A Whale For The Killing (15 page)

Because I had been at the Pond I missed this broadcast but, hearing it now, remembered a telegram received the previous day from a friendly sailor on the
Harmon
II
,
a herring seiner owned by the Newfoundland government and used for the training of outport crews. The
Harmon
was lying inactive at her berth in Corner Brook on the west side of the island and the sailor wondered if she could be put to work catching herring for our whale. I told the Sou’westers about the telegram, and added:

“If Smallwood means what he says he can hardly refuse to send the
Harmon.
It shouldn’t take her more than a day or two to get here. With her gear she can seine a hundred tons a day and we can turn Aldridges into the biggest damn herring bowl in history!”

“Might take some time to arrange, though,” the plant manager said cautiously. “Government don’t always move too quick, you know.”

“Well, all right. In the meantime why don’t we call British Columbia Packers at Hermitage? They’re fishing at least a dozen seiners on the coast; some of them right here among the islands. We’ll ask them to donate a few tons of live herring as a stop-gap until we get the
Harmon.
”

I picked up the manager’s phone and, after fuming through the usual delays, reached a B.C. Packers official in Hermitage. I told him our needs and waited expectantly while he took a few seconds to think it over.

“Sorry,” he said at last, “we can’t spare the herring. Need all we can get to keep our plant working full shift. Sorry about your whale...”

He hung up before I could become abusive. The plant manager calmed me down.

“Listen now. There just might be some old capelin seines around. We could find out easy enough. We could maybe hire a crowd and hand-seine into the cove at Aldridges tonight when the tide’s high. Might be able to purse what herring there is in the cove and drag the seine right in through the gut. Then all we’d have to do was keep the entrance barred off till the whale had her feed.”

Since this appeared to be the only course open for the moment, we decided to give it a try.

I ARRIVED HOME TO BE met by a distracted Claire. “Thank heavens you’re back!” was her relieved greeting. “There... that damned telephone again!
You
answer it!”

The call was for Bob Brooks from his impatient editor, ordering him to depart from Burgeo that very night.

“Bloody fool,” Brooks muttered after he rang off. “Does he think I’m going to call a cab, or maybe jump aboard the next Air Canada jet? Where in hell does he think I am?”

It was a good question. Most of our callers seemed to believe Burgeo was a suburb of Halifax, or maybe of Boston. The very impatient producer of a major U.S. network show had telephoned to inform Claire that he and his crew were catching the first scheduled flight to Burgeo and would be on hand next morning.

“Tell Mr. Mowat to have 110-volt power available beside the whale for lights, and we’ll need two half-ton trucks and a station wagon to carry our gear from the airport.”

Claire rose nobly to that one. In the most winsome accents, she replied: “We’ll try to find you some gasoline lanterns. I’m sorry but there is no airline and no airport. If you can find a charter ski plane to take you as far as Gull Pond we can probably get a dog team to pick you up there. But do bring your snowshoes, just in case.”

As we sat down to a hurried meal, I leafed through the messages. There was another telegram from the Premier.

I HAVE THE PLEASURE AND HONOUR TO INFORM YOU THAT YOU ARE APPOINTED KEEPER OF THE WHALE STOP THE OFFICIAL DOCUMENT RECITING YOUR APPOINTMENT WILL BE FORWARDED IN DUE COURSE STOP KINDEST REGARDS.

JR SMALLWOOD

“What the devil is
that
all about?” I asked in bewilderment.

“Joey was interviewed about it on the CBC this afternoon,” Claire explained. “He said the whale is worth a hundred million dollars in free publicity to Newfoundland. Canadian Press wired a copy of an interview
they
did with him. Here, read it for yourself.”

St. John’s, Nfld.
C.P.
Author Farley Mowat has been officially appointed Keeper of the Whale and an appropriate uniform for the office is under consideration, Premier Joseph Smallwood announced in the Legislature.

“We have not decided upon a uniform,” Mr. Smallwood said. “He normally wears a kilt. But I’m sure we would not want him monkeying around with an 80-ton whale wearing a kilt.”

As laughter rippled through the house, the Premier cautioned that no member or citizen should “take lightly the extension of this great tradition in Britain’s oldest colony.”

He quoted The Keeper of the King’s Purse and The Keeper of the King’s Conscience as other examples of the office, adding, “It has now been extended to Newfoundland for the first time with this appointment.”

“The whale has a name now, too,” Claire said. “You’d never guess... it’s Moby Joe! For good old Joey himself.”

“It may strain his famous sense of humour a bit when he finds out his namesake is a lady, and probably pregnant to boot,” I replied. “Well, let him have his fun. Main thing is he’s officially said the whale is under government protection. I’m going to wire him to send the
Harmon
down.”

