A Whale For The Killing (9 page)

THE HANN BROTHERS reached the plant about 4:30 in the afternoon and began forking their fish up on the wharf while an interested audience of plant workers listened to the tale they had to tell. It provided a major diversion in the otherwise dismal routine of working in a fish packing plant.

“You think she’s still into the Pond?” asked one of the foremen, a strapping-big—almost obese—man in his fifties. “More’n likely. Don’t see as she got a chance to get clear until full tide tonight.”

“But,” Kenneth Hann told me later, “if I’d a knowed what they fellers had in mind, I’d have told they she was gone clear of it already.”

Perhaps he would have done so, for the brothers wished the whale no ill. There were other men in Burgeo who did not feel as the Hanns felt.

ONLY A FEW MINUTES AFTER the Hanns finished unloading their fish and departed for their homes in Muddy Hole, another boat put out from the plant wharf carrying the foreman, George, who had been so interested in the whale, together with four younger men. All five were employees of the plant and they had obtained permission from the manager to quit early in order to go and “see” the whale. They did not go straight to Aldridges Pond. Partway down Short Reach they put in to shore and each man hurried up to his own house, returning with a rifle and whatever ammunition he could lay hands on. When they shoved off again, they were armed with two .30-30 sporting carbines, a .30-06 U.S. Army rifle, and a pair of .303 Lee Enfield service rifles.

Although these men had all been born on the Sou’west Coast, they had all spent some years away, either in Canada or the United States. Returning home for one reason or another, they had rejected the vocations of their fishermen forefathers and had instead sought wage employment at the plant as mechanics, tradesmen and supervisors. They were representative of the new Newfoundlanders envisaged by Premier Smallwood—progressive, modern men who were only too anxious to deny their outport heritage in favour of adopting the manners and mores of twentieth-century industrial society.

It was already growing dusk when their boat passed Richards Head and opened the mouth of the cove leading to Aldridges Pond. Suddenly the man in the bow gave a shout, grabbed his rifle and pointed with it. A whale was spouting just off the entrance of the cove.

The foreman throttled back and the boat slowed to a drift.

“Son of a bitch must’a got clear!” someone cried disgustedly.

As the whale sounded, three or four high-velocity bullets whacked into the water and ricocheted, spinning and singing into the darkening air. Although the boat’s crew waited expectantly for the great beast to reappear, it did not do so. Believing it to be the whale reported by the Hanns, and convinced it was now well on its way to sea, the disappointed men decided to head home. George, the foreman, was turning the boat when one man, who had only recently returned to Burgeo after a decade spent working in a Toronto paint factory, spoke up:

“I never been into the Pond since I was a kid. Let’s take a turn. Might stir up a couple of sea ducks or maybe a seal.”

Agreeably, George completed a full circle and the boat headed into the cove, crossed it, and nosed into the channel. At that instant all five men were electrified by what they later described as a sort of hollow roar—“like a cow bawling into a big tin barrel.” Almost at the same moment, there was a mighty splash at the inner end of the channel and a drift of spray descended on the boat and its occupants. The men stared at each other in amazement.

“Holy Jesus Christ! ’Tis still in there!”

They ran the boat’s nose ashore on a patch of shingle, sprang over the side and raced across the narrow neck of land separating the cove from the Pond. They reached the crest in time to see what one of them described as “... the biggest goddamn fish that ever swum! It was right into the mouth of the gut and looked to be half out of the water. The tail onto it was like an airplane. It was smashing into the water so hard, spray come right up where we was to.”

The five men wasted no time. Some dropped to their knees, levering shells into their rifles as they did so. Others stood where they were and hurriedly took aim. The crash of rifle fire began to echo from the cliffs enclosing the Pond and, as an undertone, there came the flat, satisfying thunk of bullets striking home in living flesh.

“You couldn’t miss,” one of the gunners recalled ecstatically, “I was shooting for the eye—big as a plate it looked. Some was shooting for the blowhole. But them bullets only seemed to tickle it. It kind of rolled a little, turned and slid off into deep water and went down. I guess we put twenty bullets into it.”

The whale submerged and retreated to the north end of the Pond but after a few minutes, during which the gunners hurriedly reloaded, she reappeared, heading back toward the channel mouth. The men held their fire until she was a hundred feet away and then let fly a concentrated blast. The whale sounded again, this time disappearing for nearly twenty minutes.

