Big Miracle Read Free Page A

shiny black skin signaled another hit. The whale’s huge tail caught one side of the boat, slamming it violently forward into its diamond-shaped shoulder blade.
    Drenched in the whale’s blood, the men grabbed hold of the gunwales to steady themselves inside their rocking dinghy. When Malik regained enough balance to look up, he saw a sluggish whale too gravely injured to carry on much longer. Concerned that the bowhead might make one last attempt to dive beneath a patch of ice before it died, Malik reached for another harpoon. Just because the beast was mortally wounded did not mean it had yet been subdued. The whale’s size and its will to live could still push it onward for many miles, prolonging the endurance test between whale and Eskimo.
    Malik need not have worried. Before he could fire again, the whale suddenly and quietly succumbed. Now the challenge was to secure their prize before it sank and the men did not have much time. Three other whaling crews out that morning watched and cheered the strike through binoculars from their respective vantage points stretched across the Chukchi horizon. Once the whale was dead, neighborly cooperation replaced friendly competition. Upon confirmation that the whale had succumbed, the sidelined crews went from passive spectators to active participants. They rushed to help Malik’s crew keep the dead whale on the surface so it could be towed to shore for butchering.
    As in ancient times, the modern way of “sharing the whale wealth” was to distribute the tasty proceeds in accordance to the contribution of the recipient. The more a crew participated, the more meat it got. The crews now rushing to Malik’s assistance would be compensated with the butchered whales’ choicest cuts.
    People have always been the most important resource in a subsistence whaling community. The act of hunting, catching, securing, towing, butchering, distributing, and disposing of a creature as large as a bowhead whale required as many people as possible to help. Dragging a giant dead whale onto the beach for butchering—particularly one this size and during such an unusual time of year—is no small task. As word spread that Malik’s crew had a whale in tow, Barrowans readied themselves to help.
    Within minutes, regular programming on KBRW-AM, the only commercial radio station on Alaska’s North Slope (serving an area bigger than the state of California) was interrupted to broadcast news of the kill, particularly Malik’s current sea location so that designated town volunteers with boats could meet Malik at sea and help his crew ballast the whale and bring it safely to shore. Within an hour, more than eighty people in twenty-two boats had arrived on the scene. Even with such help, it still took four hours to haul the mammoth carcass across six miles of choppy seas and back to the beach.
    By the time Malik and his six-man crew did get back to shore, it was too dark for them to see the hundreds of people who had assembled to greet and assist them. This was the moment every whaler dreamed of as a child and cherishes as he ages.
    Before Christianity made its way to the Arctic coast in the early nineteenth century, Inuits, like nearly every pagan subsistence culture ever studied, revered—even worshipped—the source of their sustenance. That this seems somehow remarkable to us shows how the most revolutionary conceptual discoveries are quickly assumed to have been obvious to all. But this was not the case and native peoples were there to prove it. Before the notion that our world was created by a God that transcends time and space, it was only natural for people to worship a visible product of creation than an unseen, unknown creator. The religious revolution was to see God not in nature, but above and in control of nature.
    Combining the ancient pagan practices of their ancestors with their own late twentieth-century American Protestantism, Malik gathered