Free Joe Rush 02: Protocol Zero by James Abel Page B

just the steel part on top. Look down the shaft and we come to this little plunger, see? A trigger. See it?”
    I want to know about your cousin, not the damn harpoon.
    “Yes, I see it.”
    “Well, if the harpooner throws well and hits the bowhead—you only have a few seconds to do it before it dives—and you aim just behind the head . . . the harpoon goes in up to the plunger, then the whale’s skin depresses the plunger, the plunger acts as a trigger, and the trigger fires the missile from the wooden shaft. A good throw blows up the heart. No suffering. Quick death.”
    “Then the whole wooden shaft there is a gun?”
    “That’s right. Hollow inside.” He placed the harpoon back on the rack. “There! That ought to do it,” Merlin said. “These things are humane. The harpoon stays in, and the shaft floats away, so we can recover it. The harpoon is attached to a floating buoy that marks the whale’s location if it dives and tries to get away, still alive.”
    “Merlin, I’m not here to talk about hunting.”
    “Sure you are.” Merlin signaled me to follow him into the house, walking out the door. Over his big shoulder he said, “Just a different kind. Clay worked for the mayor, actually. He kept tabs on visitors. Too many of them are like you, Colonel. They don’t tell us the whole truth about why they’re here, just what they want us to know.”
    Well! He had a point there, I had to admit.
    We passed outside and entered his one-story wooden house through a cold room—called a
cunnychuck
—where we left our shoes among hanging jackets, muddy boots, parkas, and anoraks. The living room was hot, from gas heat, and I smelled coffee brewing. A TV was on, tuned to MSNBC. The couch and sitting chair were Haitian cotton. The pile was colored gold. There was an exercise walker, from where Merlin’s wife, Edith, waved to me. She wore spandex pants, a long floral-motif snow shirt, and sneakers and she was glued by earbud to Al Sharpton on MSNBC. The walls were decorated as in most homes I’d visited here, packed with family photos: graduation shots of nephews and nieces, high school football shot on a blue Astroturf field, Hawaii shots of Merlin and Edith on vacation—looking miserable in the heat—a shot of Merlin’s crew on the ice, carving up a harvested bowhead with half the town helping. People atop the whale wielding carving knives affixed to long poles. People loading meat onto sleds. A smiling hunter holding out a piece of heart. I saw Clay Qaqulik in back.
    Inside homes you always met extended families, in person, or in photos that filled up walls.
    Merlin said, putting two thick ceramic mugs on the kitchen table, “Straight talk?”
    “Straight talk.”
    “Clay was doing fine at the FBI until a North Slope case came up. Walrus ivory smuggling. Couple of low-rent jerks from Nome coming up with machine guns and a boat, leaving carcasses behind, harvesting the tusks and shipping pieces to Chicago, claiming they came from elephants. Know what the FBI did when the complaint came in?”
    “What?”
    “Laughed, Joe. That’s what Clay told me his supervisor did: laughed. ‘Fucking walruses,’ the guy told Clay. ‘We’ve got drugs coming in from Panama. We’ve got threats against the vice president when he visits Juneau next month. We’ve got bank robbers in Anchorage—and you want to go look for a couple of guys shooting walruses? Give it to ATF.’ Clay quit the next day.”
    “What was he doing for you?”
    “Not me, Joe. Us! The people who
need
walruses and whales to eat. Over half our food comes from subsistence hunting. And more than that, our culture. Walruses aren’t just something to look at in a zoo, man. Not here. They’re who we are for four thousand years.”
    He gestured tiredly at Al Sharpton on TV, who was haranguing a Republican senator about an upcoming vote on aid to the Central African Republic.
    “That gets more play than us,” he said.
    “You didn’t answer my