Salt Water Tears Read online

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  The garden is unchanged, the silence is unbroken,

  Truth has not yet intruded to possess

  Its empty morning nor the promised hour

  Shaken its lasting May.

  —W.H. Auden

  Her name... was Anastasia.

  I remember her best on sultry summer evenings when storm clouds have boiled off and the world simmers in chartreuse, just-washed clarity. Demarcations of shape and texture are surreal in that yellow light, and in the exaggerated precision of colors it’s almost as if I’m there again in Polmak’s forest. I remember her there behind the falls in her opal gown with her arms crossed over Rosendal’s tarnished blade, the way she looked before I woke her, the way she looked when Polmak’s forest was safe outside the veil of time.

  If I concentrate hard enough, close my eyes and breath deep of the wet air, I can remember almost all of it. Though every year it seems more a dream, I know I held her, however briefly. There was magic there—the entire place was magic. How much of that magic was used to ensure that I would love her on first sight, I can’t say, even now, years later. I choose to believe that my loving her was a result not of Polmak’s magic, but of her own, a subtle enchantment imbued in the beauty of her face, the aura of her golden hair, and the supple grace of her body.

  I loved my Sleeping Beauty for the feminine perfection that she embodied. And because I wanted to love her. Wanted her. More than anything.

  It started, oddly enough, with a dead whale, one that I didn’t kill.

  • • •

  They brought me across the bay on a boat that should have never seen service in such waters, little better than the kayaks and umiaks these quiet Inuit prefer for hunting walrus and seal. Her motor coughed and wheezed and she took on water around several rusted cleats. Periodically, one of her crew of two would bail. The other Inuit clung to the tiller as if he feared the motor would drop off without his weight as counterbalance.

  Though the ice had broken over Baffin Bay—it was, after all, nearly July—there were still enough floes to make the passage dangerous. If our tiny boat were to become caught between two of these drifting behemoths, we’d be crushed like the most fragile of petrel eggs. Exciting, the Inuit would call it. My seagoing years labeled it madness. I watched them carefully as they maneuvered around the ice. If they were nervous, or even excited, they did not show it. Nothing penetrated their composure. Stalwart. Staunch. Sober. These are words used to describe the Eskimo. They’re not generally inclined to request assistance from Greenlanders. A thousand years of war with such Norsemen as Eric the Red, Leif Eriksson, and my own distant ancestor, Thorfinn Karlsefni, haven’t been forgotten.

  I still didn’t know for what reason I was being ferried across the bay. Didn’t care, provided the check in my pocket was good. A hundred Danish kroner to listen, they’d said.

  I’d been bought, of late, for a hell of a lot less.

  It took nine hours to cross. I cursed them for not sending a helicopter, the preferred mode of transportation in this wilderness. I spent those nine hours huddled in my petty coat, my woolen cap pulled as low as it would go, chilled clean through to the marrow. I sat near the bow where the wind had only partial access to me, taking covert nips from the flask of rum in my breast pocket. Even had there been enough to share, the Inuit did not seem inclined to consort with me. They kept to themselves in the stern, concealing, perhaps, a bottle of their own.

  It’s said in the Northwest Territories that there are two types of men, those who share their thoughts with you and those who’d rather die. Of the former, there are very few. Among the native Inuit, there are none.

  They beached the boat on a stretch of black shale somewhere just south of Pond Inlet. The tiny beach was flanked on the north and south by Baffin Island’s usual coastline: towering, desolate cliffs comprised of crumbling dark slabs of rock. The cliffs seemed like barren sentinels holding the shoal against the sea, as if the beach might at any moment attempt to escape inland. The route to the interior was a narrow, snow-filled gap presently occupied by three snow mobiles with passengers. I wondered how long they’d been waiting and gathered some petty satisfaction in believing that they’d been there throughout the entire boat ride. The only other feature on the beach was the dead whale. She lay twenty paces to the south, thankfully downwind of me. Dead whale was an odor with which I was all too familiar and not at all inclined to sample.

