n8 ARCTIC DREAMS
cause breathing difficulties. But immobilizing drugs are still prob-
lematic. One bear biologist told me, "Every time I chase an animal to
put a dart in it, I am in conflict. How can I justify getting the
information like this?"
That afternoon on Lancaster Sound, in the completion of the
somewhat somber duties of tagging and recording data and fitting
the animals with radio collars to permit satellite tracking, we saw
many bears. We landed once to inspect the remains of a walrus
that had been killed, perhaps, or possibly only scavenged, by a bear.
We saw two-year-old cubs with their mothers striding apprehen-
sively away from the sound of our helicopter, and we saw males
and females together, mating pairs, turning beneath us to stare. And
females with five-month-old cubs, scrambling over pressure ridges
with a boost from their mother's nose.
One of the females we darted went down near a jumble of
shattered ice. Wr
hile the others made measurements, I looked at her
feet. I had once been told that polar bear claws show an annual
shading, faint rings, which could be used reliably to age a bear, as
is the case with ringed seals. But there were none that I could
detect. I looked at details of her fur and felt the thickness of her
ears, as though examining a museum specimen. Uncomfortable
with all this, I walked over to the pressure ridge and sat on a slab
of broken sea ice. It was a beautiful day, the skies clear behind a
thin layer of very high cirrus, which made the sky a paler blue.
About five below zero. No wind.
As I sat there my companions rolled the unconscious bear over
on her back and I saw a trace of pink in the white fur between her
legs. The lips of her vulva were swollen. Her genitalia were in size
and shape like a woman's. I looked away. I felt I had invaded her
privacy.
For the remainder of the day I could not rid myself of this
image of vulnerability.
Four
LANCASTER SOUND
Monodon monoceros
IAM STANDING at the margin of the sea ice called the floe edge
at the mouth of Admiralty Inlet, northern Baffin Island, three
or four miles out to sea. The firmness beneath my feet belies
the ordinary sense of the phrase "out to sea." Several Eskimo camps
stand here along the white and black edge of ice and water. All of
us have come from another place--Nuvua, 30 miles to the south at
the tip of Uluksan Peninsula. We are here to hunt narwhals. They
axe out there in the open water of Lancaster Sound somewhere,
waiting for this last ice barrier to break up so they can enter their
summer feeding grounds in Admiralty Inlet.
As I walk along the floe edge--the light is brilliant, the cease-
less light of July; but after so many weeks I am weary of it; I stare
119
1 2 0 ARCTIC DREAMS
at the few shadows on the ice with a kind of hunger--as I walk
along here I am aware of both fear and elation, a mix that comes in
remote regions with the realization that you are exposed and the
weather can be capricious, and fatal. The wind is light and from
the north--I can see its corrugation on the surface of the water.
Should it swing around and come from the south, the ice behind
us would begin to open up. Traverse cracks across the inlet, only a
few inches wide yesterday, would begin to widen. We would have
difficulty getting back to Nuvua, even if we left at the first sign of
a wind shift.
A few days ago one of these men was caught like that. A
distant explosion, like dynamite, told him what a compass bearing
he quickly took on Borden Peninsula confirmed--that the five-
square-mile sheet of floe ice he had camped on was being swept out
of Admiralty Inlet toward open water in Lancaster Sound. He and
his companion, knowing the set of local currents, struck out
immediately to the east. Twelve hours later, near exhaustion, they
came to a place where the ice floe was grounded in shallow coastal
water, making a huge, slow turn in the current before breaking
loose into Lancaster Sound. They leaped and plunged across broken
ice cakes for the firm shore.
I am not so much thinking of these things, however, as I am
feeling the exuberance of birds around me. Black-legged kittiwakes,
northern fulmars, and black guillemots are wheeling and hovering
in weightless acrobatics over the streams and lenses of life in the
water--zooplankton and arctic cod--into which they plunge re-
peatedly for their sustenance. Out on the ice, at piles of offal from
the narwhal hunt, glaucous and Thayer's gulls stake a rough-
tempered claim to some piece of flesh, brash, shouldering birds
alongside the more reticent and rarer ivory gulls.
Birds fly across these waters in numbers that encourage you to
simply flip your pencil in the air. Certain species end their north-
ward migration here and nest. Others fly on to Devon and Elles-
mere islands or to northwest Greenland. From where I now stand
I can study some that stay, nesting in an unbroken line for i o miles
Lancaster Sound 12 I
on a cliff between Baillarge Bay and Elwin Inlet, a rugged wall of
sedimentary and volcanic rock pocked with indentations and ledges,
rising at an angle of 8o° from the water. More than 50,000
northern fulmars. At other such rookeries around Lancaster Sound,
guillemots, murres, and kittiwakes congregate in tens and even
hundreds of thousands to nest and feed during the short summer.
Gulls, arctic terns, snow geese, eiders, red-breasted mergansers, and
dovekies have passed through in droves already. Of the dovekies--
a small, stocky seabird with a black head and bright white under-
side--something on the order of a third of the northwest Greenland
population of 30 million passes over Lancaster Sound in May and
June.
On the white-as-eggshell ice plain where we are camped, with
the mottled browns and ochers of Borden Peninsula to the east and
the dark cliffs of Brodeur Peninsula obscured in haze to the west,
the adroit movements of the birds above the water give the land-
scape an immediate, vivid dimension: the eye, drawn far out to pale
hues on the horizon, comes back smartly to the black water, where,
plunk, a guillemot disappears in a dive.
The outcry of birds, the bullet-whirr of their passing wings,
the splashing of water, is, like the falling light, unending. Lancaster
Sound is a rare arctic marine sanctuary, a place where creatures are
concentrated in the sort of densities one finds in the Antarctic
Ocean, the richest sea waters in the world. Marine ecologists are not
certain why Lancaster Sound teems so with life, but local upwelling
currents and a supply of nutrients from glacial runoff on Devon
Island seem critical.*
* Lancaster Sound has been proposed as a world biological reserve by
the International Biological Programme and singled out by the United
Nations as a Natural Site of World Heritage Quality. The stability of
this ecosystem is currently threatened by offshore oil development and
increased shipping traffic. David Nettleship, an arctic ornithologist with
preeminent experience here, has written that such economic develop-
ment "should be strictly controlled in order to prevent the destruction
of a uniquely rich high arctic oasis. To harm it would go far towards
making a desert of arctic waters."
Lancaster Sound I2
3
Three million colonial seabirds, mostly northern fulmars,
kittiwakes, and guillemots, nest and feed here in the summer. It is
no longer the haunt of 10,000 or so bowhead whales, but it remains
a summering ground for more than 30 percent of the belukha whale
population of North America, and more than three-quarters of the
world's population of narwhals. No one is sure how many harp,
bearded, and ringed seals are here--probably more than a quarter of
a million. In addition there are thousands of Atlantic walrus. The
coastal regions are a denning area for polar bear and home to
thousands of arctic fox in the summer.
I am concerned, as I walk, however, more with what is imme-
diate to my senses--the ternlike whiffle and spin of birds over the
water, the chicken-cackling of northern fulmars, and cool air full
of the breath of sea life. This community of creatures, including all
those invisible in the water, constitutes a unique overlap of land,
water, and air. This is a special meeting ground, like that of a
forest's edge with a clearing; or where the fresh waters of an
estuary meet the saline tides of the sea; or at a river's riparian edge.
The mingling of animals from different ecosystems charges such
border zones with evolutionary potential. Flying creatures here at
Admiralty Inlet walk on ice. They break the pane of water with
their dives to feed. Marine mammals break the pane of water com-
ing the other way to breathe.
