When the Whales Leave Read online

  One day Reu ran down from the heights, where he had been looking out for migrating deer, with exciting news: “I saw open water.”

  Nau felt alarmed by this. “Open water?” she echoed.

  “The ice has broken,” Reu told her. “Great flocks of birds are flying down to the water. Soon they’ll be overhead.”

  “Where do they come from, all these creatures that keep coming here?”

  “There must be another land somewhere,” said Reu. “Maybe more people, like you and me. It’s just that we haven’t met them yet.”

  Another day they awoke to the sound of warm, pattering rain. Venturing out, they saw that the lagoon was free of ice, except for a few large pieces being carried out to sea by the tide. Behind them, too, on the other side of the spit, they could now glimpse open water. The breeze carried with it the half-forgotten scent of the sea, full of mysterious promise.

  Reu wove a net from deer tendons and stretched it over a hoop made from a pliant branch. He went climbing up on the shoreline crags and caught scores of red-beaked tufted puffins.

  The last of the ice floes departed from the lagoon. Nau felt a strange and uncontrollable pull toward the water. She could have spent every day just sitting on the shore, watching the smooth surface of the sea, the plump cormorants diving for fish, the darting gray gobies and the flatfish keeping low to the underwater shingle.

  It happened early one morning, when the sun was high over the nearest cape and about to set off on a long journey above the tundra hills. Nau made her way down to a small clearing near the water, where a swift stream ran to the sea through fresh, shining grass. At her cries, Reu hurried to her side.

  “Help me into the water,” Nau pleaded.

  The whale calves arrived just as the seawater touched her legs. Straightaway the newborns were swimming and spouting. Nau turned to Reu blissfully.

  “I am glad that they are like you.”

  She walked into the water, her swollen breasts pillowed on the waves. The calves drew close and began to suckle noisily, tickling her with their soft, thick lips, pinkly glistening with the first furry traces of whalebone.

  3

  Every day Reu went to hunt the earless seals that we now call nerpa, or ringed seal, and the larger, bearded seals, lakhtak, out on the treacherous ice field still stuck fast and ringing the shore. Nau, however, rarely left the shore of the lagoon; she was busy looking after her babies, who were growing bigger and stronger by the hour and soon became bold enough to venture into the deepest part of the lagoon. This alarmed her, and she would call them back by their father’s name: “Reu! Reu! Reu!”

  The calves would spout in reply and rush back to nuzzle her breasts with their soft mouths, relishing the fatty milk and drinking their fill.

  When, at the close of day, the sun sank into the water—as if to wash away the aches of a long, arduous trip over the earth—the children’s father would always come to play with them. He tossed colorful stones far into the water, and the calves frolicked, retrieving them from the bottom of the lagoon.

  Then the lagoon grew noisy with the brisk splashing of the baby whales and the hiss and whistle of their jetting spouts, and with their parents’ delighted cries. The sounds mingled with birdsong over the brook and the flapping of seagull wings as they hurriedly got out of the little whales’ way. Gophers watched from hillocks, whistling approvingly.

  At sunset it was time for the calves to retreat deeper into the water to sleep; on the beach, their parents bedded down on some deerskins. Nau would wake in the night and, holding her breath, listen for her children’s sleepy exhalations amid the splash and surf. She would lie awake and stare into the pallid sky, starless for now; the stars would appear as the days grew shorter. She was one with the breeze gently fluttering over the somnolent grasses and flowers, and the waves slapping at the beach. She was part of the stony shore, washed by icy oceanic waters, and the clouds underneath the pale, sharp-edged moon. She was everything at once, all the wide world that lay around her, filling every visible void. She knew that it would all end with the coming of the dawn. When the first rays of sunlight broke on the wet stone crags, leapt onto the shingled beach, and sparkled on the lagoon waters, she would once more be a creature separate from the natural world, circumscribed. It was always in daylight that Nau brooded on her children, who, though they were one flesh with her and Reu, were nevertheless whales and not people, and could not gain the shore, nor enter the home of their parents. She consoled herself with the faint hope that one day the calves would turn into people, as their father had done.