Smallwood and the mass media were not the only ones to “climb aboard” the whale that day. There was a message from an entrepreneur in Montreal offering me $100,000 if I would deliver her, alive and in good condition, to the World’s Fair, Expo 67. Another offer came from a circus owner in Louisiana stating he would be happy to buy the whale if I would have her stuffed or otherwise preserved for exhibition.

Canadian marine science now also awoke, if only partially, to its golden opportunity. A biologist, who was too busy to come and see the whale for himself, sent the following telegram instead.

DESIRE OBSERVATIONS OF WHALE BY CRITICAL OBSERVER SUCH AS YOURSELF LIKE TIME IN SECONDS BETWEEN BLOWS OVER TWENTY-FOUR HOUR PERIOD STOP CORRELATION ACTIVITIES WITH A DECREASED BLOW RATE STOP FEEDING BEHAVIOUR IN DETAIL INCLUDING SPEED AND RADIUS OF TURNING STOP AVOIDANCE OF OBSTACLES AND DEFINITE PLAY BEHAVIOUR STOP HOW MANY EXCRETIONS OBSERVED TWENTY-FOUR HOURS...

Not all the responses from the outer world were as absurd. There were a number of telegrams from individuals whom I did not know, and would never meet, which were simple and moving affirmations of the fact that some human beings
could
care about the unhappy plight of a distressed member of another species. These messages were something of an antidote to the unpleasant suspicion that I had got myself involved in a public circus. And, too, they helped ease the guilt I was feeling at the brutal and unthinking assault upon the people of Burgeo as a whole by the media—an assault which I had been instrumental in unleashing.

Almost every story printed or broadcast during those first few days took pains to stress the attack made on the whale by the riflemen, making it sound as though the entire population of Burgeo had taken part in an orgy of bloodletting. Many writers and broadcasters took a tone of holier-than-thou revulsion against the barbarism of an uncouth band of savages.

For years I had been publicly extolling the virtues of people on the fringes of “civilization,” whether they lived in arctic igloos, aboard ocean-going tugs, on prairie farms or on the coasts of Newfoundland. I had celebrated their unsophisticated honesty, defending them against the smug contempt of admass man. I had sought to be their champion—and now, because of my feeling of kinship for the whale, I was being made to look as if I had turned against the outport people and had joined their detractors.

THE SEINING EFFORT had been arranged by the Sou’westers during the afternoon and now they called me to say it would consist of the two Anderson brothers (a pair of dour little men who owned the only capelin seine in Burgeo); Kenneth and Douglas Hann; and Curt Bungay and Wash Pink. The Hanns and the Andersons would each provide a dory to assist in working the seine. Although high tide was not due until after midnight, I thought it would be wise to make a preliminary reconnaissance soon after dark. Curt agreed and we set off in his boat.

The sea, black and motionless as stretched silk, was literally alive with herring. Immense schools drove off on either bow. They were right at the surface and, as they dashed away from the boat, the ebony face of the waters suddenly glowed in pale bands of saffron phosphorescence. Occasionally one shoal overrode another and thousands of herring broke through the surface and sparkled in the beams of our running lights like myriad shards of mirror glass. When I turned the spotlight downward, it revealed layer upon layer of silvered fishes as far as the light could penetrate.

Only once before had I witnessed such a stunning aggregation of living things. That was in 1947, when I watched the mass migration of tens of thousands of Barrenland caribou over the Keewatin tundra. At the time it had seemed inconceivable to me that anything could diminish such multitudes of living creatures; yet, before a decade had passed, the caribou had been virtually eliminated from much of their immense arctic range.

On that winter night in 1967, it seemed inconceivable that such vast numbers of herring could ever be significantly diminished even by man’s monstrous predation; and yet by 1972 those vast schools had been so heavily decimated that informed biologists were predicting an end to the herring fishery in the entire North Atlantic before the end of the decade.

The little cove outside the Pond was jammed with herring. “Lard Jasus!” cried Curt with the uninhibited enthusiasm of a true fisherman. “Would you look at that! I don’t say as what a man couldn’t git out and walk ashore and never wet his feet!”

For fear of disturbing the schools, we did not enter the cove but instead landed a few yards farther down the open shore. With the aid of flashlights we scrambled over the slippery rocks to the channel in order to remove the barrier net the Hanns had put in place. Someone had been before us. The head-rope of the net had been cleanly sliced and the net itself had already been hauled ashore in a tangled heap.

When I asked the Hanns for an explanation of the ruined barrier net, they were evasive. Not until later, when Curt and I were alone in his kitchen awaiting the arrival of the Andersons with the seine, did I get an explanation.

