A Whale For The Killing (10 page)

WHEN CLAIRE AND I returned from our walk late Sunday afternoon, we were tired and content. The tensions which had beset us during the long months of travel had sloughed off like old skin. The outer world of turmoil and disaster now seemed so distant as to be almost irrelevant. I do not ever recall having felt more at ease within myself than I did that night as we prepared to go to bed.

Claire wrote in her journal:

“It is so nice to be back among people who live simple and uncomplicated lives. We have really missed the people here. How I hope they are never spoiled by the savagery and selfishness that seems to be spreading over the whole world like a fog...”

BY MONDAY MORNING A BITTER nor’easter, blowing down from the frozen barrens, had shrouded Burgeo under a low and scudding overcast. Those who could stay at home by their kitchen stoves did so gladly. Few fishermen were out; but the plant workers, men, women and children as young as fourteen, red-faced and bending to the chill wind, shuffled off as usual to begin their bleak day’s work. They stood for endless hours on cold concrete while numbed hands filleted and packaged a thin stream of fish coming along a conveyer belt from the belly of a deep-sea dragger unloading at the wharf.

There seems to have been little talk about the whale that day. Those who had been at Aldridges on Sunday were disinclined to discuss the matter. A letter written to me by one of the Burgeo clergymen a year afterwards may throw some light upon this reticence.

“I hope you won’t think all the people were acting in their ordinary way that Sunday. Afterwards a lot of them felt very bad about it. Except for those few who did the shooting, most of the people had no idea of harming the whale. When they saw the shooting and watched it for a while they got worked up by it; and afterwards a lot of them felt very bad. They hardly knew how to tell what was the matter, but most of them was quite upset next day...”

That there was indeed something like a conspiracy of silence explains what is otherwise difficult to understand; that Claire and I, living less than three miles from Aldridges Pond, heard not a whisper about what had taken place there. Onie Stickland, Simeon Spencer, Uncle Art and the rest of our friends and neighbours, who were usually so ready, not to say eager, to keep us informed of everything that happened in Burgeo, spoke not a word to us about the whale.

On that Monday morning, while we remained in ignorance, the Hann brothers were cautiously and somewhat fearfully entering Aldridges Pond. As Kenneth recalled it:

“We knowed the gunning
might
have killed the whale, though ’twas more likely she was just bad hurted. But you got to watch out for even a deer with a bullet in its guts, and that whale, she had hunnerts of bullets into she. There was no telling what she might do, but we knowed one flip of her tail could put an end to we.”

Gingerly they puttered through the south channel, stopping just inside to see what the situation was. The surface of the water was ruffled only by the wind. Although they waited a quarter of an hour they saw no sign of the whale. So they started up their engine and headed across the Pond, but they had gone only a hundred yards when she surfaced close ahead and almost on a collision course. She blew once and began to sound. The two men frantically snatched up their oars to help the engine push them to the safety of the shore. They were rowing for dear life when they were appalled to see the enormous head passing directly beneath their boat.

“I says to myself, ‘Kenneth, me son, that’s it! You’re gone out now!’ I was certain sure that whale, with all them bullets into her, would be so hateful she’d lay into the first humans she could reach. Feared? I was shaking like a dog!”

But Kenneth was wrong. The whale passed majestically on her way and when she surfaced again it was at the far end of the Pond. Still shaken, the Hanns hastened to the pushthrough and on into The Ha Ha, where they spent the next several rough and frigid hours wrestling with their gear. They were glad to regain the shelter of the Pond but they were still leery of the whale, so they prudently pulled their boat to shore close to the entrance before beginning to gut their fish.

While they were busy at their task, the whale continued to cruise steadily around the deep part of the Pond, blowing at intervals of about ten minutes and showing no further desire to dare the passage of the south channel. Once or twice the men saw big, circular water boils appear on the surface and they thought the whale was chasing herring.

Such placid behaviour restored the Hanns’ confidence somewhat and as they coasted the shore of the Pond, homeward bound (and keeping, as they say, “one foot on the land”), Douglas was moved to take a bait-tub full of herring and empty it into the water not far from where the whale had just submerged.

“Don’t know as she cared for it,” he explained, “but I thought ’twould do no harm. Truth to tell we was feeling friendly toward she... she give us a clear passage through the Pond, spite of what them fellers done.”

