Salt Water Tears Read online

  “Why kill a narwhal at all? There must be hundreds of their horns in museums or private collections. I can bring you one of those.”

  He shook his head, his white beard wagging like the pendulum on a grandfather clock. “No. Magic is an element of life. It draws its power from the life force that created it. The horn of an animal retains its power for a short time only. Any horn cut from its host earlier than, say, yesterday, is impotent.”

  Listening to him, it all made sense. Like the buffalo analogy when my father told it. I began to think then that there is no truth, only powers of persuasion. Here’s my story; if I tell it well enough, you’ll believe it.

  Polmak’s story was convincing. Everything he’d told me flowed in a logical, believable sequence of events: Rosendal’s obsession with Polmak’s daughter; their final confrontation outside of time, pulled there by Rosendal’s magic sword; Anastasia taking the sword away; Rosendal putting her to sleep and sealing her behind the falls so that Polmak couldn’t use the sword against him... As Polmak was describing it, I could clearly see these things happening. Eventually all that was left was for Polmak and Rosendal to fight. Polmak defeated Rosendal, but the price was permanent confinement in the garden, isolated even from his daughter by the magic in the waterfall.

  It all made perfect sense.

  The thing that bothered me was that strip of cloth fluttering from Rosendal’s shoulder.

  • • •

  To find a needle in a haystack, one doesn’t look for the needle. One studies the straw and looks for the anomaly: the strand that glimmers too brightly, the piece finer and shorter than any other, the eye of the needle. To find Polmak’s narwhal, Davies and I would have to do the same. Searching the ice-cluttered stretch of ocean between Greenland and Canada’s Northwest Territories for one narwhal was madness. There was just too much area to cover. The gregarious pods of narwhal milling about Pond Inlet could be ignored. What we wanted was the lone whale. The rogue. The problem was that he could be anywhere. Though he might haunt the fringes of existing pods, there were too many individual pods for us to watch them all. We had to find him, like that needle in the haystack, without looking for him. We had to find the anomaly.

  Davies asked me, first day out, why not kill the first narwhal we found. Take the tusk to the Inuit and collect the ransom. By the time another cow turned up dead—if another cow turned up dead—we’d be long gone with the money. Of course, I’d told him nothing about Polmak or the real reason we were out to kill this narwhal. “They’d know,” I told him, but the truth was that I was beginning to believe that all this was somehow interconnected. Any narwhal tusk might serve Polmak just fine, but there was a reason why a whale had gone berserk. I wanted to know what it was and how it fit into the total picture.

  There were other things that bothered me. Things like how my frail Anastasia could have wrestled that huge broadsword from Rosendal. Why Rosendal couldn’t have gotten it back from her rather than sealing her off behind a magic waterfall. Why Rosendal would do that when it meant cutting himself off from the only weapon with which he could defeat Polmak. And why the horn? I could only see one reason for selecting something so obscure as a key: desperation. It was the mark of an individual who wanted to make sure the spell would be all but impossible to break. Had Rosendal been that desperate? And, if so, why? Had he done it to protect Anastasia? What was he protecting her from if Polmak was her father? It seemed a lot just to keep the sword out of Polmak’s hands.

  For nine days and nights aboard the Valiant, I was troubled by these things. It would have been a fair bargain had these doubts occupied my mind and kept the nightmares at bay.

  But, if anything, the nightmares were worse.

  I knew that I had Polmak to thank for that. Polmak had opened the door on a new level of midnight terror. What kind of man, warning or no, would do that to another?

  I’d just awakened from a particularly nasty variation on the dream, one in which my father’s harpooned body was being drawn through the bloody waves while I swam behind, desperate to free him, but unable to catch him. I was opening a new bottle of rum when Davies buzzed me from the wheelhouse. It was three a.m., two hours short of my watch. The intercom was one of the things we’d neglected to list for the maintenance crew at Prudhoe to fix. Davies could ring me, but to find out what he wanted I was forced to dress and brave the cold of a mid-deck crossing. The horizon bound sun was hazy, but nonetheless bright that morning, and I immediately saw the other ship rocking gently on the Arctic swells.

