Black Water, Red Death

Along tapering ice trough was dug down to the water so the whale would slide gradually uphill, and behind that two ice bridges created a three-foot-deep, three-foot-wide wedge of ice to which a two-inch-thick rope was secured as an anchor for the block and tackle. It took four men to carry each of the two pieces of block and tackle. The blocks had three pulleys each. And then it was pull, and pull, and pull. It took four hours to drag the whale, tail end first, onto the ice. Immediately the men were at it with their butchering tools, long wooden-handled knives, making inch-deep cuts in the black skin, marking out the shares in checkerboard fashion. I climbed an ice hummock to see the entire animal. It looked both sad and grotesque lying there on the ice, belly down, facing the ocean for the last time. People milled around the huge black body, inspecting the multitude of white scars it had incurred while alive. These three long jagged ones in back were from a killer whale, an old man explained. This one might have been a harpoon; that ugly curved scar on its back was probably from the propeller of a large ship. Scars are more interesting to old people who know of such things. The kids were intrigued by the head, the huge tongue visible because the jaw had rigored half open; the beady eyes; the baleen, or whalebone, growing down from the upper jawbone like a screen, the longer pieces seven feet in length. The kids rubbed their mittens across them, playing them like vertical Venetian blinds. Hundreds of pieces of plasticlike bone, long black hairs growing out of the side, through which the animal filtered its minute food supply. Baleen was what made these whales extra valuable in the 1880s and '90s. Like so many animals that gave their pelts to the fashion world, the whale contributed its natural plastic (before plastic was manufactured) for milady's corset stays. At its peak, baleen brought $5 a pound and the plastic bone on a large whale might be worth as much as $10,000. This in a time when a man might work for something like a dollar a week.

Even though the whale looked lost and forlorn on the ice, there was an ironic smile even in death that said it really didn't matter; a whale-death smile, as though the largest of the earth's creatures knew something about death that the rest of us couldn't fathom.

And then from somewhere out across the water and ice:

Ah-whooo-ie.

Ah-aah-whooo-ieee.

The village had taken another whale.

Our crew had the second share in this whale and I stayed on the shore ice for another butchering. This was a much larger animal and we cleared another ice trough and dug two more ice supports beside the first whale. Before we got that one out, two more had been taken. The wind had kicked up and stalking the huge beasts was much easier.

The next five days are as one single homogenized memory: endless hours of chopping ice with three or four people standing by, waiting for the person using the ice tool to tire or pause for a break—and then someone else stepping in saying, Here, let me try that, brother. The fresh person whacking at the ice with the pick or the spud or the ax until he tires. One of the elders comes over from his supervisory post at the lean-to, watching us sternly, but if you look closely at the aged and wrinkled face you can see that he is pleased, well pleased that the young people show enthusiasm for the whaling. It is a knot, a strong knot that binds his village together; if it is to continue it must be passed on to the youth. He watches a young lad with eyes that have seen countless whales, polar bears, seals, caribou and walrus and countless changes in his village, but here is something that has not changed so much. Then he turns and walks quietly away.

There are endless hours of pulling on the rope. If anything dramatizes the unity that whaling brings to Point Hope it is the rope, the two-inch-thick rope running through the block and tackle to the whale. There are a hundred hands on the rope; there is pulling, grunting, straining. The rope is moving and the whale is coming up. Someone shouts and we pull for all we are worth, the rope moving steadily now. We are walking instead of tugging. We are making one step at a time, but there is no more strength in our arms and we are good for only one more pull. And then the two-inch rope pops like a rifle shot. People fall over each other and the pulleys scream as the whale slides ever so slowly back toward the sea. Three hours of pulling in vain. You want to say the hell with it and sleep—but an elder is already splicing the rope.

There is endless butchering. A whale is no exception to the rule that an animal should be butchered as soon as possible after the killing; if the red body meat is not gotten away from the stomach within 12 hours it will spoil. The bacteria in the stomach are not dead and they create heat, and the Eskimos waste nothing—even the two or three hundred feet of intestine are saved, savored at the whale feast in June after it is all over. But mostly the Eskimos want the muktuk, the two-inch-thick slab of black skin and blubber that tastes like oysters or clams and looks like vulcanized rubber and brings $4 a pound this year at the coop in Kotzebue, a nonwhaling village. Under the skin is a foot-thick slab of pink blubber speckled with red flakes and looking exactly like strawberry ice cream, oil-rich blubber that they burn mixed with driftwood in their home stoves. But first, before all this, comes the bloodletting—sticking the whale behind the head with a long-shafted knife, the blood gushing out of the beast like water from a hydrant. It is a stream of red blood thick as a man's arm gushing for two minutes, four minutes, hot steaming blood melting the ice and fouling the air, holding everyone's attention and awe—even those who have seen it many times before.