Jonathan wondered where Sigurd came up with all his literary references: Swift, encyclopedias; soon he’d be quoting Milton. He looked at his boots and shook his head. Without the notebook, he felt unprotected. Without the notebook, he would have to participate in what was probably going to be mayhem. And now, worrying him further, Heðin opened the glove compartment and drew out three knives with blades about eight inches long and yellowed bone handles.
“Here,” he said, handing one to Jonathan, who took the knife and held it, blade up, between his knees.
“Hold it down, it’s sharp,” Heðin said.
“I know,” said Jonathan. “I know knives are sharp.”
Heðin leaned over, lifted a lock of Jonathan’s hair, and sliced through it without a sound. He held the clippings in front of Jonathan’s nose. “Really sharp,” he said. Then he laughed.
Jonathan did not laugh. Heðin slapped him on the knee. “Mokka, you know what that means?”
“To cut with a knife,” Jonathan answered.
Sigurd laughed. “We do that later, after we sing,” he said, leaning toward Jonathan.
“Do what?” Jonathan didn’t like being leaned on by these people who, at the moment, seemed like strangers, rather coarse strangers.
Heðin slid his right index finger back and forth across his left palm: “Mokka,” he explained, and winked.
“Oh.” Jonathan braced himself for a comment about Daniela, and sure enough, Heðin said, “Your girl in Tórshavn, we’ll call her from the post office. She could be here for tonight.”
“No,” said Sigurd. “He’ll get a new girl. A Húsavík girl.”
“Two girls,” said Heðin, “one for Sandoy, one for Streymoy. That way, you don’t have to wait for the fucking boat.”
“Very practical,” said Jonathan. He’d intended this to end the conversation, but it only set them both laughing.
“You like them fat?” asked Sigurd. Without waiting for an answer, he said, “I like a fat one. Like a nice little puffin. Keeps you warm.”
“Nah.” Heðin waved away the fat girls. “I don’t like them fat.”
Jonathan did not like the discussion. Talking about girls with Heðin was one thing; talking about girls with Sigurd was something else. Jonathan was young enough to find a middle-aged man’s lust embarrassing. And thinking about Daniela, even in private, was embarrassing. A number of times since Wooley’s visit he’d caught himself shaking his head and blushing as he cooked dinner or walked around town—discomfited by the awkwardness of the Daniela episode, which had been in some way compounded and amplified by Wooley. He’d missed the mark with both of them, and had watched his love darts and his barbs fall equally unheeded on the ground. Jonathan these days felt constantly cut down to size, and the size he was trimmed to seemed too small. But every time he tried to stretch out a bit, the thought of Daniela or Wooley nipped him, pinched him back. As for his resolve to be a better person, buying potatoes from Sigurd or fish from toothless Gregor on the dock didn’t offer much scope for experiments with a new personality.
But today, the whale hunt, where there would be new people and new events—startling events, he was sure—offered scope: more scope than he wanted, in fact. Jonathan sensed himself shrinking from opportunity, not being a better person. What would it be, that betterness? He looked at the black-streaked, whorled handle of his knife: courage, at any rate. Maybe Sigurd was right; maybe it was good he hadn’t brought his notebook. He couldn’t play the innocent bystander anymore.
Sigurd pulled over to the side of the road and parked with one front wheel on some rocks, making it difficult to get out of the car, which swayed and teetered as first Heðin, then Jonathan, jumped to the ground. Heðin put his knife under his belt and handed a knife to Sigurd, who did the same. They looked to Jonathan like mild-mannered pirates, the fierceness of their weapons belied by their muddy rubber boots and homemade sweaters. Jonathan smiled, anticipating, suddenly, an adventure.
But now Heðin and Sigurd were serious and didn’t smile back. Sigurd was digging around in the trunk of the car and Heðin was rolling a cigarette, staring out to sea. He squinted, then pointed. “Grindahvalur,” he said. “That’s him.”
Jonathan looked, squinted, didn’t see anything. “Where?”
“Out east.” Heðin pointed again. “See the boats?”
Jonathan did, barely, see some dots that might have been boats at the mouth of the fjord. He nodded.
“See off east of them, something cuts through the water?”
Although Jonathan did not see this, he nodded again.
“That’s him.”
“Who?”
“The leader.” Heðin lighted his cigarette.
“And now they kill the leader?” Wasn’t that what the Danish guidebook had said?
“No. Why would they do that?” Heðin scowled. “They drive him in.”
“Oh. Into the fjord?” Heðin nodded. “And how do they do that?”
“Throw rocks.”
“Like herding sheep.” Jonathan laughed.
Heðin scowled again. “This is not a game, Jonathan,” he said.
“Hah,” said Sigurd, from within the trunk. “I knew I had it.” He pulled out a long, thick, greasy rope, which he wound around his waist. “Let’s go.”
The walk to the harbor was conducted in total silence. Just as well, Jonathan decided. He urged himself into a different frame of mind. He would be alert, awake, collecting every shred of information about this sacred Faroese ritual, this Corn Dance of the north or whatever it was. He put his knife under his belt and strode down the road in step with Sigurd and Heðin, armed, ready for anything.
