Big Miracle Read Free Page B

everyone on the beach to hear him offer thanks to the whale and to the God who created it. Then Malik’s wife emptied a plastic bucket filled with fresh water into the dead whale’s open mouth and then into its blowhole. Somehow, this “Arctic baptism” would make the whale’s spirit a permanent part of the village. While no doubt thankful for the honor, the whale would probably have preferred to have restored to him what was once rightfully his.
    If Barrowans wanted their whale meat raw—which they did—the butchering had to start straight away. If left unbutchered, even for a short time, and even in freezing temperatures, the process of decomposition would quickly convert the dead whale’s massive energy supply into heat, roasting the carcass at temperatures near 300 degrees. Malik assigned several men to start carving up the whale.
    Like Lilliputians tying down Gulliver, a half-dozen Eskimos mounted and climbed ladders against the side of the dead whale, carrying sharp fan-shaped knives mounted on traditional long wooden handles, called ulus. They stood on top of the two-story-high carcass, carving the blubber into a checkerboard pattern. Hot putrid air hit them in the face as they ripped two-foot-thick squares of muktuk from the whale’s back with large iron hooks.
    Plumes (more like big puffs) of steam purged from the whale as the men peeled away the long slabs of blubber. The steam could be seen for miles around Barrow’s flat, featureless plain. Lying hundreds of miles farther north than the hardiest tree could grow, it didn’t take much height for something to be seen from great distances. It took less than an hour for the entire circumference of the fifty-five-foot whale to be stripped clean of its muktuk, leaving something that looked more like a pink airplane fuselage than the skinless remains of a fifty-five-foot whale. The slabs of muktuk were quickly spirited into twenty-two neat piles reserved for each crew involved in the hunt. While the property of the each crew’s chief, the piles were payment to be dispensed at the chief’s discretion.
    Once the muktuk had been stripped, the butchers went back to work removing the whale’s meat by repeating the same process of cutting giant rectangular slaps and then peeling them off. By dawn the next morning, the entire operation, employing over a thousand people, was all but done. With a few more tasks, the forty-ton whale, the carefree master of the sea just hours before, had been hunted, ruthlessly killed, towed to the beach, and carved into thousands of pieces.
    By 1988, whale was more of a luxury than anything approaching a necessity. The Inuits could get through a winter without whale meat the same way you could get through your winters without whale meat. While the cookie-cutter politically correct (that is, false) portrayals of native Inuit life emphasized the price that modernization was extracting from their traditions and culture, it was a price everyone, including Malik, was more than happy to pay. Survival beats starvation, and a modern heated home trumps exposure. Nonetheless, Malik’s catch assured that this winter would be both modern and traditional.
    Until their once impenetrable isolation was broken, subsistence whaling villages like Barrow killed only as many whales as they needed to survive—although for reasons having everything to do with what was practical (hunting, killing. and securing giants whales was far from easy) and almost nothing to do with what was “environmentally responsible.” As World War II ended, the modern industrialized nations with commercial whaling industries suddenly realized the only way to save their dying industry was to save the few whales they had not yet killed. The first global effort at whale conservation came in 1946, with the establishment of the International Whaling Commission (IWC).
    Ostensibly, the IWC was created to allow whale populations to