The edges of any landscape--horizons, the lip of a valley, the
bend of a river around a canyon wall--quicken an observer's
expectations. That attraction to borders, to the earth's twilit places,
is part of the shape of human curiosity. And the edges that cause
excitement are like these where I now walk, sensing the birds toy-
ing with gravity; or like those in quantum mechanics, where what is
critical straddles a border between being a wave and being a
particle, between being what it is and becoming something else,
occupying an edge of time that defeats our geometries. In biology
these transitional areas between two different communities are
called ecotones.
The ecotone at the Admiralty Inlet floe edge extends in two
planes. In order to pass under the ice from the open sea, an animal
must be free of a need for atmospheric oxygen; the floe edge, there-
fore, is a barrier to the horizontal migration of whales. In the
vertical plane, no bird can penetrate the ice and birds like gulls
can't go below water with guillemots to feed on schools of fish.
Sunlight, too, is halted at these borders.
To stand at the edge of this four-foot-thick ice platform,
however, is to find yourself in a rich biological crease. Species of
alga grow on the bottom of the sea ice, turning it golden brown
with a patchwork of life. These tiny diatoms feed zooplankton
moving through the upper layers of water in vast clouds--under-
water galaxies of copepods, amphipods, and mysids. These in turn
[ 2 4
ARCTIC DREAMS
Lancaster Sound 125
feed the streaming schools of cod. The cod feed the birds. And the
narwhals. And also the ringed seal, which feeds the polar bear, and
eventually the fox. The algae at the bottom of this food web are
called "epontic" algae, the algae of the sea ice. (Ringed seals, ivory
gulls, and other birds and mammals whose lives are ice-oriented are
called "pagophylic") It is the ice, however, that holds this life
together. For ice-associated seals, vulnerable on a beach, it is a place
offshore to rest, directly over their feeding grounds. It provides
algae with a surface to grow on. It shelters arctic cod from hunting
seabirds and herds of narwhals, and it shelters the narwhal from
the predatory orca. It is the bear's highway over the sea. And it
gives me a place to stand on the ocean, and wonder.
I walk here intent on the birds, half aware of the biological
mysteries in these placid, depthless waters in which I catch fleeting
silver glimpses of cod. I feel blessed. I draw in the salt air and feel
the warmth of sunlight on my face. I recall a childhood of summer
days on the beaches of California. I feel the wealth to be had in life
in an aimless walk like this, through woods or over a prairie or
down a beach.
It is not all benign and ethereal at the ice edge, however. You
cannot--I cannot--lose completely the sense of how far from land
this is. And I am wary of walrus. A male walrus is a huge animal,
approaching the size of a small car. At close range in the water its
agility and speed are intimidating. Walruses normally eat only
bottom-dwelling organisms like clams, worms, and crabs, but there
is an unusual sort of walrus--almost always a male, a loner, that
deliberately hunts and kills seals. Its ivory tusks are crosshatched
with the claw marks of seals fighting for their lives. (It is called
angeyeghaq by the Eskimos on Saint Lawrence Island, who are
familiar with its unusual behavior.) This rare carnivore will charge
off an ice floe to attack a small boat, and actively pursue and try to
kill people in the water. A friend of mine was once standing with
an Eskimo friend at an ice edge when the man cautioned him to
step back. They retreated 15 or 20 feet. Less than a minute later a
walrus surfaced in an explosion of water where they had been
standing. A polar bear trick.
When I walk along the floe edge I think of that story. I have
no ear educated as was his companion's to anticipate the arrival of
the walrus. A native ear. Experience. I walk here susceptible as any
traveler to the unknown.
I stood still occasionally to listen. I heard only the claver of
birds. Then there was something else. I had never heard the sound
before, but when it came, plosive and gurgling, I knew instinctively
what it was, even as everyone in camp jumped. I strained to see
them, to spot the vapor of their breath, a warm mist against the soft
horizon, or the white tip of a tusk breaking the surface of the water,
a dark pattern that retained its shape against the dark, shifting
patterns of the water. Somewhere out there in the ice fragments.
Gone. Gone now. Others had heard the breathing. Human figures
in a camp off to the west, dark lines on the blinding white ice,
gesture toward us with upraised arms.
THE first narwhals I ever saw lived far from here, in Bering Strait.
The day I saw them I knew that no element of the earth's natural
history had ever before brought me so far, so suddenly. It was as
though something from a bestiary had taken shape, a creature
strange as a giraffe. It was as if the testimony of someone I had no
reason to doubt, yet could not quite believe, a story too farfetched,
had been verified at a glance.
I was with a bowhead whale biologist named Don Ljungblad,
flying search transects over Bering Sea. It was May, and the first
bowheads of spring were slowly working their way north through
Bering Strait toward their summer feeding grounds in the Chukchi
and Beaufort seas. Each day as we flew these transects we would
pass over belukha whale and walrus, ringed, spotted, and ribbon
seals, bearded seals, and flocks of birds migrating to Siberia. I know
of no other region in North America where animals can be met
with in such numbers. Bering Sea itself is probably the richest of all
126 ARCTIC DREAMS
the northern seas, as rich as Chesapeake Bay or the Grand Banks at
the time of their discovery. Its bounty of crabs, pollock, cod, sole,
herring, clams, and salmon is set down in wild numbers, the ram-
bling digits of guesswork. The numbers of birds and marine
mammals feeding here, to a person familiar with anything but the
Serengeti or life at the Antarctic convergence, are magical. At the
height of migration in the spring, the testament of life in Bering
Sea is absolutely stilling in its dimensions.
The two weeks I spent flying with Ljungblad, with so many
thousands of creatures moving through the water and the air, were
a heady experience. Herds of belukha whale glided in silent shoals
beneath transparent sheets of young ice. Squadrons of fast-flying
sea ducks flashed beneath us as they banked away. We passed ice
floes stained red in a hundred places with the afterbirths of walrus.
Staring all day into the bright light reflected from the ice and water,
however, and the compression in time of these extraordinary events,
left me dazed some evenings.
Aspects of the arctic landscape that had become salient for me
--its real and temporal borders; a rare, rich oasis of life surrounded
by vast stretches of deserted land; the upending of conventional
kinds of time; biological vulnerability made poignant by the for-
giving light of summer--all of this was evoked over Bering Sea.
The day we saw the narwhals we were flying south, low over
Bering Strait. The ice in Chukchi Sea behind us was so close it did
not seem possible that bowheads could have penetrated this far; but
it is good to check, because they can make headway in ice as heavy
as this and they are able to come a long way north undetected in
lighter ice on the Russian side. I was daydreaming about two bow-
heads we had seen that morning. They had been floating side by
side in a broad lane of unusually clear water between a shelf of
shorefast ice and the pack ice--the flaw lead. As we passed over,
they made a single movement together, a slow, rolling turn and
graceful glide, like figure skaters pushing off, these 50-ton levia-
thans. Ljungblad shouted in my earphones: "Waiting." They were
waiting for the ice in the strait to open up. Ljungblad saw nearly
Lancaster Sound 127
300 bowheads waiting calmly like this one year, some on their
backs, some with their chins resting on the ice.
The narwhals appeared in the middle of this reverie. Two
males, with ivory tusks spiraling out of their foreheads, the image
of the unicorn with which history has confused them. They were
close to the same size and light-colored, and were lying parallel and
motionless in a long, straight lead in the ice. My eye was drawn to
them before my conscious mind, let alone my voice, could catch up.