As far as is known, the Hanns were the only people to visit the whale on Monday... but Tuesday was a different day.

The weather had improved by Tuesday noon and a party of riflemen, hearing that the whale was still alive, thought there might still be some sport to be had with her. The only difficulty was a shortage of ammunition, but there was an answer to this problem. Like many remote Canadian communities, Burgeo boasts a platoon of Rangers, a semi-military organization of volunteers under command of one of their own number who holds a temporary commission in the Canadian armed forces. Each Ranger is issued with a .303 service rifle, and cases of ammunition are kept at each detachment headquarters. Part of this ammunition is issued for target practice while the balance is retained for use in case of a “military emergency.” The Burgeo Rangers had long since exhausted their practice issues, mostly on caribou, moose and harbour seals.

It happened that several of the whale hunters belonged to the Ranger platoon. On Tuesday morning one of them visited the second-in-command of the detachment, who was also a senior member of the fish plant staff, and asked for a special ammunition issue. The spokesman did not claim there was an emergency in Burgeo but he did point out that target practice never came amiss and that it was unlikely they would ever find a better target than “that whale, up to Aldridges.”

A number of rounds were issued... just how many I was never able to determine, but I was later to count more than four hundred empty .303 cartridge cases lying in piles around Aldridges Pond, all bearing the markings of Canadian army arsenals.

Apparently Tuesday’s gunners were not entirely easy in their minds. Perhaps they were aware that an undercurrent of disapproval now existed in the community. Or possibly they were a bit worried about the illegality of what they were doing since, of course, they knew that even the carrying of rifles, let alone their use, in the countryside at this season of the year was prohibited, as a measure intended to protect the caribou and moose from poachers.

For whatever reason, those who manned the three boats heading down The Reach toward Aldridges late Tuesday afternoon had waited until all the fishermen who used the Pond had left it. In fact, they were so circumspect that nobody seems to have even seen their boats depart. Had it not been for the unexpected arrival on the scene of a man and his son who, in their dory, had been fetching a barrel of spring water from a stream at the foot of The Ha Ha, the names and activities of Tuesday’s sportsmen might never have been known. Of the eleven gunners who disembarked at the Pond that day, eight had taken part in Sunday’s affray, while three were respected members of Burgeo “society” who had missed the Sunday fun because of church commitments.

The man who had gone to fetch water at The Ha Ha was not hesitant about describing what he saw.

“We heard the shooting before ever we left the spring, but never thought much about it till we come to the pushthrough. The young lad was up in the bow and we no sooner got into the Pond when a bullet comes wheening over his head, close enough so he could feel the wind.

“Well, sorr, we hauled the dory in behind a rock, right smart. Then I takes a spy over the top. ’Twas something like I never see before. There was that crowd from down The Reach, one of them fellers on every point, and carrying on like they had all gone right foolish. They was yelling and jumping, and hauling away on bottles, and shooting at the whale, and yelling some more. There was bullets flying every which way. ’Twas a wonder some of them never killed the others.”

What he was seeing that Tuesday afternoon was essentially a repetition of Sunday’s fusillade... with one important difference for the whale. The army-issue bullets used on Tuesday were
steel-jacketed
and so had a penetration far greater than that of commercial, soft-nosed bullets. Instead of shattering into small fragments after making a relatively shallow entry into the whale’s blubber, these bullets pierced deep into her body.

“The creature was drove clean crazy! She got herself into the shoal water on the eastward side of the Pond, the farthest she could get from them fellers, and there warn’t no more than just enough water to keep her afloat. And beat the water! My dear man, her tail and flippers was flying in the air! ’Twas a desperate sight, I tell you. And all the while you could hear the thump of them bullets just a-pounding into her.

“After a time she kind of thrashed into deeper water and then she took a run for where we was to. I swears to God I thought she was going to come right on top of we! She come to a stop fair in the mouth of the pushthrough with her mouth swole up like one of them balloons they used to fly on ships in the war to keep the German planes away. I tell you, ’twas more’n I cared to see! The young lad and me, we hauled back into The Ha Ha and rowed right out around Aldridges Head. I’d a rather crossed the ocean in me dory than gone across the Pond that evening!”

