Qawik put the meat down, stared at Pat, "I will eat your flesh someday, little bitch."
Paradise rose in a high parabola, each day rising earlier and earlier, until one day Paradise did not set. The whalers could hear the ice creaking and groaning. They had put watchers out, and one day Pat came running into the camp.
"The whale," she said. "A pod of them beyond the ridge."
They had a boat, an old wooden Yankee whaleboat, built by a man named Wade.
Wade had built the boat so he could get to Purgatory. Like Others, he had believed that Purgatory was across the Sea of Purgatory, and that if he rowed long enough he could reach the continent and make his way out of Hell. Soon after he finished his boat, his work had been discovered and the Fallen Angels fell upon him, flaying him alive and casting his flesh to the whalers. The whalers said that they sometimes saw Wade wandering die beach, a man with no skin, searching for his flesh.
Wade's boat leaked, was heavy in the water, but it could crack through ice.
The whalers dragged the boat out onto the ice, over the ridges, to the edge of an open channel of water. And they waited.
Leviathan rose. The great gray whale burst through the tee at the edge of the open channel of water. Ice cracked, heaved, fell in great blocks around the hole. Leviathan supped back down, sank, came up again, hitting the ice again.
He popped out of the open hole, 80 feet of whale, danced on his flukes, and then slammed down onto the ice.
The shuddering ice woke the whalers from their sleep. Qawik got up, slipped on his mukluks, grabbed the bomb gun, and ran for the boat. Queequeg was in the bow, holding the harpoon.
Qawik jumped in, Ukalliq joined them, other whalers came aboard. Pat climbed into the stem.
"No," said Ukalliq.
"I must witness this awful destruction," she said.
"Let her," Qawik yelled from behind. "We do not have time to argue."
Pat climbed in, the whalers grabbed oars, and they shoved the boat over the ice and into the water. Twenty yards ahead Leviathan thrashed in the water, leaping up, slamming down, his belly flops like fifty elephants thrown onto tike sea.
"He teases us," Ukalliq said. "Some say Leviathan is the Devil himself."
"Devil or not, we are going to catch him,' Qawik said. But he remembered the Grace's proclamation: you will hunt whales, but never catch them.
The boat crawled through the cold water, chunks of ice thumping against the sides. Water leaked through the cracks of Wade's crude boat, and Pat was put to bailing. They rowed, awkward strokes, but Leviathan was slow, and they closed the gap.
Leviathan swam slowly, his great flukes rising up and down like flapping bellows. They paddled gently, eased up ten yards, then five, then two yards behind the beast. Queequeg flicked the safety off the harpoon, raised the shaft. He took a quick breath, raised his arm, and thrust the harpoon into Leviathan.
Below the head of the harpoon was a small rod. The rod hit the whale and triggered a shotgun shell that drove a barbed bomb into the flesh, a bullet for behemoths. Queequeg counted; one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three. The bomb exploded, and Leviathan rose.
He was a mountain of flesh, a titan of tonnage, eighty feet of power and might and horror.
Leviathan turned, head facing the whalers, and opened his great mouth. Teeth like swords-row upon row of teeth-gaped at them. Dead things oozed from the beast's mouth: demon fish, green slimy things, the battered pieces of the damned.
"Azah," said Qawik, "that is not Arviqluaq. This is a beast I have never seen."
"It is Leviathan," said Pat. "It is the whale of all whales. He has come to get his revenge."
Qawik hefted the bomb gun, a great gun with a barrel an inch-and-a-half wide, a barbed bomb down its barrel. "Perhaps," said Qawik. "We will see what Leviathan can do against this."
Leviathan rolled over, dove, and went down. A line was attached from the harpoon to the boat, and when the whale dove, the line sang from the boat until all five hundred yards were strung out. The line yanked, and then the boat began moving, "A Nantucket sleigh ride!" Queequeg yelled.
Qawik shook his head, looked at Ukalliq. "It is not how we do it. We throw our floats, and let the whale drag the floats, not the boat." He stared at the great open leads. "But there is enough water. Perhaps the whale will not sound under the ice."
Leviathan towed them over small cakes of ice, through the open channel of water. The whale rose twice, lay gasping for breath, then sounded again. The third time the whale rose. Leviathan surfaced in a great red cloud of blood.
He rolled over, began spinning, winding the line around his body.
"He's reeling us in," Ukalliq said.
"No," said Queequeg, "I think not. Qawik, move up to the bow."
Qawik traded places with Queequeg, stood at the bow, bomb gun ready. Leviathan rolled, blood oozing from a great wound in his back. Qawik raised the gun, clicked the safety off, sighted down the barrel.
"Closer, closer," he said. "Okay, okay. Just a second..."
"My Lord," said Ukauiq.
Leviathan turned, great head facing them, and opened his mouth. He rose up on his flukes, and fell back, yanking the boat toward the cavern of his mouth.
"Kill it!" Pat screamed behind him. "Kill the beast!" Qawik squeezed the trigger, fired at twenty feet. The bomb flew towards Leviathan's great eye, hit it, sank deep, and exploded. The whale fell back, pulling the boat toward him.
"Cut the line!" Qawik yelled.
Ukalliq grabbed a hatchet, swung at the line, and cut it. Pat turned at the sound, screamed in horror as the line tightened around her foot and yanked her into the sea.
The boat drifted away. Pat thrashed in the water, was pulled to Leviathan, closer and closer, into the maw of the great beast. The whale opened his jaw, bit into Pat's chest, and speared her with his teeth. He shook her like a rag doll and spat her out. Leviathan rolled, eye streaming blood, kicked his flukes, and dove into the deep blue sea.
"A good hunt!" Qawik yelled. "A good hunt!" He began singing his whale song, a low guttural scream. The whalers rowed over to Pat's body, pulled it into the boat. Queequeg stared at the disappearing cloud of red. "But we did not catch the whale,' he said. Ukalliq smiled. "It does not matter. It was a good hunt.
Next time. Next time we will catch the whale," When they got back to their camp, they found a new darting harpoon, and five hundred yards of new line.
They cut up Pat's body and feasted on her flesh. They hunted Leviathan. Qawik was never sure if it was the same whale or a different whale. The whalers would go out to the leads, set up camp, and always the whale would come. He came to them; they never had to hunt him. He came in an explosion of ice, or they would hear him moaning in the distance, or they would see him thrashing in the middle of the open channels. Whalers would come and go, and they would lose a whaler to Leviathan, and eat it like they ate Pat, but they never caught the whale. They would come close, but they never caught the whale.
Qawik would stare at the open leads, at the vanishing bubbles, at the harpoon sticking from Leviathan's back, at the great wounds the bomb gun made. But he never caught the whale. They hunted well, but never caught the whale.
And he did not mind.
"Doesn't it bother you not to catch the whale?" Queequeg asked him around the campfire.
"Never," Qawik said. "It is the hunt that is good. If the hunt is good, that is what matters.
Perhaps I am not worthy of Leviathan. Perhaps that is why he does not come to me. Perhaps Leviathan does not wish to yield his body."
"I do not understand this," Queequeg said. "Why should you not be worthy? You are a good hunter. Is that not worth enough?"
"It is not enough to be a good hunter," Ukalliq said.