I stared dumbfounded while someone else shouted. Not just to see
the narwhals, but here, a few miles northwest of King Island in
Bering Sea. In all the years scientists have kept records for these
waters, no one had ever seen a narwhal alive in Bering Sea. Judging
from the heaviness of the ice around them, they must have spent
the winter here.* They were either residents, a wondrous thought,
or they had come from the nearest population centers the previous
fall, from waters north of Siberia or from northeastern Canada.
The appearance of these animals was highly provocative. We
made circle after circle above them, until they swam away under
the ice and were gone. Then we looked at each other. Who could
say what this was, really?
Because you have seen something doesn't mean you can ex-
plain it. Differing interpretations will always abound, even when
good minds come to bear. The kernel of indisputable information
is a dot in space; interpretations grow out of the desire to make this
point a line, to give it a direction. The directions in which it can be
sent, the uses to which it can be put by a culturally, professionally,
and geographically diverse society, are almost without limit. The
possibilities make good scientists chary. In a region like the Arctic,
tense with a hunger for wealth, with fears of plunder, interpretation
can quickly get beyond a scientist's control. When asked to assess
* The narwhal is not nearly as forceful in the ice as the bowhead. It can
break through only about 6 inches of ice with its head. A bowhead,
using its brow or on occasion its more formidable chin, can break
through as much as 18 inches of sea ice.
128 ARCTIC DREAMS Lancaster Sound 129
the meaning of a biological event--What were those animals doing
out there? Where do they belong?--they hedge. They are some-
times reluctant to elaborate on what they saw, because they cannot
say what it means, and they are suspicious of those who say they
know. Some even distrust the motives behind the questions.
I think along these lines in this instance because of the animal.
No large mammal in the Northern Hemisphere comes as close as
the narwhal to having its very existence doubted. For some, the
possibility that this creature might actually live in the threatened
waters of Bering Sea is portentous, a significant apparition on the
eve of an era of disruptive oil exploration there. For others, those
with the leases to search for oil and gas in Navarin and Norton
basins, the possibility that narwhals may live there is a complicating
environmental nuisance. Hardly anyone marvels solely at the fact
that on the afternoon of April 16, 1982, five people saw two nar-
whals in a place so unexpected that they were flabbergasted. They
remained speechless, circling over the animals in a state of wonder.
In those moments the animals did not have to mean anything at all.
WE know more about the rings of Saturn than we know about the
narwhal. Where do they go and what do they eat in the winter,
when it is too dark and cold for us to find them? The Chilean poet
and essayist Pablo Neruda wonders in his memoirs how an animal
this large can have remained so obscure and uncelebrated. Its name,
he thought, was "the most beautiful of undersea names, the name of
a sea chalice that sings, the name of a crystal spur." Why, he won-
dered, had no one taken Narwhal for a last name, or built "a
beautiful Narwhal Building?"
Part of the answer lies with a regrettable connotation of death
in the animal's name. The pallid color of the narwhal's skin has been
likened to that of a drowned human corpse, and it is widely thought
that its name came from the Old Norse for "corpse" and "whale,"
ndr + hvalr. A medieval belief that the narwhal's flesh was poison-
ous has been offered in support of this interpretation, as well as the
belief that its "horn" was proof at that time against being poisoned.
The eighteenth-century naturalist Buffon characterized the animal
for all the generations that would read him as one that "revels in
carnage, attacks without provocation, and kills without need."
Among its associations with human enterprise in the inhospitable
north is the following grim incident. In 1126, Arnhald, first bishop
of Iceland, was shipwrecked off the Icelandic coast. Drowned men
and part of the contents of the ship's hold washed up in a marsh, a
place afterward called the Pool of Corpses. Conspicuous among the
items of salvage were a number of narwhal tusks, "with runic letters
upon them in an indelible red gum so that each sailor might know
his own at the end of the voyage."
W. P. Lehmann, a professor of Germanic languages, believes
the association with death is a linguistic accident. The Old Norse
ndrhvalr (whence the English narivhal, the French narval, the
German Narwal, etc.), he says, was a vernacular play on the word
nahvalr--the way high-bred corn is used in place of hybrid corn,
or sparroivgrass is used for asparagus. According to Lehmann,
nahvalr is an earlier, West Norse term meaning a "whale distin-
guished by a long, narrow projection" (the tusk).
Some, nevertheless, still call the narwhal "the corpse whale,"
and the unfounded belief that it is a cause of human death, or an
omen or symbol to be associated with human death, remains intact
to this day in some quarters. Animals are often fixed like this in
history, bearing an unwarranted association derived from notions or
surmise having no connection at all with their real life. The fuller
explanations of modern field biology are an antidote, in part, to this
tendency to name an animal carelessly. But it is also, as Neruda
suggests, a task of literature to take animals regularly from the
shelves where we have stored them, like charms or the most
intricate of watches, and to bring them to life.
The obscurity of narwhals is not easily breeched by science.
To begin with, they live underwater. And they live year-round in
the polar ice, where the logistics and expense involved in approach-
ing them are formidable barriers to field research, even in summer.
Scientists have largely been limited to watching what takes place at
130 ARCTIC DREAMS
the surface of the water in the open sea adjacent to observation
points high on coastal bluffs. And to putting hydrophones in the
water with them, and to making comparisons with the belukha
whale, a close and better-known relative. About the regular periodic
events of their lives, such as migration, breeding, and calving, in
relation to climatic changes and fluctuations in the size of the
population, we know next to nothing.*
Scientists can speak with precision only about the physical
animal, not the ecology or behavior of this social and gregarious
small whale. (It is the latter, not the former, unfortunately, that is
most crucial to an understanding of how industrial development
might affect narwhals.) Adult males, 16 feet long and weighing
upwards of 3300 pounds, are about a quarter again as large as adult
females. Males are also distinguished by an ivory tusk that pierces
the upper lip on the left side and extends forward as much as 10
feet. Rarely, a female is found with a tusk, and, more rarely still,
males and females with tusks on both sides of the upper jaw.
From the side, compared with the rest of its body, the nar-
whal's head seems small and blunt. It is dominated by a high,
rounded forehead filled with bioacoustical lipids--special fats that
allow the narwhal to use sound waves to communicate with other
whales and to locate itself and other objects in its three-dimensional
world. Its short front flippers function as little more than diving
planes. The cone-shaped body tapers from just behind these flippers
--where its girth is greatest, as much as eight feet--to a vertical
ellipse at the tail. In place of a dorsal fin, a low dorsal ridge about
five feet long extends in an irregular crenulation down the back.
The tail flukes are unique. Seen from above, they appear heart-
* The knowledge and insight of Eskimos on these points, unfortunately,
are of little help. Of all the areas of natural history in which they show
expertise, native hunters are weakest in their understanding of the
population dynamics of migratory animals. The reason is straight-
forward. Too much of the animal's life is lived "outside the commu-
nity," beyond the geographic and phenomenological landscape the
Eskimos share with them.
· · &
I
Lancaster Sound 131
shaped, like a ginkgo leaf, with a deep-notched center and trailing
edges that curve far forward.
Viewed from the front, the head seems somewhat squarish and
asymmetrical, and oddly small against the deep chest. The mouth,
too, seems small for such a large animal, with the upper lip just
covering the edge of a short, wedge-shaped jaw. The eyes are
located just above and behind the upturned corners of the mouth,
which give the animal a bemused expression. (The evolutionary loss
of facial muscles, naturalist Peter Warshall has noted, means no
quizzical wrinkling of the forehead, no raised eyebrow of disbelief,
no pursed lip of determination.) A single, crescent-shaped blowhole
on top of the head is in a transverse line with the eyes.