  I managed to disembark without getting my feet wet. Such had become the state of my existence, that I found such a petty accomplishment worth noting. My two traveling companions remained where they were, the taller of the two holding the boat steady with an oar. One of the three on the beach made his way across the shale while I waited, wondering if I had time for another sip of rum before he reached me.

  “Thank you for coming,” said this Inuit. “I am Seeglook.”

  “Erik Karlsefni,” I responded, thankful that he spoke Danish. My Inupik is awful. ‘“You asked that I listen, so talk.” Seeglook motioned toward the dead whale. “This way.” Silently, I cursed. It appeared that I’d been paid less than twenty dollars American for a nine hour trip to identify a dead whale. “Narwhal,” I told him without approaching too close. “She’s dead.”

  “How did the cow die?” Seeglook asked.

  I wanted to ask who gave a damn, but it was his show and I had his money in my pocket. Cursing again, this time out loud, I approached the putrescent corpse. A narwhal cow averages about four meters and a ton and a half. This one was smaller than that, a young female who might have just this summer been old enough to mate. The female narwhal is not an impressive beast; it’s the males that bear the tusk which makes them extraordinary. I’ve seen tusks half again my height. Prized as a powerful mythological totem, antidote, panacea, and aphrodisiac, an unbroken narwhal tusk used to earn me ten thousand kroner. Of course that ended with Greenpeace, the ban on commercial whaling, and my fathers death. Though not listed as an endangered species, narwhals are still protected. Even the Inuit are limited in their hunting of them.

  I expected to find no outward signs of the cow’s death. They beach themselves frequently, suffering from exposure to chemicals dumped by the same countries whose commercial fisheries put my father and me out of business when we tried our hand at something other than whaling. But it was obvious what had killed this whale. Her head was scored with deep, crisscrossing lacerations, hundreds of them. There was a massive hole in her side, an obvious tusk thrust. I could only guess at its depth based upon the diameter of the hole and my experience with narwhal tusks: no less than a meter of penetration.

  “You have seen such before?” Seeglook asked.

  Ignoring the stench, I took my knife from my belt and cut away the thick blubber around the puncture wound. Suffusion of blood throughout the surrounding muscle tissue indicated that the cow had been alive when the thrust occurred. I had wondered if it could have perhaps been some sort of accident as a male had tried to push the dead female aground.

  Seeglook cleared his throat impatiently.

  “No,” I told him. “The bulls will fight each other for mating privileges, but they don’t harm the females. Lacerations like that are common as the bulls joust with each other. Occasionally, you’ll see an actual puncture wound, but not very often.” And certainly not delivered with such ferocity. I tried to imagine the speed with which such a thrust must be delivered to penetrate so deep, but could not.

  “This is the fifth such whale in the last three weeks,” said Seeglook.

  “All like this one?”

  “Yes. We are concerned for the whales as a whole.” The Inuit made a vast sweeping gesture with his arms as if to encompass not just the bay and its pods of narwhal, but the entire arctic circle. “Our own survival is linked to theirs.”

  I doubted that. Though the Inuit hunt several species of whale, they survive as much or more so on caribou, birds, seals, walruses, and fish. The loss of a few narwhal could hardly endang
er them. A hundred kroner didn’t buy an argument though; if they wanted to feel threatened by these incidents, so be it. I stood back from the whale and shrugged my shoulders. “It’s a rogue. Find him and kill him.”

  “We would like for you to do it.”

  I laughed to cover my sudden bitterness. “Maybe you haven’t heard. Killing whales is illegal.” I tapped the thick breast of his reindeer parka. “Only Eskimos like you can get away with it.” Many Inuit detest the name Eskimo. It was given to them by early European explorers and means eaters of raw meat. In their own tongue, they are the Inuit, the Real People. If Seeglook was insulted, he didn’t let it show.

  “Canadian law sets a limit of 542 animals a year,” Seeglook countered. “We have already taken our limit.”

  Probably more than your limit, I thought. The regulation is impossible to enforce with so many Inuit spread over such a vast area. Something else was going on here. Seeglook wasn’t telling me everything. “I’m not interested,” I told him. And, though I was already bone tired and dreading the return trip: “Have your men take me back across.”

