Big Miracle (2 page)

About an hour after shoving off, the crew heard on their two-way radio another local whaling crew report their having spotted a bowhead roughly two miles off the tip of Point Barrow. Malik squatted in the bow. He redirected his helmsman to throttle up in order to get to the site, eight miles north–northeast as quickly as possible. The dinghy's top speed of twenty knots should get them there in about thirty minutes. The windchill made it feel far colder than the zero degrees it really was. The men rolled down the fur seal linings of their hoods to protect themselves from frostbite during the ramped-up ride across the rough sea.

From more than a mile away, Malik could make out the unmistakable mist on the horizon. The fine spray lingering thirty feet above the surface of the water before vanishing into the atmosphere was proof the initial sighting was accurate and that the spotted whale was still in the area. But Malik had company. Two other whaling crews were now hovering in the same area. Still, Malik was better positioned than his rivals and would remain so—unless the whale decided to change course. Without dramatic changes, the whale was Malik's for the taking. Malik signaled to slow the boat. He pulled off his hood and exchanged his fur mitts for the baggy bloodstained cotton work gloves he wore to kill many whales. The crew sorted the weapons they would use to strike their prey.

Before local whalers started using the modern machines and techniques developed and perfected by their more efficient commercial whaling competitors, the only way Eskimos could kill a whale was to repeatedly stab it with their handmade animal-derived ivory harpoons until it died. By 1988, those days were long over. Malik grabbed his four-pound graphite harpoon armed with a unique explosive device designed to detonate on impact to produce a larger diameter, and thus more severe wound. The helmsmen loaded the explosive cartridges into a shoulder gun, a stubby brass rifle custom made for killing whales.

Crew preparations proceeded quietly and unobtrusively. Malik and his men tried to remain invisible to the whale, or at the very least, distant and nonthreatening. While not much can threaten a forty-ton whale, why add to its already copious advantages? Malik looked at his watch: 10:30
A.M.
His crew had seven hours of daylight. If they got lucky and struck the whale soon, getting the haul onto land before nightfall would still be a tall task and was by no means assured. The crew would need help. Lots of it. Everyone in town with a boat would be called upon to lend a hand. Darkness just added to list of dangers all creatures had to endure to survive in the Arctic: exposure, the cold, disorientation, and good ole Nanook, the omnipresent, rarely-seen-but-always-feared polar bear, an animal whose nondiscriminating tastes range from the tiny Arctic fox to the huge bowhead whale and a growing fondness for human dumpster delights tossed in for good measure.

For the moment, the six men and their boat lay between the beach and the site of the whale. Malik ordered his rudderman, Roy Ahmaogak, to try and position the boat north and east of the whale so that they could run with the harpooned mammal toward the shore. They didn't want to tow a huge and unstable carcass any farther than they had to. But Roy knew that his main objective was to keep the boat close enough to attack the whale. If it meant a longer haul home, so be it.

Malik waved his paddle to signal other whalers in the area to back off as his crew was preparing a strike. It appeared to Malik that the fifty-five-foot whale was still not aware of his predicament as it continued to surface and breathe normally. Its hot breath formed a spout almost directing its pursuers toward the precise spot where they could collect their biggest and tastiest gift of the year.

Observing the whale's trajectory, the depth of its dives, its rate of respiration, and the distance between surfacings, Malik directed his crew to the site where he calculated the whale would next appear. Trailing the bowhead by about a hundred feet, Roy skillfully piloted the boat to intersect the whale's path. Malik held his breath, hoping the whale would not decide to surface under his boat. All the modern technology at his disposal could still not guarantee he wouldn't position himself and his crew directly on top of the moving whale rather than astride it.

Whalers aim their harpoons at a spot behind the two perpendicular breathing holes located at the base of the whale's skull. It is the animal's most vulnerable part, exposing a narrow cavity leading to the heart. If properly executed, the harpoon pierces through the blubber, through the cavity, and into the unprotected heart. A lacerated whale heart pounds with such force that those few whalers expert or lucky enough to have landed the “perfect strike” compare notes on how long they were able to maintain a hold on the harpoon before its wild pulsations knocked them off their feet.