Narwhal calves are almost uniformly gray. Young adults show
spreading patches and streaks of white on the belly and marbling on
the flanks. Adults are dark gray across the top of the head and
down the back. Lighter grays predominate on top of the flippers
and flukes, whites and light yellow-whites underneath. The back
and flanks are marbled with blackish grays. Older animals, espe-
cially males, may be almost entirely white. Females, say some, are
always lighter-colored on their flanks.
The marbled quality of the skin, which feels like smooth, oiled
stone, is mesmerizing. On the flukes especially, where curvilinear
streaks of dark gray overlap whitish-gray tones, the effect could not
be more painterly. Elsewhere on the body, spots dominate. "These
spots," writes William Scoresby, "are of a roundish or oblong form:
on the back, where they seldom exceed two inches in diameter,
they are the darkest and most crowded together, yet with intervals
of pure white among them. On the side the spots are fainter,
smaller, and more open. On the belly, they become extremely faint
and few, and in considerable surfaces are not to be seen." These
patterns completely penetrate the skin, which is a half-inch thick.
In the water, depending on sunlight and the color of the water
Mself, narwhals, according to British whaling historian Basil Lub-
bock, take on "many hues, from deep sea green to even an intense
lake [blue] colour."
132 ARCTIC DREAMS
Narwhals are strong swimmers, with the ability to alter the
contours of their body very slightly to reduce turbulence. Their
speed and maneuverability are sufficient to hunt down swift prey--
arctic cod, Greenland halibut, redfish--and to avoid their enemies,
the orca and the Greenland shark.
Narwhals live in close association with ice margins and are
sometimes found far inside heavy pack ice, miles from open water.
(How they determine whether the lead systems they follow into
the ice will stay open behind them, ensuring their safe return, is
not known.) They manage to survive in areas of strong currents
and wind where the movement of ice on the surface is violent and
where leads open and close, or freeze over, very quickly. (Like sea-
birds, they seem to have an uncanny sense of when a particular lead
is going to close in on them, and they leave.) That they are not in-
fallible in anticipating the movement and formation of ice, which
seals them off from the open air and oxygen, is attested to by
a relatively unusual and often fatal event called a savssat.
Savssats are most commonly observed on the west coast of
Greenland. Late in the fall, while narwhals are still feeding deep in
a coastal fiord, a band of ice may form in calm water across the
fiord's mouth. The ice sheet may then expand toward the head of
the fiord. At some point the distance from its landward to its sea-
ward edge exceeds the distance a narwhal can travel on a single
breath. By this time, too, shorefast ice may have formed at the head
of the fiord, and it may grow out to meet the sea ice. The narwhals
are thus crowded into a smaller and smaller patch of open water.
Their bellowing and gurgling, their bovinelike moans and the
plosive screech of their breathing, can sometimes be heard at a
great distance.
The Danish scientist Christian Vibe visited a savssat on March
16, 1943, on the west coast of central Greenland. Hundreds of
narwhals and belukhas were trapped in an opening less than 20 feet
square. The black surface of the water was utterly "calm and still,"
writes Vibe. "Then the smooth surface was suddenly broken by
Lancaster Sound 133
black shadows and white animals which in elegant curves came up
and disappeared--narwhals and white whales by the score. Side by
side they emerged so close to each other that some of them would
be lifted on the backs of the others and turn a somersault with the
handsome tail waving in the air. First rows of narwhal, then white
whales and then again narwhals--each species separately. It seethed,
bobbed, and splashed in the opening. With a hollow, whistling
sound they inhaled the air as if sucking it in through long iron
tubes. The water was greatly disturbed . . . and the waves washed
far in over the ice." The splashed water froze to the rim of the
breathing hole, as did the moisture from their exhalations, further
reducing the size of the savssat. In spite of the frenzy, not a single
animal that Vibe saw was wounded by the huge tusks of the
narwhal.*
The narwhal is classed in the suborder Odontoceti, with
toothed whales such as the sperm whale, in the superfamily
Delphinoidea, along with porpoises and dolphins, and in the family
Monodontidae with a single companion, the belukha. In contrast to
the apparently coastally-adapted belukha, biologists believe the
narwhal is a pelagic or open-ocean species, that it is more ice-
adapted, and that it winters farther to the north. Extrapolating on
the basis of what is known of the belukha, it is thought that nar-
whals breed in April and give birth to a single, five-foot, 170-pound
calf about fourteen months later, in June or July. Calves carry an
inch-thick layer of blubber at birth to protect them against the cold
water. They appear to nurse for about two years and may stay with
their mothers for three years, or more. Extrapolating once again
* Eskimo hunters killed 340 narwhals and belukhas at this savssat in a
week, before the ice fractured and the rest escaped. In the spring of
1915, Eskimos at Disko Bay took more than a thousand narwhals and
belukhas at two savssats over a period of several months. Inattentive
birds, especially thick-billed murres and dovekies which require a lot
of open water to take off, may also suddenly find themselves with
insufficient room and may be trapped.
134 ARCTIC DREAMS Lancaster Sound 135
from the belukha, it is thought that females reach sexual maturity
between four and seven years of age, males between eight and nine
years.
Narwhals are usually seen in small groups of two to eight
animals, frequently of the same sex and age. In the summer, female
groups, which include calves, are sometimes smaller or more loosely
knit than male groups. During spring migration, herds may consist
of 300 or more animals.
Narwhals feed largely on arctic and polar cod, Greenland
halibut, redfish, sculpins, and other fish, on squid and to some extent
on shrimps of several kinds, and on octopus and crustaceans. They
have a complex, five-chambered stomach that processes food
quickly, leaving undigested the chitinous beaks of squid and octo-
pus, the carapaces of crustaceans, and the ear bones and eye lenses
of fish, from which biologists can piece together knowledge of their
diets.
Two types of "whale lice" (actually minute crustaceans) cling
to their skin, in the cavity where the tusk passes through the lip, in
the tail notch in the flukes, and in wounds (all places where they
are least likely to be swept off by the flow of water past the nar-
whal's body). The tracks of the sharp, hooked legs of these tiny
creatures are sometimes very clear on a narwhal's skin. Older
animals may carry such infestations of these parasites as to cause an
observer to wince.
IF you were to stand at the edge of a sea cliff on the north coast of
Borden Peninsula, Baffin Island, you could watch narwhals migrat-
ing past more or less continuously for several weeks in the twenty-
four-hour light of June. You would be struck by their agility and
swiftness, by the synchronicity of their movements as they swam
and dived in unison, and by a quality of alert composure in them,
of capability in the face of whatever might happen. Their attrac-
tiveness lies partly with their strong, graceful movements in three
dimensions, like gliding birds on an airless day. An impressive form
of their synchronous behavior is their ability to deep-dive in groups.
They disappear as a single diminishing shape, gray fading to dark-
ness. They reach depths of 1000 feet or more, and their intent,
often, is then to drive schools of polar cod toward the surface at
such a rate that the fish lose consciousness from the too-rapid ex-
pansion of their swim bladders. At the surface, thousands of these
stunned fish feed narwhals and harp seals, and rafts of excited
northern fulmars and kittiwakes.
Watching from high above, one is also struck by the social
interactions of narwhals, which are extensive and appear to be well
organized according to hierarchies of age and sex. The socializing
of males frequently involves the use of their tusks. They cross them
like swords above the water, or one forces another down by press-
ing his tusk across the other's back, or they face each other head-on,
their tusks side by side.
