognize the emerging shape of the strange grid I saw on Noah's cell phone.

Obviously, Ned meant for his photos to be used as evidence. He probably thought he was keeping them safe by sending them to Noah's phone. But somehow either Hall or the Oyster Man found out about it, and Max was given the job of getting Noah's phone before anyone figured the pictures out.

It is now near dark. Ekborg, it seems, does not want to share the saw. He carries on in a crazed, triumphant way, and Stempel and Lawler stand by, shuffling their feet.

Brock approaches them and gestures toward the yacht. They gaze across the water and up at the sky as if finally noticing that the sun is about to set. Stempel begins to wave his arms in wide sweeps like a man signaling a jet. Ekborg raises his head from his work, tosses back his pink-streaked hair. The men on the shore wave him in.

Ekborg complies. On the beach the long saw is rewrapped in its tarp and stowed in the shelter of the boulder. Apparently, they're planning to return.

The five men steer the kayaks and dinghies through the floating carcasses and still-living whales, to the end of the inlet and out into the bay, where the
Galaxy
floats like a tall pristine island, outlined by white running lights, all four interior levels lavishly illuminated against the encroaching dark.

—

“Come on. We've got to get back to the plane while there's still light,” Parnell says.

“What about the tusks?” Martin says.

“Leave them.”

“No. They shouldn't have the profit.”

“They don't give a shit about money. They did it for fun.”

Martin nods toward the ivory grid. “That's more than fun. They're planning on doing something with those tusks. If they're not going to sell them on the black market, they're going to use them as status symbols, gifts. Fucking coffee table legs.”

“So we'll call the authorities as soon as our cell phones work.”

“No, I don't trust them. There's too many people getting paid off around here.”

Parnell heaves a sigh. “What do you want to do?”

“Wrap them in the tarp, drag them up the incline, and back to the plane. Bury them, or drop them in the lake until we can come back for them.”

“Are you crazy? It's almost dark now. We don't have time for that. Besides, if they don't have the tusks in their possession, they'll just deny it ever happened. We
want
those tusks to be on board the
Galaxy
when it comes in to port.”

Burning with anger, Martin strains against the obvious logic of Parnell's position. “They belong to my people.”

“Oh, please. Don't start with that. Your people want to make money like everyone else. Those Inuit guys on the motorboat brought the rich white boys to this place and showed them what to do.”

“Be careful what you say.”

“I'll say what I want.”

Martin's chest expands. He takes an aggressive step toward Parnell.

Parnell stiffens, doesn't flinch.

“This seems like a pretty bad time to be having an argument,” I say in a loud, sarcastic voice. “Especially since we're all on the same side.”

With slow, dramatic reluctance, the two men turn away from each other.

“I'm heading back,” I say briskly. “You guys bring the cameras.” I start striding down the incline toward the end of the inlet. Then I start jogging. Then I run.

They don't notice at first, which gives me time to get ahead. When I reach the steep slope that leads down to the beach, I descend too fast, stumble, fall on my ass, and begin to slide through the short scrub, setting off little avalanches of scattering rocks.

“Where the hell are you going?” Parnell yells.

“Gotta do something,” I call back.

“What?”

“You'll see.”

I hear Martin and Parnell's thudding footsteps on the path above. With luck, I'll make it in time. I race to the water's edge, start stripping off my clothes.

Parnell shouts, “What the fuck? What are you doing?”

“Going for a swim!” I yell.

“Are you crazy?”

“Don't you dare come after me. The temperature will kill you.”

I splash into the shallow water, push my way through dead narwhals, and when I'm up to my waist, I dive. The water's cold. But not too cold. Just about the same temperature as the tank at NEDU. Which, if I'm being honest, is pretty fucking cold. I suck air, suck water by mistake, choke, suck air, and start swimming like a madwoman escaping Alcatraz. I'm in serious distress and telling myself it's a piece of cake.

I can smell the blood in the brine, and when I lift my arm to stroke, there's a pink film on it that gleams. The narwhal bodies bump against me, soft and smooth, dense and strangely buoyant. I slither through them, doing a short breast stroke in the tight places, passing lifeless pupils the size of dimes and huge gaping mouths from which the tusk, actually a front tooth, has been hacked. When I get to the deeper water, I slow down a bit, conserving strength, and sense something big near me, ghosting along, partly in my wake and partly underneath me. I look back and realize I have a companion. A gray calf that bobs its head like a colt and is merely twice my size.

I have no idea how far I've swum or how far away the net is. I've lost touch with my hands and feet, my eyes, and half my brain. If I think about what I'm doing, I'll surely lose my nerve. So I don't. I just keep stroking. I talk to the little whale. I ask if he likes stories. I think absurd things like that.

I start to sense that the whales around me are alive. Their bodies are just as soft as the carcasses, but there's living tension in them. They feel more like muscle than blubber. Can whales be angry? I wonder. And I recall the sperm whale that bludgeoned the nineteenth-century whale ship
Essex
several times with its monstrous head until it found the exact tension point that made the whole boat crack to smithereens and descend posthaste to the floor of the Pacific. Thus making an impression on the young Herman Melville, who turned around and gave us
Moby-Dick
. These narwhals, rumored to be placid, could nevertheless with one languorous roll keep me submerged until I drowned.

Not good thoughts, not good thoughts,
I whisper to myself, picking up my pace until I'm stroking as fast as I do at the Y when I want to push the edge. The calf is only a few feet underneath me now. Maybe it thinks I'm its mother. Maybe that's what's protecting me.

My body is quickly deteriorating. My thoughts are sluggish, but I'm still conscious. To the best of my ability, I conjure mental pictures of Lewis Gordon Pugh and Lynne Cox. I think about his V-shaped chest, her hourglass shape. The frigid, dark blue Baltic. The sun setting over Antarctica. Ice floes like modernist sculptures. But the images fuzz out quickly in my overtaxed brain, and random words take their place
. Three hours. Four hours.
Mental stamina. Body fat.
I'm not even sure what I'm muttering.
Mount Everest.
Thermal exposure. Sleep.

The face of Trudy Flanagan floats before me:
This must be a lot to handle right now.
I slap the water, drag myself through it.
No, no. Piece of cake.
No psych testing.
Jelly is best.
The sports scientist pops open his mouth to cheerfully report that when the huskies get to the end of the Iditarod, they turn right around and want to do it all over again. A laugh bubbles up in me. Those crazy dogs! I see their bright eyes, hear their joyous barks. Then the voice of the Navy doctor booms like a warning foghorn between my ears:
Don't fuck with the equipment.

Fuck you,
I tell him.

Shut the fuck up,
he says. His bulb head lights up with new knowledge.
The data shows that the
physiologic process reversed itself. Reversed. Reversed. Reversed.

Tranquillity spreads through me. I have to believe it. We're not all the same. For reasons I will never know, this moment is my birthright, what I was made for. Nobody said it would be fun.

I swim right over the net and feel it only because my kicking leg touches its slightly submerged top. I grab the top rope, pull myself along ten yards or so to the buoy at the end.