“Some of the lads figured as how we’d killed it, but that was crazy stuff. Take a hell of a lot more’n what we had to kill a thing that big! But George, he figured if we kept shooting every time it come toward the gut it’d give up on the idea and stay where it was to until next day. Next day being Sunday we’d have all day for sporting with it.”

The men had not brought much ammunition and after an hour had exhausted their supply. Reluctantly they returned to their boat and to Burgeo, where they spent the rest of the evening in convivial drinking as they toured from house to house around The Harbour and The Reach, telling the story of their exploit.

Sunday broke white and clear, with blinding sunlight glaring from the snow and ice of a silent land and on the sheen of a still sea. Completely unaware of what had been happening at Aldridges, Claire and I and Albert set out to the westward for a day-long hike on the scimitar of sand beaches which bars the waters of Little Barasway Pond from the open ocean. It was an unforgettable day for we saw seventeen bald eagles—an almost unbelievable number in this age when the bald eagle has become yet another vanishing species. They had gathered on the beaches from God alone knows how many hundreds of miles away to feed on tens of thousands of dead herring—victims of the seiners—which had washed ashore.

Meanwhile in Burgeo the bells of the Anglican and United churches were ringing and men and women were making their ways along the icy roads to morning service. After the services, knots of men gathered here and there to yarn a bit before going home for Sunday dinner. The main topic was the trapped whale. It would have been difficult to ignore the subject because ever since early morning a distant obbligato of rifle fire had been audible east of the town.

Not long after dawn, between twenty and twenty-five gunners had ringed Aldridges Pond. This time each man had a good supply of shells. A number of the merchants had obligingly opened up their stores and soon sold most of the high-velocity ammunition they had in stock. The morning shooting party included several of these merchants, together with some staff members from the plant and a good representation from among the smart young fellows who spent their springs, summers and autumns working on the Great Lakes freighters, and their winters at home in Burgeo drawing unemployment insurance. Also represented was Burgeo’s first businessmen’s organization, the recently formed Sou’westers Club, which was a combination service group and Chamber of Commerce committed to the proposition that Burgeo must transform itself as rapidly as possible into a really modern town.

With the arrival of the sportsmen, the whale retreated to the middle of the Pond, where she spent as much time as she could submerged.

THE SYSTEM WHALES have evolved to enable them, as air-breathing mammals, to survive for long periods in the depths is wonderfully effective. Unlike a human diver, the whale does not rely solely on the air it can store in its lungs. If it were to dive with lungs fully inflated, it too would be subject to the crippling and often fatal effects of what we know as the bends. Instead it stores most of the oxygen it needs in the red corpuscles of the blood and, by means of a special chemical process, in the muscle tissues too. Furthermore, a whale on a deep or prolonged dive restricts the blood circulation so that the precious oxygen is only distributed to those organs and those regions where it is most vitally needed.

When a fin whale surfaces after a long dive (there are records of dives of at least a forty-minute duration), it must expel the waste gases which have accumulated and then take in enormous quantities of fresh air; and it must do this swiftly, for it is vulnerable when it is at the surface of the sea. The arrangements which make this possible are impressive.

A whale’s blowholes are actually a mammal’s nostrils, which have migrated from the front to the top and back of the head. They are equipped with powerful valves and are connected to the lungs by a huge passage capable of handling an immense volume of air. The great bellows of the lungs are so effective that when a finner surfaces it can totally exhaust and then refill them to the bursting point in just over one second! After a long submersion this breathing rhythm must be repeated several times before the depleted supply of oxygen is fully replenished, and there must be an interval between breaths to allow the blood to absorb the oxygen which has been taken into the lungs. A fin whale submerges after each separate breath, rising to spout again at intervals of two or three minutes until, fully “recharged” with oxygen, it can again return to the deeps.

The first part of a surfacing finner to become visible is usually the hump housing the blowholes. The moment the hump breaks surface the valves snap open; the whale lets go an explosive exhalation, which is instantly followed by an implosive indraft. Then the valves snap shut and the great beast begins to descend, appearing to cartwheel forward in a flat arc so that the blowholes are followed at the surface by a long expanse of curving back and finally by the high fin, which is set well aft. The flukes seldom show, but twin circular disturbances of roiling water testify to their powerful presence as the whale vanishes from view.