Helen Silverman, whose graduate work included a study of the
social organization and behavior of narwhals, describes as typical
the following scene, from her observations in Lancaster Sound.
"On one occasion a group of five narwhals consisting of two adult
males, one adult female, one [calf] and one juvenile were moving
west with the males in the lead. The group stopped and remained
on the surface for about 30 [seconds]. One male turned, moved
under the [calf], and lifted it out of the water twice. There was no
apparent reaction from the mother. The male then touched the side
of the female with the tip of its tusk and the group continued
westward."
Sitting high on a sea cliff in sunny, blustery weather in late
June--the familiar sense of expansiveness, of deep exhilaration such
weather brings over one, combined with the opportunity to watch
animals, is summed up in a single Eskimo word: quviannikumut,
"to feel deeply happy"--sitting here like this, it is easy to fall
into speculation about the obscure narwhal. From the time I first
looked into a narwhal's mouth, past the accordian pleats of its
tongue, at the soft white interior splashed with Tyrian purple, I
i 3 6 ARCTIC DREAMS
have thought of their affinity with sperm whales, whose mouths are
similarly colored. Like the sperm whale, the narwhal is a deep
diver. No other whales but the narwhal and the sperm whale are
known to sleep on the surface for hours at a time. And when the
narwhal lies at the surface, it lies like a sperm whale, with the
section of its back from blowhole to dorsal ridge exposed, and
the rest of its back and tail hanging down in the water. Like the
sperm whale, it is renowned for its teeth; and it has been pursued,
though briefly, for the fine oils in its forehead.
Like all whales, the narwhal's evolutionary roots are in the
Cretaceous, with insect-eating carnivores that we, too, are descen-
ded from. Its line of development through the Cretaceous and into
the Paleocene follows that of artiodactyls like the hippopotamus
and the antelope--and then it takes a radical turn. After some 330
million years on dry land, since it emerged from the sea during the
Devonian period 380 million years ago, the line of genetic develop-
ment that will produce whales returns to the world's oceans. The
first proto-whales turn up in the Eocene, 45 million years ago, the
first toothed whales 18 million years later, in the Oligocene. By
then, the extraordinary adjustments that had to take place to permit
air-breathing mammals to live in the sea were largely complete.
Looking down from the sea cliffs at a lone whale floating
peacefully in the blue-green water, it is possible to meditate on
these evolutionary changes in the mammalian line, to imagine this
creature brought forward in time to this moment. What were once
its rear legs have disappeared, though the skeleton still shows the
trace of a pelvis. Sea water gave it such buoyancy that it required
little in the way of a skeletal structure; it therefore has achieved a
large size without loss of agility. It left behind it a world of oscillat-
ing temperatures (temperatures on the arctic headland from which
I gaze may span a range of 120T over twelve months) for a world
where the temperature barely fluctuates. It did not relinquish its
warm-blooded way of life, however; it is insulated against the cold
with a layer of blubber two to four inches thick.
Lancaster Sound '37
The two greatest changes in its body have been in the way it
now stores and uses oxygen, and in a rearrangement of its senses to
suit a world that is largely acoustical, not visual or olfactory, in
its stimulations.
When I breathe this arctic air, 34 percent of the oxygen is
briefly stored in my lungs, 41 percent in my blood, 13 percent in
my muscles, and 12 percent in the tissues of other of my organs. I
take a deep breath only when I am winded or in a state of emotion;
the narwhal always takes a deep breath--its draft of this same air
fills its small lungs completely. And it stores the oxygen differently,
so it can draw on it steadily during a fifteen-minute dive. Only
about 9 percent stays in its lungs, while 41 percent goes into the
blood, another 41 percent into the muscles, and about 9 percent
into other tissues. The oxygen is bound to hemoglobin molecules in
its blood (no different from my own), and to myoglobin molecules
in its muscles. (The high proportion of myoglobin in its muscles
makes the narwhal's muscle meat dark maroon, like the flesh of all
marine mammals.)
Changes in the narwhal's circulatory system---the evolution of
rete mirabile, "wonder nets" of blood vessels; an enlargement of its
hepatic veins; a reversible flow of blood at certain places--have
allowed it to adapt comfortably to the great pressures it experiences
during deep dives.
There is too little nitrogen in its blood for "the bends" to
occur when it surfaces. Carbon dioxide, the by-product of respira-
tion, is effectively stored until it can be explosively expelled with a
rapid flushing of the lungs.
It is only with an elaborate apparatus of scuba gear, decom-
pression tanks, wet suits, weight belts, and swim fins that we can
explore these changes. Even then it is hard to appreciate the radical
alteration of mammalian development that the narwhal represents.
First, ours is largely a two-dimensional world. We are not creatures
who look up often. We are used to exploring "the length and
breadth" of issues, not their "height." For the narwhal there are
i 3 8 ARCTIC DREAMS
very few two-dimensional experiences--the sense of the water it
feels at the surface of its skin, and that plane it must break in order
to breathe.
The second constraint on our appreciation of the narwhal's
world is that it "knows" according to a different hierarchy of
senses than the one we are accustomed to. Its chemical senses of
taste and smell are all but gone, as far as we know, though narwhals
probably retain an ability to determine salinity. Its tactile sense
remains acute. Its sensitivity to pressure is elevated--it has a highly
discriminating feeling for depth and a hunter's sensitivity to the
slight turbulence created by a school of cod cruising ahead of it in
its dimly lit world. The sense of sight is atrophied, because of a lack
of light. The eye, in fact, has changed in order to accommodate
itself to high pressures, the chemical irritation of salt, a constant
rush of water past it, and the different angle of refraction of light
underwater. (The narwhal sees the world above water with an eye
that does not move in its socket, with astigmatic vision and a limited
ability to change the distance at which it can focus.)
How different must be "the world" for such a creature, for
whom sight is but a peripheral sense, who occupies, instead, a three-
dimensional acoustical space. Perhaps only musicians have some
inkling of the formal shape of emotions and motivation that might
define such a sensibility.
The Arctic Ocean can seem utterly silent on a summer day to
an observer standing far above. If you lowered a hydrophone,
however, you would discover a sphere of "noise" that only spec-
trum analyzers and tape recorders could unravel. The tremolo
moans of bearded seals. The electric crackling of shrimp. The
baritone boom of walrus. The high-pitched bark and yelp of ringed
seals. The clicks, pure tones, birdlike trills, and harmonics of
belukhas and narwhals. The elephantine trumpeting of bowhead
whales. Added to these animal noises would be the sounds of shift-
ing sediments on the sea floor, the whine and fracture of sea ice, and
the sound of deep-keeled ice grounding in shallow water.
The narwhal is not only at home in this "cacophony," as
Lancaster Sound 13 9
possessed of the sense of a neighborhood as we might conceivably
be on an evening stroll, but it manages to appear "asleep," oblivious
at the surface of the water on a summer day in Lancaster Sound.
The single most important change that took place in the
whale's acoustical system to permit it to live in this world was the
isolation of its auditory canals from each other. It could then re-
ceive waterborne sound independently on each side of its head and
so determine the direction from which a sound was coming. (We
can do this only in the open air; underwater, sound vibrates evenly
through the bones of our head.) The narwhal, of course, receives
many sounds; we can only speculate about what it pays attention
to, or what information it may obtain from all that it hears. Con-
versely, narwhals also emit many sounds important, presumably, to
narwhals and to other animals too.
Acoustical scientists divide narwhal sound into two categories.