  Nau sometimes wished that she could share these troubling thoughts with Reu, but he seemed not to notice any difference between himself and the baby whales. Perhaps it was that he still thought of himself as a whale.

  In daylight Nau had to puzzle hard to know what the old raven, sitting atop the ancient walrus skull, bleached and polished to a shine, wanted from her. She didn’t immediately understand the songs of the snow buntings or the whistling of gophers. And this alarmed her, and made her wonder what was happening to her.

  Reu, meanwhile, was occupied from sunrise until sunset. Back in the spring, he had harpooned several walruses out on the ice and had shown Nau how to split the skins so they stretched supple and thin. He let the skins soak in the lagoon for a long time, while he gathered together thin sheaves of floating driftwood. It looked like he was constructing the skeleton of some strange, vast fish. He whittled down each plank with a stone blade and polished them smooth; then bored holes in them, using tubular animal bones; and finally lashed them together with sealskin thongs. When the structure was complete, Reu retrieved the walrus hides from the water and stretched them over the wooden frame.

  “This boat,” he explained to Nau, “will let us go far into the water.”

  The trial cruise took place in the lagoon. Fast-flowing water beat a cheerful tattoo against the boat’s taut, leathery hide, and the sealskin sail filled with wind. The boat all but flew across the lagoon. The whale babies followed behind, joyfully skimming across the water and trying to splash their parents with their spouts.

  The boat sailed along the shingled bar, heading for the strait that linked the lagoon with open water. Nau shouted endearments to her children and imagined that they called back to her in youthful voices, admiring their father’s invention. Reu was shouting, too, proud of his miraculous creation, and his voice rang out, forceful and stirring. Fat cormorants gave way unwillingly, beating their wings slowly to lift from the water; seagulls dashed shrieking overhead; and nerpa, bobbing up on the waves, gazed intently in the family’s wake, exceedingly puzzled by the proceedings and wondering what manner of strange beast had come among them.

  When at last they returned to shore, Nau turned to Reu happily: “Now we are closer to our children.”

  “Tomorrow, the open sea,” Reu told her.

  And the sea received them gently. Nau felt its vast, mighty power and marveled at the high waves that had been invisible from shore. How easily they carried the hide boat aloft! A strong, steady wind drew them farther and farther away from land.

  Reu’s face glowed with some emotion Nau had never seen before. He seemed to be one with the boat, indivisible. Each breaking wave and gust of wind found an answering echo in him; each time the boat reached a crest, Reu let out a strange, short breath, just like a spouting whale might. The wind played in his hair and caressed his tense, clenched features, drawing tears from his wide-open eyes.

  And then Reu began to shout, loudly and plangently—wondrous, rainbow-bright words:

  O wind, gusty wind,

  That mingles with fine sea spray!

  Take up my hide boat

  On your mighty shoulders, and lift me

  To the paths of my seagoing kin

  So I may meet them once more, and tell them

  Of the great power that lives in nature

  And can turn whale into man, and give life

  To new things, which were onc
e unknown …

  Borne along by the hypnotic rhythm of Reu’s chant, Nau, too, was shouting into the wind. The newly born song—the first human song—mingled with the wind and rang out against the sail.

  The shingled bar had long since faded from view, and the multihued ferns and lichens that riddled the stony coastline could not be distinguished. In the distance, the crags looked blue and smudged, and small. The great swath of water dividing boat from shore filled Reu with excitement and gave him new strength.

  But after a time Nau grew frightened. Safe, known earth was now far behind them. She couldn’t make out their little home.

  “Where are we going, Reu?”

  Reu broke off his song, and the last of the sound rose up over the sail and dissipated among the hiss and tumult of the waves. A dark cloud seemed to pass across his face, and his exultation vanished.