THE BRIEF SURFACINGS of the whale did not give the sportsmen at Aldridges Pond much chance to spot their quarry, take aim and fire, and at first the gunners did not make very good practice. However, they soon began to recognize a pattern in the whale’s appearances and to take advantage of it. When she first surfaced after a long submergence, they held their fire. When she rose again to take her second and subsequent breaths, they were ready for her. The rifles cracked and the echoes reverberated back and forth from nearby Richards Head to Greenhill Peak.

As the day wore on, more and more boats arrived and an atmosphere of fiesta began to develop. Most people were content just to watch the show from the natural rock amphitheatre which cradles Aldridges. Men, women and children, many in their Sunday best, sat or stood and watched with eyes that brightened when the whale, beginning to panic, turned into shoal water, touched bottom, reacted in terror, and then flailed her way back to deep water again while a continuous bam
-whap
... bam
-whap
... bam
-whap
told how well the sportsmen were doing.

Not everyone who saw the show that day was happy about it. An elderly fisherman from Muddy Hole, who had brought his daughter and grandchildren to see a live whale, was disconcerted.

“It looked like rare foolishness to I,” he said. “What war the use of it? Them bullets cost money and they was heaving ’em away like they was winkle shells. ’Twould have been better to save their bullets to get a bit of meat in the country... but I supposes the likes of them chaps got more money ’an they needs. Still and all, they had no reason to torment the whale. She war no good to they. Happen they killed her, what was they going to make of her? Put her through the plant for frozen fillets? No, me son, ’twas a pack of foolishness.”

Another friend of mine, the mate of a dragger, was there that day. He did no shooting either and his contempt for those who did was surprisingly explicit in a community where criticism was seldom openly expressed.

“There was three young chaps there I knowed for what they was... bloody butchers. March of last year when the glitter drove the deer out to Connaigre Bay, they come along to have some fun. Nothing better to do, I suppose. I was aboard the Pennyluck, anchored up the Bay with engine trouble. When them chaps come, Lard Jasus, I thought ’twas the Germans. Shoot? They never stopped, sunup to sundown. I was ashore next day and they was dead deer, cows and bulls alike, all over the place. Yiss, bye, I knowed them chaps. What was their names? That’s for me to know and you to find out. Rotten bastards they is, but I’ll not tell their names.”

I changed the subject and asked him to describe the whale’s behaviour under fire.

“It made me feel right ugly just to watch her. She had no place to go, only down under, and she couldn’t stay down forever. I expected her to go right crazy after a couple of hundred bullets had smacked into her, but it was like she knowed that would do her no good. Once or twice she got wild, but for the most of it she war right quiet.

“One thing... she warn’t alone. I was standing high up on a pick of rock where I could spy into the Pond and out across Short Reach as well. ’Twasn’t long afore I sees another whale outside. It blowed first just off Fish Island. Then there was a stretch of time when no boats was in The Reach, and it moved closer and closer until ’twas fair in the mouth of the cove.

“Now here’s the queer thing. Every time the whale in the Pond come up to blow, the one outside blowed too. It happened
every
time they blowed. I could see both of them, but they was no way they could see one t’other. You can say what you likes, but the one outside knowed t’other was in trouble, or I’m a Dutchman’s wife.

“They fellows shooting at the whale weren’t no smarter nor a tickleass.* They was using soft-nose bullets and when they hits something they busts up... goes all to pieces. That whale must a had a foot of blubber and I don’t believe the most of them bullets got through at all. I supposes some did, certainly, but I don’t say she was hurted bad. Try and kill a thing that big with soft-nosed slugs? My son, they might as well have took to heaving rocks at her!”

* The local name for the small gull otherwise called kittiwake.

The shooting gallery went out of business early on Sunday afternoon when the supply of ammunition ran out. With nothing more to entertain them, most of the onlookers went home. My friend was one of the last to leave.

“The last I see of the whale, she was swimming pretty good. Was no blood coming from her blowhole but she weren’t blowing near so high nor staying down so long. Maybe she was just played out.” He paused thoughtfully and then concluded in a tone that indicated some embarrassment. “A man didn’t feel right about what was done that day. ’Twas no great credit to us folks in Burgeo...”