one in each hand. “I don’t know. All the data in the world don’t seem to convince people that we’ve got a problem with greenhouse gases. They still think Al Gore made up global warming to get rich.”
Helen had heard exactly that from their congressman, when he’d spoken on campus. He’d claimed that global warming was “the biggest scam since Teapot Dome,” and that Al Gore was just out to make money. He’d insisted that just as many scientists didn’t believe in global warming as did and that his opinion was just as good as anyone else’s. The students in the audience had been stunned by his belligerence, and when the moderator tried to pin him down on the sources of his information, the congressman cut him off, yelling, “Don’t give me that,” and continuing his rant about how it was all just natural cycles and what was permafrost anyway—just frozen dirt. He’d said, “There’s nothing pretty about ice. Ice grows nothing.” She remembered those exact words, because he’d said them with such contempt.
That day in the auditorium Helen had sat on her hands, horrified that a person in such an important position could be either so ignorant or so corrupt—and which was it? Even an Alaskan grade school student knew that sea ice was an essential part of the Arctic ecosystem—not just the habitat for species like polar bears and ringed seals but that the underside of it grew—yes, grew—algae that fed the zooplankton and supported the food web. So was what she heard ignorance, or was it obfuscation, meant to deny the truth and protect the interests of those who benefited from destroying ice?
And Teapot Dome? Wasn’t that a scandal, not a scam? She’d gone home and looked it up. How odd to compare global warming to a bribery scandal, specifically one in which a government official took bribes from oil companies!
What was especially incongruous was that the reason the congressman had been speaking on campus was to take credit for federal funding for the new acidification office. She had to think he hadn’t known what he was doing.
The ship slowed, and the captain’s voice boomed through the speaker. “Whales at one o’clock!”
Helen dashed for the binoculars she’d left in the boot room and headed for the stairs, close behind Colin and the girls from the lab. From the main deck they climbed the ladder to the flying bridge. The ship had slowed completely now, the engines a gentle throb through the steel deck. Colin was pointing, and she saw the vapor of a blow trailing off, still well out in front of them. Then another blow beside it, tall and straight up.
“Two of them,” someone said. “At least two.”
And, “They might be fin whales.”
They all strained to look, cameras and camera phones and tablets pointed.
The whales blew again, closer, and their long dark backs cut through the surface. They were paralleling the ship on the starboard side. They were big whales, that was for sure.
“Fins,” Colin said under his breath.
Ray was there now, and his daughter, who wasn’t dressed for the outside and had her bare arms crossed over her chest. Ray was explaining that fin whales mostly fed on plankton, lots of euphasiids in these waters, and on forage fish. “Two tons of food a day,” he said. “They’re sometimes called ‘greyhounds of the sea’ because of their speed, which they use to circle schools of fish to bunch them up before gulping them.”
Then the whales were right beside the ship, so close Helen didn’t even need her binoculars. The water was so clear; she was looking through the surface and down into it, at the entire bodies of fin whales. The larger one was just feet from the ship now, seeming to look them over. Its spade-shaped head was knobby around the twin blowholes, and whitish chevron-shaped marks stretched down its long back to the elegant slice of dorsal fin. It turned its head, showing the white side of its jaw. It rolled around to face the other way, and she saw the other jaw—the dark one—and remembered this asymmetry of the fin whale, white on one jaw and dark on the other.
“Did you see that?” she said quietly, to anyone who was listening. “Did you see the way it flashed us with the white side of its jaw?” She could imagine now what she’d only read, that biologists speculated that the jaw coloring had to do with that fish herding Ray had just mentioned. Fin whales were known to circle clockwise, which meant the white jaw would be visible to the fish, could be like a flashing light. But why would they want to circle only clockwise? Why not have two white jaws and be an ambidextrous circler?
The scientist in her wanted a theory, wanted to understand, needed more than awe.
A voice came from beside her. “Can you imagine anyone wanting to kill such a magnificent creature?”
It was the artist, the woman she’d met briefly at the safety orientation when they first boarded and then later had the short conversation with about seasickness meds. Now here she was, googly-eyed about the whales.
“Actually, yes,” Helen said. “Native people hunt and eat whales. Not fin whales, not in Alaska, but bowheads and belugas, and in Russia, gray whales.”
The woman—petite in an oversized and overstuffed parka, with bleached-blond hair matted into dreadlocks and dangling beads—turned to her. Helen watched her register dark hair, dark eyes, skin a little yellowish, Mongolian eye fold, whoops. Now the woman looked embarrassed. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean that. I meant the Japanese commercial whalers that do it for the meat. The Inuit have a different relationship, I know.”
“The whales give themselves to the people.” Helen said this instinctively, rhetorically, defensively. It was what she’d been raised to know, and if she didn’t actually believe this—she was a scientist, after all—many of her relatives did. While it might not be literal truth, the belief centered on respect; if you behaved well and were grateful for your food the animals would see that you didn’t go hungry. She wasn’t sure why she’d made such a bald statement to a strange woman, except that she was annoyed by her attitude and her use of the word “Inuit.” It was not a name that Alaska Natives used for themselves.
“Yes,” the woman said, and Helen noticed she was quite a bit older than she’d first thought. Her face was like a shriveled apple, like the faces of apple-headed dolls some of the grannies sold at Native arts fairs. Helen didn’t understand why a woman that age, even an artist, would be wearing at sea spackled tights, pink ballet slippers, and a giant puffy parka.
The woman asked, “Do you think the smaller one is the baby of the other one?”
“I’m not a whale expert,” Helen said, “but that’s probably a good bet.”
The smaller one—the likely calf—was at the surface now, exhausting spray that nearly reached the ship. Helen breathed deeply, hoping for a whiff of fishy breath. The ship was one hundred twenty feet long, and the whales beside it—approaching half that length—made it feel small and insubstantial, as though it were a toy boat and they were little Lego people snapped onto it.
“They’re telling us something,” the woman said. She held her digital camera at arm’s length, shooting in directions and at angles that seemed odd to Helen.
Helen was trying very hard not to be rude. “What are they telling you?”
“They’re sizing us up. They’re saying, ‘OK, you’re innocuous.’ Or they might be saying, ‘Screw you, stop messing up our home and stealing our food.’ The water’s reflective, so it’s hard for me to read the energy field.”
Helen resisted expressing an opinion about energy fields. The
