Black Water, Red Death

Then I saw the shiny angular back rise out of the water a hundred yards to starboard. It was moving away from us, visible for a full cinematic mind-frame. A charge of power rushed through the boat, everyone suddenly gifted with an untapped energy source, the mind leaving the body on its own now and contemplating what it had seen, the monster visualized, a living creature swimming away from us, heading toward the blur of the ice field.

Then the paddling stopped and all heads turned starboard. A couple of hunters were grumbling, not seriously it seemed, and I raised my head to see chunks of ice bobbing and the water whirlpooling underneath, swirling as though someone had pulled the plug out of the ocean right below us. We had come to the floating ice field and the whale had sounded just at the edge. He was now safely within the ice refuge and suddenly I was overcome by the odd feeling that we had been chasing a whale that knew we were there and was afraid and wanted only to get away. Could that be? Were these creatures afraid of eight men in a skin boat?

Yes, they were. We chased whales all that night, perhaps a dozen; either chasing after them or—and this seemed a more likely way of taking one—trying to intercept them as they traveled up the channel. Every whale moved in the same northerly direction; it was indeed a migration, and, if seen in time, intercepting their course was fairly predictable. Three or four times that night (an Arctic night that grew just dark enough so that it was hard to see them coming more than three or four hundred yards away) you could hear them, you could feel them, but for an hour you couldn't see them. And then suddenly it was getting lighter and a new day had begun and once more you could see them coming up the open water of the lead, their backs once again glistening. Three or four times we were on a perfect intercept course, the whale coming toward us almost playfully, weaving above and under the water like a giant porpoise. How could it know we were there? How could it know that out of the thousands of miles traveled this would be the most precarious moment? Three or four times we had quit paddling and drifted silently, stealthily, into a perfect ambush. The whale would be coming toward us, blowing heavily but peacefully like a long-distance swimmer who has not yet taxed his first wind, his angular back glistening out of the water, sliding along for what seemed like five long drugged seconds. One's mind would say, This is it! This is it! Here it comes! Here it comes! Behind me Abe whispers, Three more times, three more times, and the shiny black back shows again, coming for us, with Joe very slowly standing up in the bow, his hands secretly groping for the perfect harpoon balance. And then one more time, just one more time, and the whale knows, he knows, dammit, and does not arch his back out of the water to receive the harpoon point and the whale bomb. We do not see him again. Twice Joe saw whales under the boat and moved as if to throw the harpoon but stopped, sat down, shaking his head, saying Too deep, too deep.

The trouble was, I believe, that there was no more wind. The water was flat calm, the air ungodly quiet. Too quiet to close up to a whale. The long strings of migrating eider ducks now made an awesome sound, like a freight train without the engine; three and four hundred ducks strung out perhaps a quarter of a mile, creating an unbelievable draft of wind, flying so close together their wings touched five or six times before they passed, creating a sound like rapid small-arms fire.

The first time I looked at my watch it was 4 a.m. I felt a strange alienation toward it. What a foolishly deceptive way to measure time, in tick tick tick seconds when the night had passed with huge rushes of jammed-together sensations. Periods of frozen eternity as a whale approached the boat, long lulls when nothing happened or seemed that it ever had. And then chasing a whale again through another eternity of physical torture, thinking it will never end and never had a beginning and then sitting quietly, silently, punch-drunk with fatigue, waiting again for something to happen.

We had pulled into the floating ice once more. The sun was on fire behind the mountains beyond the village. The sky was red with a forest-fire-at-dawn glow. The water was still calm and the silence descended upon us from the heavens. Half the crew was sleeping, sitting up, their heads rolling drunkenly or resting on their chests. Those of us still awake passed around a filter cigarette. We shared a secret feeling: we had survived, we had endured, we would watch for the whale. Except for Abe, who was alert and smiling, we were zombies. I sat and stared with glazed eyes out across the water. I dozed. I was awakened by an unnatural sound. A high-pitched, almost musical sound.

Ah-whoo-ie.

Ah-aah-whooo-ieee.

A cheer went up from our crew, arms and paddles raised. Then they chanted.

Ah-whooo-ie.