In the Valleys of the Noble Bey - John Zada Page 0,48
about any of the seals or otters he classified and knew well. These sea apes were some other species. Now, I’m not saying it was necessarily a Sasquatch. But it just goes to show some things fall through the cracks. Take these humpbacks we saw earlier. Believe it or not, we just don’t know how they find food. They don’t echolocate. And then there are their songs: the mystery of how humpbacks arrive singing the same song from all over the coast—from places too distant to hear one another’s vocalizations. How do they communicate over such long distances?”
We’re back in Fitz Hugh Sound. The ocean is again calm, and the sun, now lower on the horizon, casts a soft, warm light over the mainland shore, which has begun to accumulate patches of fog. As we approach Koeye, we near the cluster of gillnetters, which are starting to pull in their catches for the day. Their nets teem with salmon, whose writhing silver bodies glisten.
“You watch these guys and all their hard work,” Brian says, “and you can’t help feeling respect for them—and for the longevity of a tradition. But at the same time, there’s an impact from all of this. It’s huge, and it involves more than they’ll ever know.”
Nick, the first mate, approaches Brian and tells him there’s another humpback close by that’s behaving erratically. It’s coming to the surface, he says, thrashing, and then sinking back into the water. Brian’s face drops. He turns the boat in the direction of Nick’s last sighting of the animal.
“I think we’ve got a whale caught in a fishing net,” he says gravely. “On the way to Koeye a few days ago, we saw two other humpbacks that had been caught in nets. This whale may be one of them.”
Sure enough, the huge, knobby head of a humpback tightly draped in netting bursts out of the water to port. It lets out a powerful exhalation from its blowhole. Everyone looks on in horror as it lurches and struggles, falling sideways on the surface before sinking resignedly into the water again.
Brian surrenders the helm to Nick and heads to the bow. The whale stays close to the boat. At one point the creature surfaces to within six feet of the vessel and lets out a shrill scream. We can see the gill net draped tightly over the whale’s wet, glistening head, trapping its mouth shut. That indescribable sound, a kind of painful screech, echoes in my mind.
Brian says the scream is a distress signal. He shakes his head and clenches his fist. “Damn it! Too many fishing boats!”
Brian continues to shout out orders to Nick, who’s steering the boat, as the whale bobs in and out of the water around us. I approach him and ask if anything can be done. He shakes his head.
“Not now,” he says. “The whale is panicked. It’s too dangerous to go near it. Maybe later when it gets tired someone might be able to get close enough to cut or remove the net. The important thing is not to lose sight of the whale. It’s already beginning to drift with the current. If it escapes our view, it’ll flounder for a few more days and then probably die of exhaustion.”
Brian gets on the VHF and reports the whale to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) field station on Denny Island. Its staffers respond, saying they’re dispatching a speedboat to the scene.
Jess reminds Brian that it’s getting late and that the kids have to return to camp. Brian asks Nick and Megan to track the whale in the Zodiac until the fisheries people arrive. He instructs them to bring extra gas and provisions.
“We’ll come back and get you after dropping the kids off,” Brian says to them. “If the fog gets heavy, and we can’t find you, follow the shoreline back. Do not go into deep water.”
News of the entangled humpback has spread back to camp. Larry Jorgensen, with whom I haven’t spoken much until now, tells me how many times he’d found himself in the very same situation in the past.
“Back in the day we used to jump into the water like heroes to try and save those whales,” he says, “but it seldom worked.” He too complains about the number of fishing boats, and says that the DFO is to blame for not having a better response capability—and for not equipping and training local communities to disentangle whales.*