  Quietly, he answered: “I don’t know.” He sat down on the lashed wooden ribs of the boat. “I was thinking of the past,” he told her. “I was young then, and curious. I often swam apart from the others, and went far into the open water; I loved to feel as one with the sea, the wind, and the blue sky. I was warned, but I didn’t listen to my elders. Once, a pod of killer whales came after me. They hunted and harried me fiercely, driving me closer and closer to the shore. It was a long chase, but I managed to evade them and reunite with my pod. Another time, I was trapped among great shards of floating ice, and barely managed to make it out, scraped and bleeding. Today, out on the open sea, I felt young and full of life again.”

  Reu turned the boat homeward.

  As they approached the lagoon, a whale spout suddenly soared from the water, and there was the head of a whale, right beside the boat.

  “It’s one of my brothers!” Reu was delighted. “And look, Nau, there’s another! And one behind us! They came to meet me! Nau, they are happy to see us!”

  The whales approached the fragile vessel with care and nudged it helpfully toward the beach. Their wide-open mouths, fenced with whalebone, seemed to Nau to be smiling.

  Reu had risen to his feet. He was beaming to see his brothers.

  “What a shame they don’t understand human language,” Nau said.

  “They understand it well enough,” Reu told her, “but speaking it is another matter. To speak, you must become a human, fall in love with a woman like I did…. That’s what my mother told me when she found out why I was drawn to the beach, why I was so long gone from the pod each day. And she told me, too, that all the humans who live by the shore are descended from whales transformed by love.”

  “So we are not alone?”

  “Maybe not,” said Reu.

  “Why, then, did I give birth to whales?”

  “Because I am a whale,” said Reu. And just at that moment, like an echo of his words, the whales all leapt powerfully up and nearly out of the water, their vast, long bodies shining. The waves they raised nearly swamped the boat, but Reu only laughed and shouted joyfully to his brothers.

  Nau shared his pleasure. The nearer they came to the shore and the line of the surf, the less anxious she felt.

  Reu aimed the boat for the entrance to the lagoon. There, their children met them, swimming alongside the boat.

  Toward sunset, Nau fed the children, and they swam off to the middle of the lagoon.

  As the humans ate their evening repast, Reu said, “My brothers acknowledged me. They saw I had come back, that I still belonged to the sea.”

  When the morning dew turned frosty and the tundra berries were at their juiciest, Nau began to notice that her children were struggling to swim close to her. They had grown up.

  Rising with the sun, Nau would walk up into the green hills to fill her hide satchel with black crowberries, wild blueberries, and ripe, crimson cloudberries, returning to their hut in the noonday sun. Reu would still be out; each morning he sailed to the Far-off Crags, which thrust up sharply from the sea, where he hunted nerpa, harpooned walrus, and met with his brothers.

  Nau would mix up the berries with a quantity of nerpa fat and set them outside to freeze, a delicious treat for the hunter’s return.

  Later, she would stand on the shingled spit, facing seaward, awaiting the sight of Reu’s boat. First the sail would appear. It would grow taller, swaying slightly in the breeze. Birds flew overhead, pointing the way home, and alongside, the whale-brothers cruised.

  Nau would watch the boat come in until she could make out the face of the hunter, his black hair streaming in the wind, and the nerpa and walrus carcasses lashed to the sides of the boat.

  Today, Reu was dragging in a huge walrus; its yellow tusks poked out of the water. The two of them struggled to get the huge beast onto the shore.

  “This walrus has a great big hide,” said Reu. “We will stretch it over a new hut, a more spacious one.”

  He had long known that Nau would be a mother again and was pleased to see her time approaching.

  As winter neared and nights grew darker, the baby whales stopped coming close to shore; they had grown too big to swim into the shallows. Nau no longer breastfed them, and they had learned to feed themselves.

  “The lagoon is too cramped for them,” said Reu, as he readied the boat one day. As Nau settled in the bottom, he took the prow, the better to adjust the sail and steer.