  We’d found our anomaly.

  She rested a quarter mile to port. She looked like a small Japanese trawler, one of the commercial vessels that had put Karlsefni Fisheries out of business. She wasn’t supposed to be this far north—all the good fishing was to the south. There were krill to be had by the ton in these waters, but I could tell from here that she wasn’t rigged for taking them. She was as out of place as we were.

  Davies was looking her over with the binoculars. He handed them over as I closed the door behind me. “Wearing the name Hagakure,” he said. “Mean anything?”

  “Not to me.” I studied her through the binoculars. The Hagakure looked to be no better off than the Valiant, another tired vessel long past retirement. As she crested each wave, I could see that her hull was in need of much scraping and a fresh coat of paint. There was a deserted look about her, no one moving on her deck, no lights, and no smoke from her stack. “Have you tried the radio yet?”

  Davies shook his head. “Wasn’t sure you’d want to hail her with what we’re about and all.” I smelled liquor on him. He’d probably hidden several bottles about the ship, one somewhere here on the bridge, but what did I expect? He’d been hitting the bottle daily for the last ten years or so. Having him drunk was better than having him shaking with withdrawal.

  “What’s she doing here, Captain?”

  I set the binoculars aside and reached for the radio mike. “Same thing we are,” I answered intuitively. “She’s looking for a whale.”

  “How you figure?”

  “Bring us to a stop.” I keyed the mike as Davies shut down the engines. “Valiant to trawler Hagakure. Come in.”

  The radio crackled with static.

  “This is Captain Karlsefni hailing trawler off my port bow. Do you read me?”

  Static. We listened to it for several long minutes.

  “Maybe she’s adrift,” Davies speculated.

  I took another look through the binoculars. “Looks like anchor lines fore and aft.”

  Davies’ eyes said that he wasn’t deep enough into his rum to not realize I wasn’t dealing square with him. He knew now that there were things that I hadn’t told him, things that lead me to these rather irrational conclusions about a chance encounter at sea. Not unusual; a captain often tells his crew only what he thinks they need to know. Davies had crewed enough ships to know that. He also knew enough to wait for explanations—if there would be any.

  “Restart the engines.” I took a .45 from a drawer in the chart table and checked to make sure it was loaded.

  “Captain?”

  “Take us alongside, Davies. I’m going across.”

  • • •

  Davies did a good job of placing us beside the trawler, a tricky enough maneuver even in calm seas—and the swells had grown in the last fifteen minutes. He was, as I’d known for years, more than just another dockside rummy. Because the trawler’s deck was higher than the Valiant’s, I had to time my jump carefully. Davies made it easy, letting the larger vessel slip over the crest of the next wave while the Valiant rode for an instant above her. With the Colt in the pocket of my p-coat, I leaped across the distance separating the two vessels, slipping on the trawler’s wet deck. By the time I’d regained my feet, he’d already used the wave’s momentum to separate the two vessels. Davies had followed my instructions: not once had the two vessels touched. An echoing boom of clashing hulls would have signaled our arrival to anyone on board.

&nb
sp; There was no one on the Hagakure’s bridge. The door was standing open. The deck immediately within was soaked from the mist kicked up as waves slapped the trawler’s moored sides. The Hagakure’s radio, navigation, and computer systems were all in perfect working order. They were also state-of-the-art. This was a bridge I could only dream of owning. Sonar. Surface radar. What appeared to be a sat-link of some kind, complete with an imaging system producing high-def color charts of the surrounding topography. I had no idea how to read the damn things, but they sure looked like they were designed to track the movement of things in or on the ocean. Whales perhaps. Or, more likely and far easier to trace from orbit, the schools of fish and crustacea upon which the whales feed. There was also some sort of tracking system. On its precisely calibrated screen a green blip was moving at a stately pace perpendicular to the two vessels, in the general direction of Baffin Island. The computer screen included a label for the blip.