A vigilant calm hung over the harbor when they arrived. Jonathan had expected bustle. Instead, the few people who were about had the look of an audience waiting for the curtain to rise. Ten or a dozen children perched on the end of the jetty looking silently out to sea. Down on the barren gray shingle, a line of men stood knee-deep in the yellow foam. The dock was empty of boats and looked naked and sad, its walls lined with peeling tires and barnacles waiting for high tide.
“There aren’t many people here,” he said to Heðin.
Heðin lifted his chin slightly toward the horizon. “Out on boats,” he growled.
Turning to Sigurd, Jonathan asked, “What’s that rope for?”
“Pulling,” said Sigurd.
Maybe the point they were trying to make was that he shouldn’t ask questions. Well, then, Jonathan resolved, he would not. He would watch what they did and do it too, without calling attention to himself. He would be one of them, and they would be impressed; or perhaps he would succeed so well that they would forget he was an idiot foreigner. And then he could forget it too.
For the moment, though, all Heðin and Sigurd were doing was standing at the top of the jetty with their hands in their pockets, something they did every day in Skopun and which Jonathan had long ago mastered.
“Where’s Petur?” Jonathan asked, and cursed himself: a question! Hadn’t he just determined not to ask questions? But this seemed to be an acceptable one. Sigurd and Heðin moved their heads right and left, conferring.
Sigurd pointed out into the fjord. “See how there are two lines of boats there?” Jonathan saw only waves and dots; squinting, concentrating, he convinced himself he saw two lines of boats and nodded. “Petur is in the northern line”—the northern line must be the one to the left, Jonathan figured—“and he’s the second boat.”
“Ah. I see.” Could he pull this off? Jonathan could no more pick out Petur’s boat in the water than he could see the dark side of the moon: not an auspicious first move in his game of Be the Native. He heard Heðin’s words again, This is not a game. A warning of some sort? A raw wind gusted off the ocean and gave him a chill. And then suddenly his vision resolved the blurs into boats, two long processions of boats that like pincers grasped between them a frothing mass of water sliced and scored by the fins of whales.
The line of me
n on the beach shifted, stretched out to cover more territory, and a murmur rose up from it. Then, as if this sound had triggered them, other sounds began: the kids on the jetty scuffled their feet against the cement, a few elders who’d joined Heðin, Sigurd, and Jonathan coughed and whispered, Heðin and Sigurd bent their heads together for another mumbled conference. And swelling up behind these sounds, overtaking them within minutes, was a roaring compounded of the screams of gulls, the yells of men, the slapping of water on wooden hulls, and a high thin keening that seemed to be the voice of the ocean itself. The collective agitation that was the grind was moving closer to land, bringing its halo of sound with it. It was a living vortex, whirling and rushing to swallow everything within reach and to fix all eyes on its splendid voracity.
The sky above the water had gone flat white and was glazed with sea fog. Twenty degrees up from the horizon, the pale sun overlooked the fjord and its activities, casting toward land the huge shadows of men and birds, so that they moved in a mottled darkness.
They were close enough for Jonathan to distinguish words and faces: Petur yelling “Faster, faster!,” Jens Símun flailing the sea with a length of wood, Jón Hendrik perched at the bow of a six-man boat, teetering as they rode the swells but directing the crew and their oars with his thin arms. And over, under, through all of this, the keening ran like a silver thread, pure and ceaseless. One whale heaved up in a great black arc, and Jonathan saw his dark eye rolling, his dark mouth gaping. Water flashed off his flanks as he crested, soaring on the wing of his fin. And at that perfect moment, when in his black entirety he floated in the air, Petur speared him, and the ocean bloomed in blood.
Jonathan gasped. The men on the beach and on the dock drew in a breath as well, and for a few moments everyone stood in silence watching the red streamers spread. Petur was poised at the side of his boat, dark-tipped spear in hand. Then the wounded whale crested again, and the glare of the gash in his side, so bright against his skin, broke whatever spell had stilled them all.
One of the men on shore waded out to sea holding an iron prong and hooked the whale on his second try. At this, Heðin and Sigurd rushed down to the beach, bumping Jonathan along with them. The rope attached to the prong was already thick with hands, but they took the last three feet of it and joined the pulling. Jonathan stood staring. On the fjord, dozens of spears were being stabbed into the sea, jets of blood combining with the watery exhalations of the animals.
“You can’t stand there!” Sigurd yelled at him. “Get on the rope!” He was red in the face and looked furious. Jonathan took a few steps toward the crowd and faltered. Sigurd dropped his portion of rope and went to Jonathan’s side.
“It’s illegal just to watch.” He stood with his hands on his hips. “You must either help or get out of the way.”
A second whale had been hooked, and half the men were heaving on a new rope. This whale was bigger than the first and fought more. His tail smacked the water, jolting the boats around him and shooting up curtains of spray. He cried, too, with a powerful high voice that cut through the din of waves and yells.
