Ice Whale (21 page)

A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

I
ce Whale
is Jean Craighead George's last novel.
It was not quite finished when she died last year, so it was completed with the help of two of her children, Twig George, a writer and teacher, and Craig George, a biologist who is an expert on bowhead whales. This book is set in northern Alaska, the same as her classic
Julie of the Wolves
.

Craig George, who lives in Barrow, Alaska, thinks this book about whales was born around the time he was finishing up his PhD dissertation. He says: “I spent three weeks at Mom's place writing in the winter of 2008. She was very taken by my chapter on age estimation and the possibility of two-hundred-year-old bowheads.”

Siku, the ice whale of the title, does live for two hundred years, outlasting generations of humans, some who seek to kill him, others to save him—and outlasting the writer who created him as a character. At the time of her death, the book was substantially finished; it had already gone through several revisions. There was no question in the mind of anyone involved, least of all mine, that we would finish the book. Craig George was already fully involved in the project when his mother died; he had been a reader and commentator on the early drafts. I am sure she would have gratefully acknowledged his enormous contributions to this book. I am grateful as well.

We seamed together the plot sections, smoothed the time line, and corrected some of the geography and science, but it is Jean's voice, lyrical and wondrous when writing about the natural world, that comes through so unmistakably. Simply, Jean George is incomparable.

Lucia Monfried

NOVEMBER
2013

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T
his book was completed after our mother
,
Jean George,
died in May, 2012. We would like to thank the following people for their help, ideas, and support finishing the text: Lucia Monfried, Cyd Hanns, Gay Sheffield, John Bockstoce, George Noongwook, and T. Luke George. Also many thanks to the amazing Book Club of the Park School: Arenal, Alexa, Isabel, Sarah, Reed, Noam, and Isabelle. Without their wise comments and enthusiasm, this book might never have been completed.

I (Craig) would like to thank the Inupiat and Yup'ik whaling community for teaching me about the sea ice, bowheads, and Arctic life.

We especially thank our mother, Jean, for sharing her love of the natural world and leaving us with this complex “homework assignment,” which pulled us together after she died.

Craig George and Twig George

BARROW, ALASKA, AND COCKEYSVILLE, MARYLAND,
2013

AFTERWORD

E
ach spring, over sixteen thousand bowhead whales, or
Agviq
[Ah-gah-vik] in Inupiat Eskimo, will navigate through fragmentary lanes, called leads, in the sea ice to the Canadian Arctic. There they will feed through the short Arctic summer. The combination of sunlight and nutrients brews a soup of zooplankton on which the bowheads feed. In autumn the herd will begin a feeding migration back to the Bering Sea to winter, as the Arctic Ocean begins to freeze and shut down. The graceful shy bowheads conduct their remarkable annual migratory cycle each year, seeking food and giving birth wary of predators.

The bowhead whale is a large member of the “right whale” family (called Balaenidae), which inhabits the ice-covered seas of the Arctic and sub-Arctic Seas. They can exceed 60 feet (19 m) in body length and 80 tons in body mass, but far larger specimens have been reported by Eskimos and Yankee whalemen in the 1800s.

Remarkably, bowheads begin life in the ice leads along the northwest coast of Alaska. They are the only baleen whale that gives birth in the sub-freezing Arctic waters, and the only one that never leaves the Arctic waters, wintering in the darkness and unimaginable cold of the North Bering Sea. As such, the bowhead has a number of important adaptations: the thickest blubber, greatest longevity, longest baleen, low body core temperatures, and large head-to-body length ratios. All are designed to allow
it to live under these extreme conditions. In the words of the Arctic biologist John Burns, “What seems harsh to us, is not harsh for the Arctic animals adapted to live there.”

Its baleen is one of its most unusual and important features. Arguably, it is their huge baleen rack that allows the bowhead to thrive in the Arctic seas where food can be very hard to find. Bowheads have about 640 baleen plates in their mouth, divided between two equal-sized racks. Yankee whalers reported baleen to 15 feet in length. The blubber of the bowhead is the thickest of any whale at well over a foot thick in some individuals and comprises up to 50 percent of the body weight.

Another unique thing that sets bowheads apart from other whales is that they are hunted for food by several coastal native communities in Alaska, Russia, and Canada. It is probably true that these Native societies evolved around hunting bowheads and using their products for food, fuel, and building materials. Hunting enormous animals like the bowhead whale requires social coordination, sophisticated tools, and complex hunting strategies. The Inupiat and Yup'ik Eskimos of North America and eastern Asia have hunted bowheads for at least the last two thousand years. Currently in Alaska about forty whales are harvested annually among eleven villages with Barrow taking the most whales.

Yet another unique characteristic of the bowhead, and a major subject of this book, is how long bowheads live. According to the Inupiat, they live “two human lifetimes.” According to the scientific research we've conducted with the hunters, lifespans of an astonishing two hundred years are possible.

The knowledge these animals accumulate over two centuries is obviously immense. While no one knows exactly how or what they think, the Inupiat have a strong spiritual connection with the bowhead. It is a mutual exchange. Their belief is a whale only offers itself to a worthy hunter; in exchange the whale earns respect, protection, and an ice cellar with a bed of fresh clean snow as its final resting place. From the western science perspective, their sea ice navigation skills, collective memory of the thousands of places they've successfully found food, and predator avoidance strategies are the kinds of information that bowheads store away. Physiologists also tell us that processing the complex natural sound and communication with other whales may be one of the main functions of their large brains, which are about twice the size of a human brain. While relatively small for an animal that size, their brain retains years of experience and information critical for survival.

Bowheads are able to reproduce to the age of 150 years. A female may give birth to over forty calves in her long life but probably not many survive their early years.

 

My mother's book captures the severe beauty of the Arctic, follows the bowhead—one of Earth's greatest creatures—and lets us live with the remarkable people who inhabit this land and harvest the whales. She truly loved Barrow and its people. She would visit often and talk in the schools, encouraging young writers. The story is not based on actual events, although it is set in real places and pulls on some of the customs of the indigenous people. At its core, it is her story about the unique and ageless relationship between the Eskimo people and the bowhead whale. It is also about the Arctic's uncertain future.

While some find it ironic, it should be no surprise that no one has fought harder to protect the bowhead and its habitat than the Inupiat and Yup'ik Eskimo whalers. We should all applaud their dedication and hope that their relationship with the bowhead will persist another two thousand years. While they've continued to hunt, bowheads have nearly recovered to their former population size and now number seventeen thousand strong in the western Arctic alone. Now science shows us that the main threat to the survival of whales is no longer commercial whaling; instead it is the cumulative sum of shipping, pollution, climate change, commercial fishing, offshore oil development, other human activities, and even, to a small degree, whale watching. As the Inupiat say,
agvikseoksagatagichi
(Keep on whaling).”

John Craighead “Craig” George Ph.D.

BARROW, ALASKA

2013