“Seems as if some of the people down to The Reach is right ugly about you barring off the Pond,” Curt said. “Claim nobody got the right to bar off a boat passage. Not you, nor the Mountie, nor Joey hisself.”

“But,” I protested, “the Hanns fixed the net so anybody could slip one end of it and pass a boat through with no trouble. The fishermen must know it’s not intended to keep them out of the Pond. It’s just to keep the herring in.”

“No matter, Farley. ’Tis partly that sign you put up saying the Pond is closed. We... them fellows been free to come and go on the water anywhere they wants, all their lives. If you was to bar the channel with anchor chain I don’t say they wouldn’t cut it clear somehow.”

I was getting angry.

“That’s just damn stupid! Surely they realize we have to hold herring in the Pond. And it won’t be forever... not more than a month at most... Well, the hell with it! The channel’s going to be barred and it’s going to stay barred so long as need be.”

Curt’s round, red face was impassive and he made no reply. I got to my feet. “Let’s get the crowd and go. It’s midnight and we’ve work to do.”

The moon was up by the time our three-boat flotilla deployed off the mouth of the cove. Quietly the men fed the hundred-yard-long seine over the stern of Curt’s boat as she slowly moved parallel to the shore. The Andersons, in one dory, were left to hold the free end. When the net was all paid out, the second dory, manned by the Hanns, took the remaining end. Then both dories moved landward toward the cove.

The curved net began inching shoreward as Curt, Wash and I waited, watching silently. Then, as if there had been an explosion down under, there came a violent eruption and a surge of water that set us rolling wildly. I instinctively grabbed for the gunwales to brace myself just as a sonorous
whoosh
sounded so close at hand I thought for a moment it was in the boat itself. A fine mist settled over us. Transfixed, we stared astern where the streaming back of the Guardian was arching smoothly under, not a dory’s length away. Curt was the first to recover.

“Lard God Almighty! That was close enough! Hope the bugger’s got his radar working! What the devil do you suppose...?”

He was interrupted as the usually imperturbable Wash Pink shouted:

“Look, bye, look there!
Look
at them herring drive!”

Fifty feet to port, between us and the entrance to the cove, the water was surging with the bodies of wildly fleeing herring. In the glare of the spotlight it looked like a groundswell running to shore after a storm. The swell seemed to break against the right-hand section of the seine and along the remaining gap between the Andersons’ dory and the shore.

Curt and I looked at each other.

“You don’t think...?” I began hesitantly. “You don’t think he did that on
purpose,
do you?”

“Purpose or no, Farley, bye, he sure and hell druv a couple hundred barrels right straight into the cove.”

Later the Hanns told us the rush and flow of herring under and around them had rocked their dory. Kenneth had no doubt at all as to what had happened.

“That whale you calls the Guardian, we t’inks he has his own way of doing for the one inside. Me and Doug’ve seen he rush the cove like that afore. ’Tis certain he be trying to drive herring into the Pond for she to eat.”

Fortunately for our nerves, the Guardian did not reappear. In a few minutes the two ends of the seine were in shoal water. Wearing hip waders, the four fishermen went over the sides of their dories and began pursing the seine through the cove toward the mouth of the channel. Penned ahead of them was what we later estimated to have been about five tons of milling little fishes.

When the trapped school was almost in the mouth of the channel, the men began wading back and forth along the perimeter of the seine, banging the surface of the water, shouting, and shining flashlights into the seething mass. Finally an arrow stream of fishes sped into the channel and in a moment the entire school was pouring into Aldridges.

It was too dark to see what was happening beyond the channel, but the swoosh and surge of water, and a mighty splashing of flukes, told us that the prisoner was hungrily enjoying the bounty we had provided.

The first sweep was a great success, but a second failed when the seine snagged on the rocky bottom and allowed most of the herring to escape. Nevertheless, the men managed to bag four or five barrels in one end of the net, and they decided to tow the bag right through the channel. Kenneth Hann described what followed:

“We was no more’n ten feet inside the Pond when we opened up the bag and let the herring go free. I had a holt of the seine and was leaning overside to see was they all clear, when Dougie yelled for me to look arter myself. I turned me head and there was the whale coming straight for we with her mouth open wider’n the main hatch of the
Baccalieu.
She was pushing water ahead of her like one of them ocean liners, and the dory rose right up and near capsized.

“By the time I got me bearings she was gone again. And I tells you, bye, it never took we long to be gone out of there ourselves. If they was a herring she never got, he must have been some slick. She could have had we just as easy, but she never bothered. ’Twas just as well. I never did envy that fellow Jonah anyhow.”

All in all it had been a good day. Temporarily, at least, we had solved the feeding problem. And we knew for sure that the lady in the Pond had a good appetite and was able and anxious to fill her belly.