Had this whale sensed the shadowy forms on the crew hovering ominously above it? Malik did not know. All he could do was prepare his harpoon. But for the puttering idle of the Johnson outboard, the crew was silent, consumed by their anticipation of the instant when the silence and stillness would be shattered.

Anxiety mounted as the whale submerged longer and deeper than at any point since it was first spotted. Before its last dive, Malik and his crew were close enough to actually see that the whale's blowholes did not open wide enough to signal a longer or deeper dive, yet longer and deeper it was. But it couldn't go on. The whale would have to surface. And when it did, Malik would be sure to be ready.

He grasped the harpoon firmly in his left hand, undulating comfortably to the rhythms of the churning sea. No one needed to be told where to look for the whale to next emerge. These were whalers, born of and for this moment. Nor did Roy, the rudderman, need to be told where or how to shuttle his craft into Malik's desired position. The two men did not need to communicate. They worked as integral parts of a whole.

At that instant the whale's shimmering black skin effortlessly glided upward through the surface of the roiling waters of Chukchi Sea at the precise point where every eye on Malik's crew was trained. Malik cocked his arms behind his round, thinly thatched head. His triceps tightened as he raised his hollow graphite harpoon. He knew the whale was at its most vulnerable immediately before starting its exhale. Harpoon in hand, a strong impulse ran through Malik's wiry frame lunging him forward toward his target. Carefully but forcefully shifting his weight from his back foot forward, Malik's throwing mechanics generated enough linear momentum to pull his shoulders around to create the rotational momentum needed to properly launch the harpoon. The force of such an explosion would have tossed nearly anyone else into the swirling waters below. But Malik emerged from his harpoon release as firmly planted in the bow of his boat as any baseball pitcher's feet would be at the base of the mound.

The razor-sharp tip pierced the lustrous black skin of the graceful giant. A primer charge planted at the end of the harpoon detonated as it lodged inside the whale. Recoiling from the shock of a bomb literally exploding inside it, the whale roared in confusion and terror as it plunged below the waterline in a hopeless attempt to escape its fate. The next blast came seconds later. This bomb, on a five-second fuse, detonated even deeper inside the whale and tore apart its pulmonary cavity.

Roy waited patiently for the sound of that second blast, which was his signal to raise his forty-pound brass shoulder gun to land still more exploding shells at or near the whale's head, a target so huge he could hardly miss. The whale surfaced, exhaling a geyser of blood, at which point Roy jerked the trigger of the lumbering weapon back toward him. The charge misfired. Instead of detonating only after it had lodged inside the whale, it instead exploded on contact. Chunks of charred blubber spewed in all directions. The whale fell back into the sea, leaving a storm of crimson hail in its wake.

Roy reloaded and fired twice more. The whale violently writhed in a frantic but powerful attempt to unshackle the inflated sealskin floats tied to the harpoon securely lodged inside it. The whale spun circles as the red water foamed in its wake.

After Roy scored his third shot securely in the whale's arched back, Malik motioned the helmsman to steer him still closer to the crippled and disoriented whale. As wounded as it was, the whale was still capable of escaping the crew, if not its fate, by plunging deep beneath the surface. If Malik could hit the whale with another wire-guided harpoon, the harpoon's floats might slow down the whale just enough to kill it. Malik readied and fired again. The sudden bloat of the whale's shiny black skin signaled another hit. The whale's huge tail caught one side of the boat, slamming it violently forward into its diamond-shaped shoulder blade.

Drenched in the whale's blood, the men grabbed hold of the gunwales to steady themselves inside their rocking dinghy. When Malik regained enough balance to look up, he saw a sluggish whale too gravely injured to carry on much longer. Concerned that the bowhead might make one last attempt to dive beneath a patch of ice before it died, Malik reached for another harpoon. Just because the beast was mortally wounded did not mean it had yet been subdued. The whale's size and its will to live could still push it onward for many miles, prolonging the endurance test between whale and Eskimo.