Respiratory sounds are audible to us as wheezes, moans, whistles,
and gurgles of various sorts. The second group of sounds, those
associated with, presumably, echolocation and communication,
scientists divide into three categories: clicking, generated at rates as
high as 500 clicks per second; pulsed tones; and pure tones. (Certain
of these sounds are audible to someone in a boat in the open air, like
an effervescence rising from the surface of the water.)
Narwhals, it is believed, use clicking sounds to locate them-
selves, their companions, their prey, and such things as floe edges
and the trend of leads. Pulsed tones are thought to be social in
nature and susceptible to individual modification, so each narwhal
has a "signature" tone or call of its own. Pure-tone signals, too, are
thought to be social or communicative in function. According to
several scientists writing in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of
America, the narwhal "seems much less noisy [than the belukha],
appears to have a smaller variety of sounds, and produces many that
are outside the limits of human hearing." A later study, however,
found narwhals "extremely loquacious underwater," and noted that
tape recordings were "almost saturated with acoustic signals of
highly variable duration and frequency composition." The same
140 ARCTIC DREAMS Lancaster Sound 141
study concluded, too, that much of the narwhal's acoustically re-
lated behavior "remains a matter of conjecture."
I dwell on all this because of a routine presumption--that the
whale's ability to receive and generate sound indicates it is an
"intelligent" creature--and an opposite presumption, evident in a
Canadian government report, that the continuous racket of a subsea
drilling operation, with the attendant din of ship and air traffic
operations, "would not be expected to be a hazard [to narwhals]
because of . . . the assumed high levels of ambient underwater noise
in Lancaster Sound."
It is hard to believe in an imagination so narrow in its scope,
so calloused toward life, that it could write these last words. Ceta-
ceans may well be less "intelligent," less defined by will, imagina-
tion, and forms of logic, than we are. But the idea that they are
intelligent, and that they would be affected by such man-made
noise, is not so much presumption as an expression of a possibility,
the taking of a respectful attitude toward a mystery we can do no
better than name "narwhal." Standing at the edge of a cliff, study-
ing the sea-washed back of such a creature far below, as still as a
cenobite in prayer, the urge to communicate, the upwelling desire,
is momentarily sublime.
I stare out into Lancaster Sound. Four or five narwhals sleep
on the flat calm sea, as faint on the surface as the first stars emerg-
ing in an evening sky. Birds in the middle and far distance slide
through the air, bits of life that dwindle and vanish. Below, under-
neath the sleeping narwhal, fish surge and glide in the currents,
and the light dwindles and is quenched.
T H E first description of a unicorn, according to British scholar
Odell Shepard, appears in the writings of Ctesias, a Greek physician
living in Persia in the fifth century B.C., who had heard reports of
its existence from India. The existence of such an animal, a fierce,
horselike creature of courageous temperament, with a single horn
on its forehead, gained credibility later through the writings of
Aristotle and Pliny and, later still, in the work of Isidore of Seville,
an encyclopedist. The Bible became an unwitting and ironic au-
thority for the unicorn's existence when Greek translators of the
Septuagint rendered the Hebraic term re'em (meaning, probably,
the now extinct aurochs, Bos primigenius) as "the unicorn."
The legend of the unicorn, and the subsequent involvement
of the narwhal, is a story intriguing at many levels. Until well
into the Middle Ages the legend passed only from one book to
another, from one learned individual to another; it was not a part
of the folk culture of Europe. During the Renaissance, scientists,
scholars, and theologians put forth various learned "explanations"
for the unicorn's existence. However farfetched these explana-
tions might have seemed to skeptics, the concrete evidence of a
narwhal's tusk to hand seemed irrefutable. Furthermore, no Chris-
tian could deny the unicorn's existence without contradicting the
Bible.
Scholars argue that the animal in Ctesias' original report from
Persia represents the transposed idea of an oryx or a rhinoceros.
It went unquestioned, they speculate, because Greeks such as
Ctesias took "the grotesque monstrosities of Indian religious art"
rendered in the Persian tapestries they saw for real animals. In
medieval Europe, trade in rare narwhal and walrus tusks, confusion
with the mythical animals of Zoroastrian as well as Christian
tradition, and the bucolic practice of making bizarre alterations in
the horns of domestic animals, all lent credence to the legend. The
interest of the wealthy and learned in this regal animal, moreover,
went beyond mere fascination; it was also practical. European
royalty was besieged with politically motivated poisonings in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the unicorn's horn was re-
putedly the greatest proof against them.
In The Lore of the Unicorn, Odell Shepard writes of the great
range of appreciation of Renaissance people for the unicorn's horn;
it was "their companion on dark nights and in perilous places, and
they held it near their hearts, handling it tenderly, as they would
a treasure. For indeed it was exactly that. It preserved a man from
the arrow that flieth by day and the pestilence that walketh in
t
142 ARCTIC DREAMS
darkness, from the craft of the poisoner, from epilepsy, and from
several less dignified ills of the flesh not to be named in so distin-
guished a connection. In short it was an amulet, a talisman, a
weapon, and a medicine chest all in one."
The narwhal's tusk, traded in bits and pieces as the unicorn's
horn, sold for a fortune in the Middle Ages, for twenty times its
weight in gold. Shepard estimates that in mid-sixteenth-century
Europe there were no more than fifty whole tusks to be seen, each
with a detailed provenance. They were gifted upon royalty and
the church and sought as booty by expeditionary forces who knew
of their existence. Two tusks stolen from Constantinople in 1204
were delivered by Crusaders to the Cathedral of Saint Mark in
Venice, where they may be seen to this day.
The presence of these tusks in Europe depended upon Green-
landic and Icelandic trade. The oddity was that they were deliv-
ered to Europe by men like those who drowned with the Bishop
of Iceland, sailors with no notion of unicorns and no knowledge
of the value of the tusk to those who did know. On the other hand,
the tusk was frequently bought by people who had not the re-
motest notion of the existence of such an animal as the narwhal.
The first European to bring these disparate perceptions to-
gether, it seems, was the cartographer Gerhard Mercator, who
clearly identified the narwhal as the source of the unicorn's horn
in 1621. In 1638, Ole Wurm, a Danish professor and a "zoologist
and antiquarian of high attainment," delivered a speech in Copen-
hagen in which he made the same connection. But by then the
story of the unicorn was simply too firmly entrenched at too many
levels of European society to be easily dispelled, and the horn itself
was too dear an item of commerce to be declared suddenly worth-
less. Besides, it was argued, was not the tusk simply the horn of
the unicorn of the sea? Why shouldn't it have the same power as
the horn of the land unicorn?
Over time the narwhal's tusk lost its influence in medical
circles, trade dwindled, and the legend itself passed out of the
hands of ecclesiastics and scholars to the general populace, where
Lancaster Sound 143
it became dear to the hearts of romantics, artists, and poets. It was
passed on, however, in a form quite different from the secular
tradition in Ctesias. In its secular rendering the unicorn was a
creature of nobility and awesome though benign power. It was a
creature of compassion, though solitary, and indomitably fierce.
It became, as such, the heraldic symbol of knights errant and of
kings. It was incorporated into the British coat of arms by James I
in 1603, and in 1671 Christian V became the first Danish king to
be crowned in a coronation chair made entirely of narwhal tusks.
