As a kid, every summer we would travel to our traditional whaling camp at Baby Island on the Beaufort Coast. I was too small to go in the boat with my dad and the other older hunters, so I used to bug my cousins Buck and Freddy to take me in their boat.
Buck used to tell me, “You’re gonna get cold.” I would run up to our camp and come back with my big parka and boots to show him I had enough clothes to keep warm.
Then Freddy would say, “You’re just gonna be in the way.” So I would load their boat with their gas cans and a grub box to show him I could work.
Buck would look at me and say, “Go ask your mom.” I lied to him and told him she said I could go.
“Don’t cry if you get scared, ”Freddy told me.
I was pretty excited to go on my first hunting trip with my older cousins. It was the first time I was out in the open sea and I was excited to be hunting with Buck and Freddy. Freddy yelled at me over the noise of the kicker (the outboard motor). “Keep an eye out for whales!” I didn’t know what he meant so I asked him what they looked like.
“They’re white and they’re gonna come out of the water. You’re gonna see them blow when they come up. It looks like a water fountain.” So I peeled my eyes on the horizon and tried to spot the whales. It was rough out and there were white caps all around.
Then we spotted whales. They looked just like what Freddy described.
“Right there!” I yelled at Buck.
“Whitecaps,” Freddy said. The way the sun was hitting the whitecap sprays looked like a water fountain to me. That’s why I said it.”
It was getting too rough, so we headed toward an old lookout spot called Tom Elanik Point, where there were lookout towers. We landed and Buck told me to start gathering wood for the fire. I knew I had to earn my keep so I got busy collecting driftwood for the fire. When I was done, Freddy told me to take his binoculars and climb the tower and look around for whales. I was the only one small enough to climb to the top and I stayed up there over an hour looking around with binoculars. I saw these white things bobbing around, so I yelled to Freddy and Buck. “Whales!”
Freddy came running over and struggled to get up to where I was, losing one rubber boot on the way up. He took the binoculars from me and looked in the direction I was pointing. “Seagulls,” Freddy said. Then he grumbled as he made his way back down the tower pole. I had a quick lunch with Freddy and Buck, then they spotted whales coming into the bay. We packed up and took off at full throttle towards the pod of whales. Freddy saw them first. “Right there! Right there!” he was telling Buck.
“Where?”
“Right there in front of us.”
“Oh,” Buck said and started going toward three big bulls that were travelling together.
“Pick one,” Buck told Freddy.
“That one. That big white one,” Freddy said. He grabbed his harpoon and stood on the bow of the boat while Buck got behind the whale.
When a whale is swimming in shallow water, it creates a wake and that’s what you have to follow. You have to stay right on top of it and harpoon it as soon as it comes up. I was getting so excited that I started running around the boat trying to see what they were seeing. “Sit down!” Buck yelled at me. I sat down for two seconds, then stood back up. Just then the kicker started to sputter. “Grab the wheel,” Buck told me. “I have to change kicker tanks.”
The gas tank was running out of gas and Buck had to switch tanks. I took the wheel, even though I never drove a speed boat before, and Freddy was yelling at me to turn this way and that way as we chased the whale. Buck was having trouble switching tanks ‘cause the waves were throwing us around. I kept turning too much one way or another and pretty soon we lost the whale. Buck finally fixed the tank and we got on the way again. This time, Buck was able to stay on top another whale while Freddy harpooned it. A beluga whale is about fifteen feet long and over two-thousand pounds. When you kill one, you have to get a rope around the back flipper and tie it to the boat so you could tow it in. It’s hard enough with two guys, let alone with a little kid who keeps getting in the way.
“Get out of the way,” Freddy would yell at me. But I was so curious to see what they were doing that I stuck my head between them. We finally got it tied to the boat and started towing it in.
Freddy looked at me and started laughing. “You don’t know how to listen, or what?” We towed the whale back to camp where my mom and aunties went about butchering and cooking it. I must have grown on Freddy and Buck ’cause they took me out hunting the next summer. I was a little bigger and not so much in the way. I knew I graduated when Freddy let me roll him smokes and take one puff.
In the summer of 2023 I went hunting again with Freddy and Buck for the first time in thirty years. Freddy looked at me and started laughing. “Don’t get in the way now.” Buck busted out laughing and we had a hell of time on that trip. I’ll never forget it.
