And what was to be done if Kannakapfaluk was angry? The traditional Inuit sought only to appease the spirits. If there was no afterlife in which to believe or anticipate, in life one sought only to avoid provoking the malevolence of the spirits. The modern Inuit seemed to do nothing. However justified, it was simply easier to blame the white man and his government for the end of the past. But Victor prayed anyway. He prayed to all the spirits, and when he prayed he asked for their forgiveness. Once angered, the spirits became monsters and they feasted on the flesh of the living.
Some say the earth will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
1
Below her, the ice was breathing.
Carol Harmon pulled her snow goggles down around her throat, adjusted the hood of her jacket, and tried to hold the syringe steady against the bite of the wind. Her fingers trembled not from cold, fear, or the ungainly size of the syringe, but from the awe of her magnificent trespass. The forty-gauge needle in her hand was as thick as a pencil and the plunger could draw nearly a pint of blood.
Carol shut her eyes for a moment, balancing, relaxing. She could hear the thin rasp of her own breath sliding through her throat in a shallow, steady rhythm, then see the vapor whisked away in air that was not quite twenty degrees Fahrenheit. In, out. In, out. A moment later, as if performing a gigantic mimic of this gesture, the ice moved with the gentle respiration of the whale beneath her.
She felt like a flea on the back of some immense dog, which she very nearly was.
The trapped whale had been discovered only hours earlier during an acoustical survey conducted by the U.S. research vessel Phoenix a stone’s throw inside the Arctic Circle. The ice, a floe the size of two football fields, obscured the exact size of this whale, its species, or even its sex. So far, the crew had exposed only four square feet of the animal’s thick, blubbery hide.
Chipping down through more than three feet of solid ice, Carol and one of her technicians eventually managed to extend the opening forward, clearing a larger area around the whale’s blowhole. Then, moving back and following some trial-and-error searching, other members of the research team opened another hole to expose the smallish dorsal fin at the base of the tail.
An elongated ridge along the animal’s spine gave the first indication that it might be a Balaenoptera musculus, a blue whale, the largest animal the earth has ever known. The prospect made Carol’s heart race.
From the distance between the two openings, Carol could estimate that the magnificent animal was also among the largest ever viewed in such suspended animation.
The impromptu landing party had been so preoccupied by the discovery that they had not even thought to look more closely at their surroundings. Then a radio call from the Phoenix — moored to the edge of the ice and nearly eighty feet above it at bridge level — reported more animals trapped by the same floe. Four more whales were discovered over the next hour, all of them Balaenoptera.
Unbelievable for many species, but especially so for the nongregarious Balaenoptera, a pod of five animals had been assembled here, all adhered to the same piece of drifting ice. Individually or frozen together to form enormous accretions, such floating ice masses provided ephemeral islands and bridges for polar bears and foxes, and temporary rookeries for seals and walruses. To a whale, bound by bulk to remain in the water yet requiring unobstructed access to the air in order to breathe, a large, continuous floe was nothing but a nuisance.
As the floe slowly rose and buckled beneath them, Carol and the crew of the Phoenix were somewhat reassured that these whales still had plenty of energy left in them. But for these specimens to be so far north this early in the year, they must be struggling to sustain themselves, even with the ample reserves of blubber that comprised as much as half their body weight. Growing to over a hundred feet in length, Balaenoptera subsist on a diet of krill — shrimplike crustaceans high in fatty-acid content — using their baleen plates to filter up to five tons of sustenance per day from the plankton in the water. Frozen onto the bottom surface of the ice sheet, the whales couldn’t possibly be feeding properly, much less sufficiently, and that was what concerned Carol most of all.
Soon the floe was alive with human activity. Carol’s voice crackled over the walkie-talkies every few minutes, coordinating teams of technicians to examine each animal and report its condition. The remaining technicians and all available deck crew used portable heaters and set up bucket brigades of seawater to the openings in the ice, pouring as much warmed water into the holes as possible. This would perhaps lessen the adhesion and would certainly keep the animals’ skin from chafing in the dry arctic air.
Such an extensive assemblage of animals was virtually unheard of, inspiring someone to dub this temporary landfall “the Balaenoptera floe.” There was easily a career’s worth of research here for someone, if only the whales could somehow be held this way and studied over time. Eventually the ice floe would break up, and the scientists knew their only reasonable course of action was to assist that process if these gentle giants were to survive. Any real studies would be incidental to their attempt to free the whales.
The most likely cause of the whales’ entrapment was a late-season freeze with extremely cold temperatures. Carol knew that there hadn’t been a storm in the area for more than two weeks, which meant that these animals would have been on starvation rations for some time, even after reducing their metabolic requirements. Another possibility was that the animals had simply become lost or disoriented — a phenomenon observed in whales for a number of reasons, ranging from magnetic disturbances to viral infections. In warmer climates, such maladies could cause entire pods to run themselves aground; in polar waters, the whales instead floundered in air spaces captured under the ice. Finding a breathing hole large enough, the animals might have to wait there for the floe to break up. By the time that happened, their warm-blooded bulk could become frozen to the ice the way one’s tongue stuck to a piece of metal on a cold day.
Without a breakup of the floe, many such animals died within a few days, their carcasses left to saturate and sink into the ocean’s depths.
Whatever had put them here, Carol still had difficulty imagining their bittersweet windfall. Five whales. Over a million pounds of marine mammal, directly beneath her.
In, out. In… out. Breathe.
Such a discovery would be awe-inspiring to anyone; it was particularly entrancing to a professional whale biologist. Carol’s interest in marine mammals of every description had followed her since childhood.
The family had obediently followed the career of her father, Dr. Charles Harmon, from his graduate work at Yale to positions on three continents before settling on the west coast of Canada. There, Carol and her stepbrother, Mark, would comb the rocky beaches of British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest, looking for sea-lion rookeries. As they grew older, Carol and Mark would borrow small boats from the marine station and venture offshore to see gray whales on their annual migration to the Gulf of Alaska.
After an honors degree at Oregon State, Carol completed her master’s at Stanford. Before venturing to Stanford himself, Mark had enjoyed a hitch in the U.S. Navy, working on ocean acoustics at a NAVFAC at Coos Bay, Oregon, then later, up the road at Newport, where the private sector caught his eye. It was in Oregon that Mark had introduced Carol to her first husband. Together, the three of them had worked in vaguely related areas of underwater sound propagation and had shared a nearly unbalanced passion for the sea. It had seemed the most natural thing in the world when Carol decided to specialize in bio acoustics and the study of whale vocalizations.