Free A Whale For The Killing by Farley Mowat Page B

Art was so delighted to have them about that, I truly believe, he set most of his herring nets, not to catch herring, but simply to justify the hours he spent on the water watching his gigantic friends. Ashore, he was equally happy to sit for hours telling me what he had learned about leviathan during his long life; and slowly, slowly, I began to steal some glimpses through the shroud of mystery.
    During the succeeding years, the whales returned to our coast early each December and remained with us until the herring departed, usually sometime in April. Each winter we looked forward with unabated eagerness to their arrival. We were not alone in our interest. In general, the fishermen of Burgeo seemed to hold the great beasts in a kind of rough and friendly regard. There was no conflict between whales and men. The whales remained scrupulous in keeping clear of the fishing gear; nor could they be looked upon as competitors for the herring since our fishermen were only interested in taking small quantities for use as trawl bait, plus a few tubs to be salted down for table use. Since the herring were present in millions, if not billions, there were far more than enough of them for whales and men together.
    The whales and the inshore fishermen developed a remarkable familiarity. Whales would often surface only yards from a dory, a skiff, or even a forty-foot longliner; blow, draw in a huge draft of air, then return unconcernedly to their fishing while the human fishermen went on as unconcernedly with theirs.
    It was Uncle Art’s conviction that the whales looked upon our fishermen with an almost benevolent tolerance, as those who are past masters of a complex trade may sometimes look upon willing but not very bright apprentices. This is how matters stood until the arrival of the “foreign” purse seiners on our coast.
    Although anatomists and other such can tell us something about the mechanisms of dead whales in terms of what they are, rather than of what they do, science remains surprisingly ignorant about the activities and behaviour of living whales and understands even less about their special capabilities in their aquatic world. A friend of mine, who is one of the foremost cetologists of our time, recently summed up the state of our knowledge in these words: “The little we biologists know about whales in life would hardly provide enough material for an essay by a high school student.”
    In view of the fact that man’s interest in the great whales, through the millenniums, has been largely restricted to bringing them to death, this is not very surprising. It has only been within the last few decades that we modern technological men have made any real effort to study them as living creatures; and by the time our scientists began to show some interest in the matter, there was only a remnant population of many species left, and that, however, so widely dispersed over such an immense realm of waters that we landsmen could count ourselves lucky to catch even occasional glimpses of them. A modern scientist attempting to plumb the secrets of whale life is in much the same predicament as the denizen of another planet would be if, suspended high above the atmosphere, he tried to comprehend the intricacies of human life through the cloudy ocean of air surrounding us. Fortunately, we do not have to rely solely upon what professional science has been able to piece together.
    Because fin whales are herring-eaters (at least in certain seasons and in certain parts of their vast oceanic range) and because the herring strike inshore every winter along the ice-free southern coast of Newfoundland, there is a period when the great mammals live almost at the portals of our world. And because of men like Uncle Art, who are possessed of that abiding curiosity about other forms of life which is the hallmark of natural man, we actually know rather more about the great whales than my scientist friend concedes.
    It is proper for me to acknowledge