Malik need not have worried. Before he could fire again, the whale suddenly and quietly succumbed. Now the challenge was to secure their prize before it sank and the men did not have much time. Three other whaling crews out that morning watched and cheered the strike through binoculars from their respective vantage points stretched across the Chukchi horizon. Once the whale was dead, neighborly cooperation replaced friendly competition. Upon confirmation that the whale had succumbed, the sidelined crews went from passive spectators to active participants. They rushed to help Malik's crew keep the dead whale on the surface so it could be towed to shore for butchering.

As in ancient times, the modern way of “sharing the whale wealth” was to distribute the tasty proceeds in accordance to the contribution of the recipient. The more a crew participated, the more meat it got. The crews now rushing to Malik's assistance would be compensated with the butchered whales' choicest cuts.

People have always been the most important resource in a subsistence whaling community. The act of hunting, catching, securing, towing, butchering, distributing, and disposing of a creature as large as a bowhead whale required as many people as possible to help. Dragging a giant dead whale onto the beach for butchering—particularly one this size and during such an unusual time of year—is no small task. As word spread that Malik's crew had a whale in tow, Barrowans readied themselves to help.

Within minutes, regular programming on KBRW-AM, the only commercial radio station on Alaska's North Slope (serving an area bigger than the state of California) was interrupted to broadcast news of the kill, particularly Malik's current sea location so that designated town volunteers with boats could meet Malik at sea and help his crew ballast the whale and bring it safely to shore. Within an hour, more than eighty people in twenty-two boats had arrived on the scene. Even with such help, it still took four hours to haul the mammoth carcass across six miles of choppy seas and back to the beach.

By the time Malik and his six-man crew did get back to shore, it was too dark for them to see the hundreds of people who had assembled to greet and assist them. This was the moment every whaler dreamed of as a child and cherishes as he ages.

Before Christianity made its way to the Arctic coast in the early nineteenth century, Inuits, like nearly every pagan subsistence culture ever studied, revered—even worshipped—the source of their sustenance. That this seems somehow remarkable to us shows how the most revolutionary conceptual discoveries are quickly assumed to have been obvious to all. But this was not the case and native peoples were there to prove it. Before the notion that our world was created by a God that transcends time and space, it was only natural for people to worship a visible product of creation than an unseen, unknown creator. The religious revolution was to see God not in nature, but above and in control of nature.

Combining the ancient pagan practices of their ancestors with their own late twentieth-century American Protestantism, Malik gathered everyone on the beach to hear him offer thanks to the whale and to the God who created it. Then Malik's wife emptied a plastic bucket filled with fresh water into the dead whale's open mouth and then into its blowhole. Somehow, this “Arctic baptism” would make the whale's spirit a permanent part of the village. While no doubt thankful for the honor, the whale would probably have preferred to have restored to him what was once rightfully his.

If Barrowans wanted their whale meat raw—which they did—the butchering had to start straight away. If left unbutchered, even for a short time, and even in freezing temperatures, the process of decomposition would quickly convert the dead whale's massive energy supply into heat, roasting the carcass at temperatures near 300 degrees. Malik assigned several men to start carving up the whale.

Like Lilliputians tying down Gulliver, a half-dozen Eskimos mounted and climbed ladders against the side of the dead whale, carrying sharp fan-shaped knives mounted on traditional long wooden handles, called ulus. They stood on top of the two-story-high carcass, carving the blubber into a checkerboard pattern. Hot putrid air hit them in the face as they ripped two-foot-thick squares of muktuk from the whale's back with large iron hooks.

Plumes (more like big puffs) of steam purged from the whale as the men peeled away the long slabs of blubber. The steam could be seen for miles around Barrow's flat, featureless plain. Lying hundreds of miles farther north than the hardiest tree could grow, it didn't take much height for something to be seen from great distances. It took less than an hour for the entire circumference of the fifty-five-foot whale to be stripped clean of its muktuk, leaving something that looked more like a pink airplane fuselage than the skinless remains of a fifty-five-foot whale. The slabs of muktuk were quickly spirited into twenty-two neat piles reserved for each crew involved in the hunt. While the property of the each crew's chief, the piles were payment to be dispensed at the chief's discretion.