Black Water, Red Death

I got my seabag out of the umiak and thanked Joe for the lift, saying I'd better find my crew and help set up camp. The sight of the open water had excited him and he was all business now and barely heard me. I shouldered my bag and walked away.

"You come visit us, Ron," he called after me.

The other Joe, Joe Frankson, had already set up about half a mile down the ice. There was a lot of ribbing and joking about how I had missed the boat and most of the work but there was still a wide trough to be chopped for the boat, since the ice along the water in front of the tent was piled six feet high. We chopped with axes and picks and a long wooden-handled ice tool with teeth like a jack-o'-lantern. In two hours we had a driveway cut through the ice and the umiak stuck out over the water by three feet.

"That's so we go into the water quiet," Joe Frankson explained. "Don't make any noise when you're near the water. Whales can hear you."

It was a waiting and watching game. No, it wasn't exactly a game; you had only to look into the faces of the older hunters to know that. Whaling was still an important part of life for them: the two months of the migration, April and May, meant something important. Two months every year spent chasing the big black whales, one-sixth of their lives. It was much more than a game, but I wondered what. Was it the ancestral link with their fathers and grandfathers buried in the whale-rib-lined cemetery behind the village? A way of saying we remember? We loved you as children and remember the awe and respect we felt when you pulled these huge black beasts from the ocean. We remember the pride and strength we felt for our people that they could do such a thing. We remember it as one of the strong knots that held us together and we will not let it die. Is that what was in the faces of the old people? Was there more? Did there need to be more? Surely there was the challenge of the hunt. Hunting the largest creature on earth in its own environment. Having to get close enough to this beast to hand-throw a harpoon into it. Surely the challenge was there. And what of the mass of food they got from the whale? I wondered how badly they needed this food, the taking of which required so much outlay of specialized equipment, time, energy and money. There were other meat sources available. Ducks, thousands that flew overhead, at present ignored. Caribou and ptarmigan in the nearby hills, fish and seal and polar bear from the ocean. One source was conspicuously unavailable. There was no meat counter at the village store.

No, there was something more than merely providing in the look of the older men in their traditional white hunting parkas, standing on the ice ridges stoically watching the sea. It was a way of providing, and a substantial one if successful, but there was also the feeling of preserving. Preserving a ritual, a tradition, a way of life and a way of death; of keeping in tune with the ocean and its seasonal bounty. There was a religious energy among the older people that was not quite shared by the youth. Many of the younger people had moved out of the village to larger cities, as in small-town America. For them, whale hunting was a reunion, a time to get together and see what had happened to whom. The younger people did not look out to sea so much, but gathered in small groups away from the ice edge, talking about who was in town and what crew they were with. Most of them wore colorful down parkas and the popular store-bought boots with the rubber bottoms and leather tops. Mostly they spoke English while the elders communicated in Inupiat, the Eskimo tongue.

I was not sure what was expected of me, a guest, an outsider participating in this unique hunt. I am a hunter and could surely help with the harvest of ducks that flew overhead, but what of the whale? All I knew of whaling was from books and most of these were of a historical nature. I knew the white man had hunted them far differently from the Eskimo. The early New Bedforders hunted the open ocean from sleek company-owned clipper ships. When the whaling industry moved to the Northern Pacific in the late 1800s, they used both steam and sailing ships that also carried smaller whaling boats. The Eskimo had always hunted from the ice out of the umiak, and it was not until the early 1890s that they began using gunpowder. Before that, they killed the whales with harpoons and lances, the heads and cutting edges made from ivory and slate. The idea was to hamstring the animal near the flukes to prevent it from diving and then sever an artery so it would bleed to death. Charles D. Brower, a white man who actually hunted with Eskimos using these primitive tactics, tells in his book, Fifty Years Below Zero, of a single whale pulling 21 sealskin floats before it was finally killed. Every float was attached to a harpoon head stuck in the whale.

About 1890 the Eskimo began adopting those white man's tools that fitted him. Most notable was the use of gunpowder and the "whale bomb." That's what I was interested in. Exactly what is it that kills a whale in 1976?

I walked quietly down to the ice cut where the umiak waited, perched over the water with a harpoon sticking out over the bow. A yellow polyethylene line ran from the factory-made harpoon head up the shaft and lay coiled in the bottom of the boat. Attached to it was the skin of a spotted seal blown into a float. It looked like a stuffed toy with cute pudgy arms sticking out from a balloon body. Here were the old and the new working together: a nylon line attached to a primitive sealskin float.

"What do you think of that sealskin?"