  “We will pay you twenty thousand kroner.”

  I had turned and taken half a step back toward the boat. Now I hesitated. “Twenty thousand will not put my ship back in the water. It would cost half that again for repairs.”

  “We will pay for the repairs up front,” Seeglook said. “The twenty thousand’s yours when the whale is dead.”

  “And how will I know I have killed the right whale?”

  “That,” replied Seeglook, “is why we came to an expert.”

  • • •

  While it might seem to some that Seeglook was paying me a compliment when he called me an expert, nothing could be further from the truth. Nor was he referring to me as an expert on whales. The Inuit know me for what I am—or rather, what I was when my father was alive and the Valiant, our boat, was still afloat. The expertise to which Seeglook referred was my expertise in killing. The killing of whales.

  We ran a successful whaling operation, a tradition handed down through many generations. The Karlsefni have always made their living on the sea, most by hunting whales. Even Thorfinn took his share of whales during his explorations to the south. Whaling was the only life I knew, as far removed from any imposed concept of right and wrong as was the natural order of hunter and hunted.

  I grew up on the deck of the Valiant, hauling in frozen ropes, standing watch for tell-tale spouts, working a flensing knife with the older men, and, eventually, hurling the harpoon. In the early days, we took the right and the sperm whales, the gray and the humpback and the bowhead. For a time the smaller rorquals were safe: they yield less oil and have shorter baleen plates; they carry no ambergris or spermaceti; they’re swift and powerful and nearly impossible to obtain with the thrown harpoon; they’re denser than seawater, sinking as soon as they die. But that changed with the diminishing number of larger whales and the American invention of the exploding harpoon gun. To catch the rorquals, the rapidly expanding commercial whaling enterprises built faster boats and equipped them with air compressors to pump the dying whales full of air. It wasn’t long before my family was out of business, shoved aside by the more powerful competition. The slaughter went on in earnest until the northern seas were depleted of whales save for the small ones such as the beluga, pilot, and narwhal.

  The slaughter didn’t end there. It shifted south to the Antarctic, home to more whales than all other waters combined. There too, the commercial industries pushed out the small whalers from places like Argentina, the Falklands, New Zealand, and Australia, bringing to bear vast resources in the form of larger, faster ships, helicopters, sonar, radar, and rendering vessels where a whale could be stripped right at sea. At its peak in 1962, more than sixty-six thousand whales were slaughtered.

  Once, when I was a very young man, I was confronted by a Siberian Chukchi child who knew what I did for living. She called me names, asked how I could live with myself. I tried to explain to her that whaling was all I had known, all I had grown up knowing how to do. It hadn’t been wrong; it had merely been what my family did to put food on the table. I explained to her my father’s analogy comparing the whale to the American buffalo. Whaling, he believed, was the victim of bad press. Because there was no organized media, no Greenpeace, and no readily available images of slaughter, no one cared when the bison population was reduced from thirty million to a mere five hundred near the end of the last century. No one called those men butchers. No one rallied against them or boycotted their products. And most of those animals were left rotting in the sun! At least we wasted none of the whale.

  Every piece of the whale was used. For food and fertilizer, car wax and candle wax, soap and detergents, shoe polish and glue. Without the whale, there could have been no industrial revolution; it gave us fine fuels and oils, coolants and antifreeze. How might modern medicine have faltered without the whale organs we distilled for pharmaceuticals, the whale rendered surgical stitches, iodine, endocrinal hormones, liver oil, vitamins, and gelatinous capsules?

  The whale gave to every facet of our lives.

  To art and literature via paint and pigments and crayons, varnishes, parchments, inks, and the gelatine coating on photographic film. (Few people know that flexible baleen provided the springs in the very first typewriter.)

  To the domestic household via margarine and sausage skins, brushes and brooms, linoleum, oilcloth, and low-calorie cooking fat.

  To fashion: buttons, trusses, corsets, earrings, brooches, and cufflinks.