  The whales awaited their parents in the deepest part of the lagoon. Reu called out, “Follow me! Follow our boat!” And so the children fell in beside the stern. They were always happy to see their father and mother. Reu steered for the strait.

  Nau was silent as she gazed at the little whales. Whenever they raised their heads from the water, their bright, clear eyes shone with unspoken tenderness and filial loyalty. It was a sight that warmed her to the core and made her wish she could join them in the water, swimming alongside them down the wide, shimmering path to the open sea.

  On reaching the bay, the little whales paused, as though saying farewell to the lagoon that had cradled them. Before them lay the open sea—wide, mighty, and deep, full of new discoveries, new friends, and kin.

  Nau looked ahead and saw Reu’s brothers waiting. No sooner had the children left the lagoon than they were ringed by adult whales, spouting and trumpeting their joy.

  “Now they will be safe,” said Reu. “They are where they ought to be, in deep water and among their whale kin.”

  Nau gazed at her departing children with sadness.

  “Do not grieve,” Reu told her, laying a comforting hand upon her shoulder. “We will have more children … though all children, when they grow up, leave their home for a new life that belongs only to them.”

  The children returned to the lagoon many times. They did everything to show Nau and Reu how hale and happy they were, and how well they remembered their parents.

  When the ribbon of encroaching ice first showed on the horizon, Nau gave birth to twin boys. They lay on either side of their happy mother and screamed fit to burst. When Reu bent over them for a closer look, his expression was hard to read. Was he pleased with them or not?

  Their older siblings had gone to warmer waters only the day before, to winter there, safe from sharp ice floes and deadly frosts. The entire pod had come to bid Nau and Reu goodbye, playing close to shore for a long while, and alarming the flocks of migrating birds.

  The beach grew bare and empty. The ice sheet, creaking malevolently and rustling as it crept past the shallows, ranged nearer each day. The wind raged ever harder, lashing the shingled beach with the kind of sleet that could turn into snow before one’s very eyes.

  Inside the hut, the two baby boys kept up a din that carried far and wide, threading human voices into the howl of the winds.

  As she held them close, Nau thought of her first, silent babies who had been born whales and who had left for the far seas. How wonderful it was to be a mother!

  Reu was busy building a large new yaranga.

  First, he erected a semicircle of tall poles and covered them over with untreated walrus h
ide. Then he constructed a conical top and covered this, too, with hides that were fresh, so that daylight, falling through them, seemed yellower and warmer. For real warmth, though, they would need a polog—a heavy, shielding curtain—which Nau sewed from a polar bear skin.

  There were baskets of hardened hide and wooden barrels brimming with walrus fat, and the earthen pit outside stored plenty of frozen meat. The people of the shore awaited the coming winter without fear, for now they were not alone among the snows, facing the icebound Sea of Whales.

  Every spring the whales returned. Nau brought her boys to the shore and pointed out the whales, saying, “Look, there are your brothers!”

  The brother-whales swam close to shore, their great heads nearly touching the shingle. They dipped their heads under, then surfaced suddenly and showered Nau and the boys with warm water.

  The boys dashed to and fro, shouting and excited. Their mother often had to drag them out of the surf.

  They’d all come home wet from head to toe. Nau was forever drying out and mending the boys’ clothes and sewing new torbasses and kukhliankas. They seemed to grow out of everything with manic speed.

  The whales accompanied Reu on his hunts and often helped out when his boat was heavily laden and slow in the water.

  Whales and humans are one people!

  Joining together, the land and the sea

  Gave birth to a nation whose pastures

  Lie in the waves and in the deep waters And,

  in winter, among the ice hummocks!

  The boys heard their father’s mighty voice carried from the sea and listened with wonder to his song.

  The waves of the sea, growing still,

  Became the hills of the tundra,

  Overgrew with grass, gone speckled with berries;

  And all that lives upon the tundra

  Has kin in the waves upon the sea …

  The boys would go to the surf and join their father in the refrain:

  Whales and humans are one nation!