Free A Whale For The Killing by Farley Mowat Page A

crowd standing and staring at the monstrous corpses. I particularly remember a small boy, who could not have been more than eight years of age, straddling a dead calf and repeatedly striking into its flesh with a pocket knife, while his father stood by and encouraged him.
    Nor were the “townies” of St. Pierre the only ones to enjoy the spectacle. Many American and Canadian tourists had witnessed the show and now were busy taking pictures of one another posing beside the dead behemoths. Something to show the folks back home.
    It was a grand exhibition... but the aftermath was not so grand. Those many tons of putrefying flesh could not be left lying where they were: So, on the following day, several big trucks appeared at the shore where lay the carcasses of twenty-three pothead whales. One by one the whales were hauled up by a mobile derrick and either loaded aboard the trucks or, if they were too big, chained behind. Then the trucks carried and dragged the bodies across the island to a cliff where, one by one, they were rolled over the steep slopes... and returned to the freedom of the seas.

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    A CURIOSITY ABOUT THE WHALE nation has been a part of me for as long as I can remember. When I was a very small child my grandfather used to sing me a song that began:
    In the North Sea lived a whale...
Big of bone and large of tail...
    The song went on to describe how this particular whale was the master of his world until the day when he espied a stranger in his domain: a big, gleaming silver fish who stubbornly refused to acknowledge the whale’s mastery. The whale grew angry and slapped the interloper with his tail. That was a fatal error, because the strange fish was actually a torpedo.
    The moral of the song (all children’s songs of that era had a moral) must have been that it does not pay to be a bully. I never understood it that way. The song haunted me because my sympathy was entirely with the whale—the victim, so it seemed to me, of a very dirty trick.
    As I grew older and became more and more fascinated by non-human forms of life, the whale became a symbol of the ultimate secrets which have not yet been revealed to us by the “other” animals. Whenever anything came to hand about whales, I read it avidly; but the only thing which seemed to emerge with certainty from all my reading was that the whales appeared to be doomed by human greed to disappear and to carry their secrets with them into oblivion.
    Before coming to live in Burgeo, I had never actually seen one of the great whales. Knowing how rapidly they were being destroyed, I never really expected to see one. However, I had not been there long when I heard about the little pod of finners which had spent the previous winter among the Burgeo islands. The possibility that they might come back again was intensely exciting and contributed something to my decision to make our home in Messers Cove.
    Shortly after I first met Uncle Art, I asked him if he thought the whales would return. He assured me they would, but I hardly dared believe him until a day just before Christmas in 1962.
    It was a cold and pallid day with a hazed sky and sun dogs circling a half-veiled sun. Claire and I were in our kitchen, reading, when Onie Stickland came quietly through the door to tell us that whales were spouting just off Messers Head.
    Seizing binoculars, we followed him out along the snow-crusted promontory. Not more than a quarter of a mile off the headland, several quick, high puffs of vapour bloomed and hung briefly in the still air. We could catch only elusive glimpses of the great beasts themselves: slick black mounds, like moving rocks, awash in the jet-dark waters. It was enough. For me it was a moment of supreme excitement and supreme awareness. The secret was here—was now—was on my own doorstep.
    Four fins comprised the family that spent the rest of that winter in Burgeo waters, and it was a bad day indeed when we could not spot them from our seaward windows. Uncle