Harry carved the name “Konwa” deep on a board, and added the sentence, “He died bravely, fighting for his friends,” and placed this over the body, supported by the stones.
CHAPTER VIII
WHALING IN EARNEST
The bowhead whale spends his summers among the ice-fields that surround the pole. What he does in winter is still a mooted question, but there are many old whalemen who declare that the bowhead hibernates. Many of them, they say, spend the winter about Bering Straits, and as far south in Bering Sea as the Seal Islands. Here it is claimed that they lie on the bottom and sleep till the warmer currents of the spring rouse them, as they do the marmots, badgers, and brown bears on land, and at about the same time. At any rate, the bowhead goes north with the ice in the spring, comes down with it in the fall,—and then vanishes. He is not found in the southern part of Bering Sea, nor in the north Pacific. Hence, say the whalemen, who make a business of following him, if he does not hibernate, what does become of him? Ordinarily, in the summer time, the bowhead comes to the surface and breathes every forty minutes or so. But now and then, for some cause or other, one will sulk, and the natives have watched them lying close in shore in shallow water for five days without seeing a movement or attempt to come to the surface to breathe. Such whales are denominated “sleepy heads,” and when killed are found to have a blubber that is watery instead of full of oil. The blubber of more than one whale is thrown overboard after being cut in, because it is deficient in oil. Whether there is any connection between the sleepy heads and the hibernating may never be known, but if a whale can stay on bottom without air for five days simply because he is sick or sulky, say the whalers, ought he not to be able to sleep all winter in good health? There is no certain answer to the question.
At any rate, the whales appear in the open leads from Point Hope to Point Barrow about the middle of April. These are all young whales who seem to be the early risers. After them come the cows and their calves, and behind these, mostly in the open water, follow the older single whales. Bachelors and old maids these, and perhaps lack of responsibilities makes them lazy. As these are the last up in the spring, so they are the first down in the fall. Sometimes they too go in with the ice, and in that case the whaleships following do not get many. The whales which the Eskimos capture are almost always the young, who go up first, and they capture them quite easily from the ice. The Chuckchis about East Cape get from twenty to thirty thousand pounds of bone annually, and the Alaska natives about as much. This is bought in the main by traders or whalemen, who pay in trade goods at the rate of about fifty cents a pound for the bone. As good bone is worth about three dollars a pound in San Francisco, it will be seen that the business is a profitable one for the buyers. Yet the Eskimos are glad to dispose of their surplus for the white man’s goods, and the returns are of great value to them.
There used to be in Bering Sea and the Arctic a small black whale with a white spot near the small, which was easily killed and yielded good blubber, but was weak in whalebone. These whales were all killed off as long ago as 1885. Before them, and now probably extinct, were the old 100-ton gray backs, the monster bowheads of all. These whales were leviathans indeed, yielding sometimes four hundred barrels of oil, and often three to four thousand pounds of whalebone. These were the prize monsters of the early days of the bowhead fishery, and the lucky ship that got through the straits and fastened to one or two of them was well along toward a full trip at a blow. The last record of the capture of one of these whales was as far back as 1876. They were sly, lazy old chaps, exposing often only the edges of the gray spout-hole when blowing, and having thus the appearance of a gull sitting on the water. It is perhaps plausible that these great-grand-fathers of whales had survived the glacial epoch, as is claimed for them. At least, they were of as great age compared with the smaller bowheads as are the giant sequoias of California compared with the redwoods of the present day.
After the battle with the highbinders, the community at Icy Cape saw no more outsiders, but as day by day the sun rose higher and stayed longer, they began to await impatiently the coming of the spring and to prepare for it. March was a wild, uproarious month, intensely cold for the most part, and with fierce gales blowing. The boys got a bear or two and the Eskimos brought in a good number of smaller pelts, so that the collection of furs grew steadily and bade fair to be of considerable value. Joe used to figure it up every few days, and when it reached the two-thousand-dollar valuation mark he was quite jubilant.
LOCKED IN THE ARCTIC ICE
“Now,” he said, “if we can only get a good catch of whalebone while the ice is melting and get the ship out safe, what happy fellows we’ll be!”