This man had one further detail to add. As he and his son were rowing into Short Reach they encountered four more whales.

“Three of them was in deep water a quarter-mile offshore, but t’other was right into the mouth of Aldridges Cove and he was near as wild as the one inside the Pond. He was running right up to the edge of the shoal ground, blowing high as a steeple, and sending a wash right up onto the shore. I and the young lad hauled clear over to the south side of Fish Rock and took to the lee of the islands. ’Twas a long way out of our course, but I tell you I never liked the looks of that big fellow. Far as I were concerned he could have the whole channel to hisself!”

AT THEIR HOMES in Muddy Hole that Tuesday evening, the Hann brothers knew nothing of this new assault upon the whale. They had spent several quiet hours in her company earlier in the day and had begun to take an almost proprietary interest in her, and even to feel a strengthening sympathy for her predicament.

“What a hard business,” Kenneth remembered. “’Twasn’t fitting for a creature the like of she to be barred off. Whales likes company, you see. Was times Doug and me thought she was after looking to we for company... Times us’d be gutting cod and that girt big head would come along six, eight feet off the boat, just under water and moving slow and easy as you please, with nary a ripple of a wake... Could see her eye sometimes, looking up at we. We took the habit of saving the herring out of the cod bellies and heaving it overboard when she come nigh. Can’t say as she took to it, but ’tis certain she had no use for gurry!* When we’d heave that overboard, she’d go right clear of we until it washed away.”

* The guts of the cod.

When the Hanns returned to the Pond on Wednesday, they noted changes in the whale’s behaviour and appearance.

“She waren’t blowing near as high as Tuesday and she blowed a lot oftener. Couldn’t seem to stay down more’n a few minutes at a time. When she come close up we see her hide was peppered with white spots the size of silver dollars. Doug said they was likely bullet holes but a man could hardly believe she had that many bullets into her. I thought maybe ’twas where she’d had barnacles hung onto her, and they got scraped off.

“Well, sorr, we soon found out the truth of that. Just afore we left the Pond two of them speedboats come in from The Reach and six fellows jumped ashore. They all had them army rifles, and George Oldford, he started right in to shooting.

“We hailed them and told them to hold off so we could get clear of the Pond. George, he yelled down to we they had orders for to finish off the whale. Put it out of its misery, like. I told them that was only foolishness. ‘You’ll shoot somebody yet!’ I told them. They never answered but when we was passing out of the south gut we heard the lot of them open fire again.

“Doug, he turns to me and says ’tis time somebody put a stop to it. Trouble was, the Mountie waren’t likely to take a hand unless some of the big folks told him to, and they was into it as much as anybody... People was needing to use the Pond for the fishing and to fetch water from The Ha Ha, but ’twas hardly safe to go in there at all.”

Although I still knew nothing about the continuing attacks on the whale, they were no secret to most people. The firing could be distinctly heard in the eastern parts of Burgeo and by Thursday a rising indignation on the part of those who customarily used Aldridges Pond had brought the matter to a head. Late Thursday evening some of the Muddy Hole fishermen decided on a course of action.

During my years in Burgeo I had been called upon on a number of occasions to speak, or write, on behalf of individuals and groups who felt themselves incapable of reaching the ears of those in authority. Although a little vague about the real nature of my work as a writer, they assumed I had some kind of influence with those up above.

After supper on Thursday two fishermen from Smalls Island walked into our kitchen bearing gifts of cod tongues and a huge slab of halibut. They sat on the daybed and we talked for a while about the state of the fishery, the weather and other usual topics of Burgeo life. It was not until they were leaving that the real reason for the visit came out.

“I suppose, Skipper, you knows about the whale?”

“You mean the finners in The Ha Ha?”

“No, Skipper, I means the one down in Aldridges Pond. Big feller. Been in there quite a time.”

“What the devil would a whale be doing in there?” I asked incredulously. “What kind of a whale is it?”

He was vague. “Don’t rightly know. Black, like; with a girt big fin. They says it can’t get clear... Well, goodnight to you, Missus, Skipper.”

And with that they vanished.

“Now what do you suppose that’s all about?” I asked Claire.

“Who knows? Maybe there’s a pothead caught in Aldridges.”