Under Christian influence, the story of the unicorn became
the story of a captured and tamed beast. The animal lost its robust,
independent qualities, that aloofness of the wild horse, and was
presented as a small, goatlike animal subdued by a maiden in a
pastoral garden. The central episode of its fabulous life, its power
to turn a poisonous river into pure water so that other creatures
might drink, as Moses had done with his staff at the waters of Marah,
passed into oblivion. The creature of whom it was once written
in Solinus' Polyhistoria, "It is an animal never to be taken alive-
killed possibly, but not captured," became a symbol of domestic
virginity and obeisance.
One winter afternoon in Vancouver, British Columbia, I spoke
with the only person ever to have succeeded in putting an adult
narwhal, briefly, on display. (The six animals, brought back from
northern Canada in 1970, all died of pneumonia within a few
months.) Murray Newman, director of the British Columbia
Aquarium, explained the great difficulties inherent in capturing
such animals and later of maintaining them in captivity, especially
the male, with its huge tusk. He doubted any aquarium would ever
manage it successfully. The description from Solinus' Polyhistoria
seemed at that moment, as we gazed across the aquarium's trimmed
lawns toward Vancouver's harbor, oddly apt and prophetic.
A narwhal's tusk, hefted in the hands, feels stout but resilient. It
is a round, evenly tapered shaft of ivory, hollow for most of its
length. (The cavity is filled with dental pulp in the living animal.)
I it
144 ARCTIC DREAMS
A large tusk might weigh 20 pounds, be eight or nine feet long,
and taper from a diameter of four inches at the socket down to a
half-inch at the tip. The smooth, polished tip, two to three inches
long, is roundly blunt or sometimes wedge-shaped. The rest of the
tusk is striated in a regular pattern that spirals from right to left
and may make five or six turns around the shaft before fading out.
Often a single groove parallel to the spiraling striations is apparent.
The tusk also shows a slight, very shallow ripple from end to end
in many specimens.
The striated portion is rough to the touch, and its shallow
grooves are frequently encrusted with algae. These microorganisms
give the tusk a brindled greenish or maroon cast, contrasting with
the white tip and with the 1 o to 12 inches of yellower ivory nor-
mally embedded in the upper left side of the animal's skull.
Well into the nineteenth century there was a question about
which of the sexes carried the tusk (or whether it might be both).
Although many thought it was only the males, a clear under-
standing was confounded by authenticated reports of females with
tusks (a female skull with two large tusks, in fact, was given to a
Hamburg museum in 1684 by a German sea captain), and an
announcement in 1700 by a German scientist, Solomon Reisel, that
some narwhals carried "milk tusks." It did not help matters, either,
that there was much conjecture but no agreement on the function
of the tusk. (A more prosaic error further confused things--
printers sometimes inadvertently reversed drawings, making it
seem that the tusk came out of the right side of the head instead
of the left, and that it spiraled from left to right.)
Several certainties eventually emerged. The tusk spirals from
right to left. In normal development, two incipient tusks form as
"teeth" in the upper jaw of both sexes, one on each side. In the
female, both teeth usually harden into solid ivory rods with a
protuberance at one end, like a meerschaum pipe (these were
Reisel's "milk tusks"). In males, the tusk on the right remains
undeveloped, "a miniature piece of pig iron," while the one on the
Lancaster Sound 145
left almost always develops into a living organ, a continually grow-
ing, fully vascularized tooth. On very rare occasions, both tusks
develop like this, in both sexes. And both tusks spiral from right
to left (i.e., they are not symmetrical like the tusks of an elephant
or a walrus). Viewed from above, twin tusks diverge slightly from
each other. In some males the left tusk never develops (nor does
the right in these instances). In perhaps 3 percent of females a
single tusk develops on the left.
Solving this problem in sexual systematics and physiology
proved simpler than determining the tusk's purpose. It was pro-
posed as a rake, to stir up fish on the seabed floor; as a spear to
impale prey; and as a defensive weapon. All three speculations
ignored the needs of narwhals without tusks. In addition, Robin
Best, a Canadian biologist with a long-standing interest in the ques-
tion, has argued that the tusk is too brittle to stand repeated use
as a rake or probe; that attacking the sorts of fish narwhals habit-
ually eat with the tusk would be difficult and unnecessary and
getting large fish off the tusk problematic; and that there are no
records of narwhals attacking other animals or defending them-
selves with their tusks.
The fact that narwhals frequently cross their tusks out of
water and that the base of the tusk is located in the sound-producing
region of the narwhal's skull led to speculation that it might serve
some role in sound reception or propagation (again ignoring the
female component of the population). Oral surgeons determined
that the tooth's pulp does not contain the bioacoustical lipids neces-
sary for echolocation, but this does not mean that the narwhal
can't in some way direct sound with it and, as some have suggested,
"sound-joust" with other males. (On their own, the oral surgeons
speculated that because the tooth was so highly vascularized, the
narwhal could get rid of a significant amount of body heat this
way, which would presumably allow males to hunt more ener-
getically. The biologists said no.)
William Scoresby, as bright and keen-eyed an observer as ever
I!
146 ARCTIC DREAMS
went to sea, speculated in 1820 that the tusk was only a secondary
sexual characteristic, like a beard in humans, and was perhaps used
to fracture light ice when narwhals of both sexes needed to breathe.
Scientists say narwhals are too careful with their tusks to subject
them to such impact, but on the first point Scoresby was correct.
Male narwhals engage in comparative displays of their tusks,
like the males of other species, but they also appear to make some
kind of violent physical contact with each other occasionally. The
heads of many sexually mature males are variously scarred, and
scientists have even found the broken tips of tusks in wounded
narwhals. (A scientist who made a detailed examination of the
narwhal's musculature said the muscles are not there in the neck
to allow the animals to parry and thrust with rapierlike move-
ments. Indeed, males appear always to move their tusks with de-
liberation, and dexterously, as at savssats.) The circumstances under
which head scarring might occur--the establishment and continual
testing of a male social hierarchy, especially during the breeding
season--are known; but how these wounds are suffered or how
frequently they are inflicted is still widely debated. One plausible
thought is that males align their tusks head-on and that the animal
with the shorter tusk is grazed or sometimes severely poked in the
process.
A significant number of narwhals, 20 to 30 percent, have
broken tusks. Some broken tusks have a curious filling that effec-
tively seals off the exposed pulp cavity. Oral surgeons say this
rod-shaped plug is simply a normal deposition of "reparative den-
tine," but others have long insisted it is actually the tip of another
narwhal's tusk, to which it bears an undeniable resemblance. (The
broken tips of other narwhals' tusks are filled with stones and
sediment.)
Exposed tooth pulp creates a site for infection, not to mention
pain. That animals would try to fill the cavity (if "reparative
dentine" didn't) makes sense. That one narwhal entices another
into this ministration is as intriguing a notion as the thought that
Lancaster Sound 147
males put the tips of their tusks on the opposite male's sound-
sensitive melon and generate a "message" in sound-jousting. It
would be rash to insist categorically that narwhals don't do some-
thing odd with the tusk on occasion, like prodding a flatfish off
the sea bottom. (Herman Melville drolly suggested they used it
as a letter opener.) But it seems clear that its principal, and per-
haps only, use is social. Robin Best argues, further, that because
of its brittleness, its length, and the high proportion of broken
tusks, the organ may have reached an evolutionary end point.
A remaining question is, Why is the tusk twisted? D'Arcy
Wentworth Thompson, a renowned English biologist who died in
1948, offered a brilliant and cogent answer. He argued that the
thrust of a narwhal's tail applied a very slight torque to its body.
The tusk, suspended tightly but not rigidly in its socket in the
upper jaw, resisted this force with a very slight degree of success.