  NAR-7.

  “Bingo,” I whispered, reaching for the Hagakure’s radio. “Davies?”

  The reply was immediate. “Davies here, Captain.”

  “Swing around the trawler and check the sea to port. Let me know what you find.”

  “Roger that.”

  Silence then, while I waited for him to confirm what I already knew. It was then that I spotted the blood stains on the deck. They weren’t fresh. They’d dried to a rust-hued, peeling crust. But they weren’t old either. I pulled the pistol and chambered a round. Now that I knew they were there I could see more stains leading out across the deck.

  Fact: This was some sort of research vessel. Forget that it was a battered hulk in no better shape than the Valiant. There was a lot of money in equipment crammed onto this bridge. I’d no doubt that a quick search would reveal more equipment below; this was just the stuff they’d need to pilot. Unless there was another logical entity which would be abbreviated as an N-A-R, they were following a narwhal.

  Fact: If there was anyone on board, they weren’t answering the radio which would surely be routed below—to the galley if nowhere else. They should even be able to hear me using it. Unless there was someone on board who didn’t want to be found.

  Fact: There’d been some sort of accident. Or, more likely, given the extenuating circumstances, there’d been some sort of violence on the bridge.

  “Captain?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “There’s a single narwhal moving west-northwest at about 2 knots. It’s a bull. What are your orders?”

  “Let him go.”

  “Sir?”

  The NAR-7 receiver was portable. I unplugged it and wrapped the cord carefully around the case. “Let him go, Davies. We can find him again.”

  “Roger that. There’s something else odd here.”

  “What is it, Davies?”

  “The remains of a raft. Some equipment adrift. I think I see a life vest.”

  “Bodies?”

  “Negative.”

  “Okay. Stand by, Davies. I’m going below.”

  • • •

  The blood led to the galley. There was a middle-aged Japanese man there, sprawled unconscious across a table. Despite having lost a lot of blood, he was still alive, breathing fitfully. His hair was matted with blood. On closer examination I found that his scalp had been grazed by a bullet. A suicide note in his pocket, deliriously written half in Japanese and half in English, said that he was responsible for the deaths of his friends. How they’d died, I couldn’t be sure. It might be in the Japanese portion of the note which I couldn’t read, or he might have left it out, but I thought I’d figured it out.

  His friends had gone out in the raft to look at the narwhal.

  I searched the rest of the ship, expecting to find more electronics equipment. What I found was a full blown chem lab. There was a copious amount of notes—fortunately written in English—from which I gleaned enough to know that they had injected the narwhal with some sort of drug which acted as a tracing agent. A vast improvement over electronic devices, which malfunction or get scrapped off, or simply run out of battery power, the endocrinal agent described in the lab notes would allow the Japanese to trace the migratory patterns of any whale they injected.

  The narwhal had to be a test case. They’d want to try it out on the smaller species first, before they used it to track minkes or humpbacks, two whales which everyone knew the Japanese were still harvesting despite bans by the International Whaling Commission.

  The tests hadn’t been going well. The endocrinal tracer instigated some sort of hormonal imbalance in the test subjects. The medical terms were beyond me. The volumes of blood tests and chemical analyses were indecipherable. But, in short, the tracing agent had driven the whale mad.

  When I returned to the Hagakure’s galley, the Japanese scientist was still unconscious. I left him there on the table. His wound wasn’t fatal. He’d recover on his own. Then he could decide whether to radio Canada’s Coast Guard for help or find his gun and make a second attempt at suicide. I wish I could say I cared which option he chose, but the truth is I didn’t.

  The jump back across to the Valiant was more difficult carrying the heavy receiver, but again Davies made it easy for me.

