Killer

And they had hunted him ever since.

On the eighteenth of June he had driven his great body into the island-filled shallows of the Aleutian Chain. All that day he worked his way east, playing a deadly game of hide-and-seek with them, but their pattern of gutturals and clicks was well able to distinguish his huge body even among the islands.

Here they had nearly caught him, and in his escape he had seen them for the first time. The leader was huge, longer by a head than any other killer the blue had ever seen; he had two scars on his face: one at the tip of his nose, and the other from his upper lip, along behind his right eye. The second scar pulled the right lip up so that the leader could never properly close his mouth, and the white interlocking teeth were always on display.

He had come upon the group of killers three months earlier as they hunted the reef just south of Midway Island. Come in, wary as a shark out of the black depths to challenge the old bull who had led the pack, and drive him off, trailing blood, to the mercy of the deep. He had selected from among the docile cows one mate, the thirty foot female who was at present at his side, and he had led them east by north towards the American coast.

The pickings were good and they moved slowly, decimating the schools of dolphin along the shipping lanes; hunting seal around Pacific islands and even on the mainland coast; and when there were no large animals, there were always the schools of tuna, and even of mackerel.

During those three months, the killer’s mind settled. He returned with ease to his natural lifestyle. He led the pack surely and with confidence, and grew to know the comfort his gentle consort brought. And then, late in the evening of the eighth of June, some fifteen hundred miles west of San Francisco, the leader had picked up a new echo. He had made a short sound which alerted the others to his new, purposeful course, and he had moved off.

During the night they had formed the pattern which held them close to the big blue, and they had begun to follow him properly. They did not move in to the attack for they all knew the power of the great whales, and the first object was to tire it out. So they followed, harried, frightened the blue, making it exert itself to the limit of its abilities during the next ten days as the hunt progressed up the coast of the United States, across the Pacific and among the Aleutian Islands to that first, ill-timed, unsuccessful attack.

Every now and then, when the pack was hungry, one of two hunters went off after seal, sea lion and walrus, always returning with enough for all. But although they were never starving during this time, the pack were never as full and content as they had been on the sea lanes of the Pacific. And now, five days later they had driven the blue up through the Bering Sea past St. Laurence Island, through the Bering Straits, into the Chukchi Sea and the Arctic Ocean.

Since mid-afternoon the blue had been still, lying at the edge of the ice, apparently asleep. The leader guided the pack silently closer and closer. He too sensed the aeroplane’s crash, ignored it. The water was so thick with krill that visibility was down to a few feet, but the leader did not want to use his sonar, for fear of arousing their monstrous prey. He left the pack, therefore, and moved forward in the red fog to explore for himself. Inch by inch he moved silently through the living soup, back breaking water occasionally for a quiet breath. Then, unexpectedly, an abrupt current swirled the curtains of krill aside, and there, less than one hundred feet away, was the head of the sleeping giant. The killer paused, and then went back to the pack. Now it was time for the kill.

Counting the calf there were twenty-four killers in the pack. They split into six groups. The mother and one other pregnant female remained well clear with the baby, but close enough for it to see, to learn. This left five fighting groups: Groups One, Two, Four and Five, each of four; Group Three of five. The leader and his mate led Group Five. The five groups silently surrounded the sleeping blue, who was still plainly visible in the krill-free current. He was still asleep, at peace, totally defenceless.

Group One remained behind the whale. Group Two paired off and went to either side of him. Groups Three, Four and Five went to the head. In a few moments they were all in position around the sleeping monster. The leader hovered thirty feet from the immense face, his blood reeling in his veins, hot and terribly alive. His mouth opened and closed and the low sun made his teeth flash like huge candle flames. He waited. They all waited.

Then the leader’s flukes jerked down, up, down, and he was at the giant’s throat, sinking his jaws into the blubber. The blue woke in a panic. The teeth in its throat were not dangerous, for its arteries and veins were buried too deep in the fat to be touched by them; but their very presence signalled the gravest danger, and so the blue exploded into a frenzy of terror. Its great tail went up. The hawsers of its belly moved deep under its delicate skin, standing out slightly on either side of its genital pouch. Here Group One centred their attack. Avoiding the downward sweep of the great flukes, they fastened their teeth into the flesh laid open by the blue’s panic and as quickly as they could, they tore away huge ragged mouthfuls of blubber laying bare the muscles underneath.

The blue tried to steady himself against the forces unleashed by the movement of his tail, spreading its enormous flippers. Immediately, a pair at each side, Group Two attacked. They bit at the base of each flipper, trying to sever the tendons which made them move.

The blue, in its terror, never came anywhere near to comprehending the almost ritual sequence of moves which were bringing about its downfall; but their logic and their effectiveness were overwhelming. Like picadors in the bullring, Groups One and Two were destroying the sets of muscles which controlled the enemy’s most powerful weapons, so the whale could neither run away nor fight back. It was the logic of all types of pack, of wolves biting the legs and shoulders of an elk to stop running and kicking, to make it incapable of tossing those which finally go for the throat. But the ritual here was more complicated and protracted, for its participants were more powerful and intelligent.

With the first two groups fastened in its flesh, the blue whale sounded. It plunged in less than a minute down the six hundred feet to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. As the floor of the sea rose to meet it, the blue turned on to its left side, crashing its full weight against the thinly sanded rock platform. The terrible power of this landing burst the two killers on its left side like toy balloons. It also crashed the bones in the left flipper to formless splinters.

Above, the leader, who had released his grip on the blue’s throat as Group Two went in, probed the dark depths with his sonar, piercing the growing cloud of sand which hid the thrashings of his victim, waiting with groups Three, Four and Five.

After fifteen minutes the blue came up again towards the surface, trailing blood in great streamers from its belly and its crushed flipper.

Then it sounded again, but with so little of its original force that the remaining half of Group Two had no difficulty in swimming away as its right side crashed on to the ocean floor. The flipper was not even damaged, and as the whale rolled over they attacked again.

This time it only stayed down for five minutes, and as it laboured back up to the surface, the five killers in Group Three went into the attack. Swimming at the giant head-on, they fanned out slightly at the last possible moment and fastened themselves to its pendulous lower lip, using their weight and power to force the mouth open. But the blue was not ready for that yet, and, changing the angle of its ascent slightly, it came up with all its force through the ice at the edge of the pack. It was lucky: this section of the pack was still hard as iron, and a razor-sharp edge of ice sliced down one of the males as neatly as some giant fisherman’s knife, laying him open from head to tail, gutting him completely and leaving him to tumble down to the foaming water entangled in his own insides.