  To cosmetics: skin cream, glycerol based lipsticks, hair treatments.

  To the fancies of a culture building world: drum skins, sword hilts and scabbards, laces, tennis racket strings, chess men, watch-springs, umbrellas, toys, upholstery, riding crops, pipes, piano keys, and shoe horns.

  The whale even fed those animals we chose to protect: our cattle, our dogs, our kittens and chickens and chimps.

  All we took from the buffalo was his hide.

  The Chukchi child did not seem to understand. She hit me with her tiny little fists and wept, calling me names so vehemently in her native tongue that I could not translate. A crowd gathered on the pier, and though half of them had done worse at sea, they looked on me as if I were the devil himself. The mother, when she finally dragged her child away, spit on me, cursed the Valiant, and said I stank of death. She said something odd, something in Russian that I’m not at all positive I’ve translated correctly. She told me that when large creatures disappear, life becomes smaller.

  The buffalo analogy made sense when I heard my father tell it. Thirty million wasted buffalo versus a few well-utilized whales. Where was the crime? Hearing my father explain it, I was able to wash the blood from my hands.

  But that was before he told me about his nightmares. Before he put that gun to his head.

  • • •

  Seeglook made me a place to sleep by the fire. His wife and sons had already retired, having courteously, but quietly, shared their evening meal. It was painfully obvious that they were uncomfortable having me in their home. As uncomfortable, perhaps, as I, but Seeglook had insisted that it was too late to send his two nephews back across the bay. “Tomorrow,” he said, “is soon enough to begin this atrocity.”

  The fire was warm—for hours I’d been trying to shake off a chill that had settled in while crossing the bay. I expected Seeglook to leave me to my bottle and my usual nightmares, but instead he squatted beside me, staring into the flames as if therein might lie some tiny treasure which, if he were quick enough, he could snatch away.

  “I knew your father,” he said after several minutes of silence.

  I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I remained quiet.

  “Is he still alive?”

  “No.”

  The Inuit offered no condolences, merely nodded and continued staring into the flames. It was several more minutes before he spoke again. “There’s something I must tell you. This money we ar
e paying for... for you to kill this narwhal... it’s all we have. If you—” He turned to face me. “If you take our money and—”

  “If you knew my father, Seeglook, then you know we Karlsefni are nothing if not honest.”

  A curt nod. “Yes. I did not intend any offense. But I want you to know that if you don’t do this thing for us, you will ruin us. Not just me and my family, but the entire community.”

  “I understand. The money isn’t just yours.”

  “I represent the village. I am their angakok.”

  The shaman, the medicine man, the spiritual leader, perhaps even the mayor. The title had undergone many revisions as civilization caught up with the Inuit. If Seeglook was an angakok, I understood some of the superstition surrounding the deaths of these whales. To the Inuit, animals possess a spirit no less important than man’s. A hunter’s wife will offer a dead seal a drink as a sign of hospitality when her husband brings it home. The Inuit practice complex ceremonies giving thanks to all the animals upon which they prey. These superstitions are the life and breath of the angakok. The Inuit believe, like most native North Americans, that nature is an integrated whole, that to affect just one piece of that chain is impossible because all beings are interconnected. This may be what Seeglook meant by saying that he feared for all the whales and his implication that something was out of balance in the natural order, something that threatened the village which I now knew looked to him for guidance and leadership.

  Still, he wasn’t telling me everything.

  “Seeglook, if there is to be trust between us, you must tell me everything you know about these whales.”

  He frowned, looked back to the fire. “Your father,” he said, “was a good man. He respected the sea, and Sedna smiled on him. He would be very angry to see what someone has made of Sedna’s third finger.”

  In Inuit mythology, Sedna is the goddess of the sea. Legend has it that she spurned all suitors and married a bird. Outraged, her father killed her husband and took Sedna home in his umiak. On the voyage, Sedna angered him and he threw her overboard. When she clung to the side of the boat, he cut off her fingers. Each finger as it sank became a creature of the sea: a beluga, a right whale, a narwhal, and so on.