  • • •

  I tried to remember how many years it had been since I’d last ridden the Valiant’s high prow with the frigid wind and salty mist in my face, the weight of the harpoon on my arm, the piles of line coiled at my feet, and the hunt accelerating my heart. My fondest memories are of those first years whaling. I was thirteen, barely tall enough to clear the prow rigging with the harpoon when first set to the task. I missed often that first summer, but there was time, back then, to haul in the harpoon, recoil the lines, and try again. There was encouragement from my father, gentle jests from the experienced men, the exuberance and the thrill of it all.

  None of that now. No thrill. No pleasure.

  Just the bare, essential need to kill this one last whale... this deranged, yet fragile narwhal whose life had already been wasted. I’d come to waste his death. We’d take his horn. Leave his corpse floundering in the sea.

  Like a buffalo carcass rotting in the sun.

  I worried over who might see me. Another mysterious ship. A passing helicopter. A soviet or U.S. jet on maneuvers. Not because I was worried about being caught. Because I was ashamed to be there, doing what I was doing. People constantly ask God to look down on them, keep a watch over their lives. I prayed that God was otherwise engaged that afternoon.

  When large creatures disappear; life becomes smaller.

  Davies was, again, the consummate pilot. Only once did I look back and yell a turn to him. He was already reacting. After that I gave him the response time he needed, calling back to the wheelhouse only the two times the narwhal sought to lose us by diving. Sober, with my heart barely beating, I watched and waited as the Valiant’s laboring engines brought us closer to the fleeing cetacean. The narwhal was doing nine knots now, an impressive speed for his species. But it wasn’t enough, and he was only able to maintain it for thirty minutes.

  His back where I centered the harpoon was mottled grey, a narrow and trying target for one who’d spent his life throwing at the right and the bowhead. The harpoon caught him in the lungs and he struggled very little. One unsustainable dive. A futile fight against the line, with all of the Valiant’s weight in tow. The knurled shaft of his great tooth—what Polmak had decided was the unicorn’s horn—struck weakly at the side of my boat. I saw his eyes, red-rimmed and soul-sucking deep. When he made that last roll, I saw his tiny mouth, the white of his belly, and his claspers.

  And then he was gone.

  I put a heavy line on his flukes and Davies helped me pull him alongside. “There’s a hacksaw in the toolbox,” I told him. Without comment, he went and got it. I hung from the side, with Davies holding firm to my belt, and I took what we’d come for. The narwhal’s dark eyes never left my face.

  Afterward, we cut him loose. He didn’t sink. I saw him as w
e pulled away, his tubular corpse bobbing in the Valiant’s red wake, his eyes set just above the demarcation of water and air, watching me still.

  “If we press on through the night,” Davies suggested, “we can be at Pond Inlet by morning.”

  “No. We’ve both put in a full day, Davies. Find an open place to your liking and shut her down.” I picked up the tusk and hugged it to my chest. It was just slightly shorter than I was tall. If there was power within it, I couldn’t feel it. It felt heavier than it ought to. Cold. Lifeless.

  “Guess the Eskimos’ll wait another day,” Davies muttered in that unreadable monotone of his.

  “At least,” I whispered. I turned to go below. “Why don’t you drag out one of your bottles and meet me in the galley.”

  • • •

  “Heard tell of one once that went four and a half meters,” Davies told me between pulls at his rum. He’d unearthed not one, but two bottles. We were making short work of them as the Valiant rolled on the Arctic swells. “Norwegian Captain by the name of Stavanger had it rigged as a prow.”

  “What for?”

  The old man shrugged and studied me as if he were trying to decide why I’d ask such a damn fool question. Finally, he shrugged a second time. “Bloody damn bit of business,” he belched, “the killing of a whale. Especially one ain’t got no more value than a narwhal. Guess Stavanger killed it for sport.”

  “Don’t see the sport in it,” I said.

  “Nor did your Da. He told me once—” He took a long drink from his bottle. “Told me that no man really knows himself because he doesn’t know how others see him. It was them damn environmentalists showed your Da who he was. They showed him what they thought of him. Your Da, he didn’t much like what he saw.”