Black Water, Red Death

Joe and Abe decided to go after that sound. Joe hurried to the boat and sat in the bow-harpooner position again and as soon as he sat down the boat began to move without anything being said. The crew hopped in as soon as they shoved to the water and with my mind still on shore digesting that wallowing, bellowing animal sound, I found my body out in the open water zipping along in a sealskin boat powered by eight paddles. Everyone paddled, even Joe, four to a side, working together to make one single dipping noise. Willie, Abe and Joe had all briefed me earlier on the importance of keeping in stroke, and I took my mind off the sound of the whale and concentrated on moving with the three paddles in front of me. This hunt needed teamwork above all others I have seen, and I was the novice. And though I didn't yet know how badly these people needed the whale, I did know that they wanted him.

In the back of my mind lingered the thought, What if it tips us over? I knew this sometimes happened, and if it did I did not want to be the one who leaned the wrong way at that critical moment on the whale's back. I watched only the arms and paddles in front of me, seeing the ice mass draw nearer as a blur, as in a camera out of focus.

And then suddenly we were there. We had covered the distance in just a few minutes.

We drew the boat alongside the ice and listened. The whale was still in there among the chunks of broken ice and slush-covered water. The ice along the edge was solid and Abe stepped out and rose ever so slowly to full height, peering over the rugged ice field. Again I got the sensation that we were after a mammal: no hunter would be so cautious with a fish.

The whale made two noises. There was a splashing of water and chunking of ice noise, and then the grunting, gurgling, guttural, wallowing noise. Wallowing. That's what it was. A 30-or 40-ton hog wallowing in a slush hole. And then the blowing. Fwsssshhh. Steam coming from an overheated radiator. But not quite; a warm breathing noise, too. There was an animal in there, Melville; an animal, not a fish.

We waited at the edge of the ice pack for the whale to move. Back across the open water in the camps, a mile of people scattered along the edge of the ice, standing, sitting, some in dark clothing, some in camouflaged white. The big white canvas tents were visible, because of their straight lines, against the backdrop of the jumbled ice. Two boats moved toward us carrying full crews of eight hunters each. There was no noise from any of this, save for the whale. Gradually, the wallowing and splashing became more infrequent and then fainter, and soon it became apparent that the whale had gone farther into the ice.

Joe and Abe conferred quietly in Inupiat. No one else spoke. They agreed to stay where we were. The crew suddenly relaxed, some removing their paddles from the water, first letting the water drip off, then quietly laying them in the boat, and lighting up cigarettes. And finally talking and chuckling softly.

I guessed it to be about eight in the evening. In the northeast, a long straight line marked the end of the clouds, with a clear clean sky underneath. The wind had gone down some and the sun would be above the horizon for another couple of hours. It looked as though we would have light enough to hunt all night.

Which is exactly what happened. No sooner had the whale in the ice gone out of hearing than another appeared in the open water of the lead. I didn't see it. But everyone else did. Abe pushed the boat away from the ice and we were paddling again, frantically, the hunters in the other boats paddling, too, angling out into the open water. Then on a signal from Joe we quit, leaving the paddles in the water but bringing them quietly in against the soft skin of the boat. Joe boated his paddle in the bow and placed one hand on the harpoon shaft, waiting, drifting, watching the water around us. He's watching for a whale to come up right underneath us, the rational part of my mind kept saying. He wants the whale to come up right underneath us. No. no, another part said. Just close enough to throw his harpoon and if it did happen to upset our boat there were two others close by to help out...we're all in this together. Once the adrenaline flowed there was no more rational mind saying what if, what if—only another part wanting to know where, because suddenly we were paddling again more furiously than ever. Everyone had seen the whale but me and again I wanted to see it, too. We paddled like men possessed, the three boats heading into a large fjord that cut into the ice pack, the paddling becoming something surreal. It was a death race in a nightmare in which you are being pursued by an unknown monster and your legs have lost feeling and you have to look to see if they are even moving and find that it is the ground underneath that is moving; a death chase between you and something huge and unknown, doubly surreal because you are the pursuer.

My arms and shoulders and neck and back and hips ached. It was not like paddling a canoe; doing that you can switch from one side to another. You had to stay on the same side and the only relief was to shift your weight to take the strain off one fatigued muscle and put it on another. There came a threshold beyond which the mind assumed control over the separate parts of the body, encouraging the arms to keep going, telling a cramped muscle that it was not cramped enough to cause a missed stroke, the mind visualizing the pull of the water against the paddle, directing the strain of each stroke down through the various muscles, from the arms to the neck, down the back and hips into the legs, the final gasp of energy seeping out of the feet into the skin of the boat and back into the water.