In effect, throughout its life, the narwhal revolved slowly around
its own tusk, and over the years irregularities of the socket gouged
the characteristic striations in the surface of the tooth.
Thompson pointed out that the tooth itself is not twisted--it
is straight-grained ivory, engraved with a series of low-pitched
threads. No one has disproved, proved, or improved upon Thomp-
son's argument since he set it forth in 1942.
BECAUSE the ivory itself dried out and became brittle and hard to
work, the greatest virtue of a narwhal tusk to the Eskimos who
traditionally hunted the animal was its likeness to a wood timber.
Some of the regions where narwhals were most intensively hunted
were without either trees or supplies of driftwood. The tusk
served in those places as a spear shaft, a tent pole, a sledge thwart,
a cross brace--wherever something straight and long was required.
Narwhals were most often hunted by Eskimos during their
near-shore migration in spring, and in bays and fiords during the
summer. To my knowledge, Eskimos attach no great spiritual
importance to the narwhal. Like the caribou, it is a migratory food
148 ARCTIC DREAMS
animal whose spirit (kirnniq) is easily propitiated. The narwhal
does not have the intercessionary powers or innate authority of the
polar bear, the wolf, the walrus, or the raven.
Beyond its tusk, Greenlanders valued the narwhal's skin above
all other leathers for dog harnesses, because it remained supple in
very cold weather and did not stretch when it became wet. The
sinews of the back were prized as thread not only for their dura-
bility but also for their great length. The outside layer of the skin
was an important source of vitamin C, as rich in this essential
vitamin as raw seal liver. The blubber, which burned with a bright,
clean yellow flame, gave light and warmth that were utilized to
carve a fishhook or sew a mitten inside the iglu in winter. A single
narwhal, too, might feed a dog team for a month.
It is different now. The hunter's utilitarian appreciation of
this animal is an attitude some now find offensive; and his consid-
erable skills, based on an accurate and detailed understanding of
the animal and its environment, no longer arouse the sympathetic
admiration of very many people.
In the time I spent watching narwhals along the floe edge at
Lancaster Sound in 1982 no whale was butchered for dog food.
The dogs have been replaced by snow machines. No sinews were
removed for sewing. Only the tusk was taken, to be traded in the
village for cash. And muktuk, the skin with a thin layer of blubber
attached, which was brought back to the hunting camp at Nuvua.
(This delicacy is keenly anticipated each spring and eaten with
pleasure. It tastes like hazelnuts.)
The narwhal's fate in Lancaster Sound is clearly linked with
plans to develop oil and gas wells there, but current hunting pres-
sure against them is proving to be as important a factor. In recent
years Eskimo hunters on northern Baffin Island have exhibited
some lack of discipline during the spring narwhal hunt. They have
made hasty, long-range, or otherwise poorly considered shots and
used calibers of gun and types of bullets that were inadequate to
kill, all of which left animals wounded. And they have sometimes
exceeded the quotas set by Department of Fisheries and Oceans
Lancaster Sound 149
Canada and monitored by the International Whaling Commission.*
On the other side, Eskimos have routinely been excluded from
the upper levels of decision-making by the Canadian government
in these matters and have been offered no help in devising a kind
of hunting behavior more consistent with the power and reach of
modern weapons. For the Eskimos, there is a relentless, sometimes
condescending scrutiny of every attempt they make to adjust their
culture, to "catch up" with the other culture brought up from the
south. It is easy to understand why the men sometimes lose their
accustomed composure.
In the view of Kerry Finley, a marine mammal biologist
closely associated with the Baffin Island narwhal hunts, "It is crit-
ical [to the survival of narwhals] that Inuit become involved in
meaningful positions in the management of marine resources." The
other problems, he believes, cannot be solved until this obligation
is met.
I would walk along the floe edge, then, in those days, hoping to
hear narwhals, for the wonder of their company; and hoping, too,
that they would not come. The narwhal is a great fighter for its
life, and it is painful to watch its struggle. When they were killed,
I ate their flesh as a guest of the people I was among, out of respect
for distant ancestors, and something older than myself.
I watched closely the ivory gull, a small bird with a high,
whistly voice. It has a remarkable ability to appear suddenly in
the landscape, seemingly from nowhere. I have scanned tens of
square miles of open blue sky, determined it was empty of birds,
and then thrown a scrap of seal meat into a lead, where it would
* These charges are detailed in K. J. Finley, R. A. Davis, and H. B.
Silverman, "Aspects of the Narwhal Hunt in the Eastern Canadian
Arctic," Report of the International Whaling Commission 30 (1980):
459-464; and K. J. Finley and G. W. Miller, "The 1979 Hunt for
Narwhals (Monodon monoceros) and an Examination of Harpoon
Gun Technology Near Pond Inlet, Northern Baffin Island," Report of
the International Whaling Commission 32 (1982): 449-460.
150 ARCTIC DREAMS
float. In a few minutes an ivory gull would be overhead. It is hard
to say even from what direction it has come. It is just suddenly
there.
So I would watch them in ones and twos. Like any animal seen
undisturbed in its own environment, the ivory gull seems won-
drously adapted. To conserve heat, its black legs are shorter in
proportion to its body than the legs of other gulls, its feet less
webbed. Its claws are longer and sharper, to give it a better grip
of frozen carrion and on the ice. It uses seaweed in its nest to trap
the sun's energy, to help with the incubation of its eggs. To avoid
water in winter, which might freeze to its legs, it has become deft
at picking things up without landing. In winter it follows the polar
bear. When no carrion turns up in the polar bear's wake, it eats
the polar bear's droppings. It winters on the pack ice. Of the genus
Fagophila. Ice lover.
And I would think as I walked of what I had read of a creature
of legend in China, an animal similar in its habits to the unicorn
but abstemious, like the ivory gull. It is called the ki-lin. The ki-lin
has the compassion of the unicorn but also the air of a spiritual
warrior, or monk. Odell Shepard has written that "[ujnlike the
western unicorn, the ki-lin has never had commercial value; no
drug is made of any part of his body; he exists for his own sake
and not for the medication, enrichment, entertainment, or even
edification of mankind." He embodied all that was admirable and
ideal.
With our own Aristotelian and Cartesian sense of animals as
objects, our religious sense of them as mere receptacles for human
symbology, our single-mindedness in unraveling their workings,
we are not the kind of culture to take the ki-lin very seriously. We
are another culture, and these other times. The ki-lin, too, is no
longer as highly regarded among modern Chinese as it was in the
days of the Sung dynasty. But the idea of the ki-lin, the mere fact
of its having taken shape, is, well, gratifying. It appeared after men
had triumphed over both their fear and distrust of nature and their
desire to control it completely for their own ends.
Lancaster Sound 151
The history of the intermingling of human cultures is a history
of trade--in objects like the narwhal's tusk, in ideas, and in great
narratives. We appropriate when possible the best we can find in
all of this. The ki-lin, I think, embodies a fine and pertinent idea--
an unpossessible being who serves humans when they have need of
its wisdom, a creature who abets dignity and respect in human
dealings, who underlines the fundamental mystery with which all
life meets analysis.
I do not mean to suggest that the narwhal should be made
into some sort of symbolic ki-lin. Or that buried in the more
primitive appreciation of life that some Eskimos retain is an "an-
swer" to our endless misgivings about the propriety of our inva-
sions of landscapes where we have no history, of our impositions
on other cultures. But that in the simple appreciation of a world
not our own to define, that poised arctic landscape, we might find
some solace by discovering the ki-lin hidden within ourselves, like
a shaft of light.