Jonathan looked at Sigurd, who was silhouetted against the dark, churning sea and whose face, though shadowed, shone with an intensity Jonathan hadn’t seen there before. The lines around his mouth—the remnants of thirty-odd years of a shopkeeper’s smiles and frowns—had been transformed to sharp slashes in his flesh, so that his face seemed like a mask of itself. His eyes were open wide, showing white all around the blue, and they fixed Jonathan with a stare he could not duck. Then something shifted, and this new Sigurd relaxed enough to resemble the old, affectionate Sigurd; he put his hand on Jonathan’s shoulder. “This is why you came here, isn’t it?” he said. “So, come now.”
Heðin didn’t even grunt a greeting as Jonathan took a place beside him on the rope. They were still hauling in the first whale, and though he was weak from the spearing and didn’t resist, he was heavy: the heaviest thing Jonathan had ever tried to move. Eight men pulling had brought him only twenty feet in from where he’d been hit. A spurt came out of his blowhole now and then, but otherwise he seemed to be playing dead, lolling in the water as if trying by his very density to thwart their efforts.
“Ooof.” Heðin sighed. To Sigurd he said, “Maybe we should leave him until later.”
Sigurd shook his head. “I think we can get him on the beach easier than the other one.”
Jonathan glanced over at the second rope. The men on it were having a hard time just holding their ground while the whale bucked and thrashed at the other end.
Sigurd leaned to Jonathan. “Once we get one on the beach, you see, the others follow.”
Jonathan’s view of the ocean was blocked by Heðin’s back. His hands were chilled and sore from the rope, and the sound of rubber boots grinding in cold, wet sand grated on his ears. The whole business of killing whales, which from the sidelines had seemed vicious and awful, was now nothing more than the usual hard work. Running after sheep, baiting barbed lines for fishing, unloading dank holds reeking of cod: everyday life in the Faroes was composed of hundreds of unpleasant tasks, and this was no different. Putting his back behind another big pull, Jonathan figured there was a benefit to this realization. If whale killing was just work, he could do it.
The resistance at the end of the rope changed its character all of a sudden, and a new noise, of scraping and dragging, began. Peering around Heðin’s shoulder, Jonathan saw the first few feet of whale emerging from the spume onto the sand. Then they were all pulling again, stumbling backward up the beach. At a yell from the men in front, Heðin and Sigurd dropped the rope, leaving only Jonathan grasping its oily, thick coils. He let it go and ran down to the shore behind the others.
Twice as long as a man, panting in huge heaves, and with his gashed side rubbed raw from the dragging, the whale lay surrounded by people. In his distress he lifted his head up from the beach and moved it from side to side. His tapered, forked tail sketched a delicate tracery of pain in the sand. He was no longer making his thin cry, only pushing out ragged puffs. Jonathan was close enough to see his blowhole open and then contract. With a shock he understood that this was breathing—the whale breathed air just as men do. This was not a fish struggling for water, a haddock writhing on a deck to provoke in Jonathan an almost shameful pity, but a breathing, bleeding creature, trapped, terrified, more kin to him in its complexity than any lamb or ewe. Jonathan reached out his hand and placed it on the whale’s back, which was cool but radiated warmth and quivered under his palm. What comfort could he offer? He drew his hand away, defeated.
People were moving back from the whale’s head, parting to make room for a barrel-chested old man Jonathan had noticed standing up on the jetty before the whale was speared. “That’s Klæmint, the sheriff,” Sigurd whispered. “Now, watch.”
Klæmint stood with a leg on either side of the whale, pressing his calves against the head, and drew from his belt a knife even longer and more wicked looking than the ones Sigurd had supplied. Then he bent down, clamping the animal between his knees, pressed his left hand just below the blowhole, and with one quick stroke sliced the neck open. Black popped back to reveal the dense, pale inches of blubber, and then blood welled up. Klæmint made another swipe across the neck; this time the bone cracked. The whale’s tail fluttered once. Blood seeped into his still-open eye, which didn’t blink.
Jonathan passed a hand over his face and felt his fingers cold against his cheeks.
“That’s how you do it,” Sigurd said. “You cut the spinal cord. Quick, you see, so they don’t suffer.”
Blood dripped down the whale’s head. The gash in his side had begun to clot before he died; half-coagulated lumps lay dark against the red. The obsidian gleam of his skin was fading already and marred by sand and small wounds. Jonathan could bear neither to look at all this nor to look away, so he kept turning his head aside and then finding himself staring, darting from the lacerated body to the rigid, reddened eye.
 
; Then Klæmint made a cut in the whale’s belly, and in a cloud of steam the guts slid onto the sand.
Jonathan looked out to sea, where dozens of whales milled and circled in rose-tinted water. The boats were closing in, oars thudding on fins and tails as the chase funneled toward the beach. Was he going to have to watch a hundred dark eyes blinded, a hundred smooth dark cheeks laid to rest on beds of sand? He put his hand on Sigurd’s arm. “I don’t know if I can do this,” he said, and braced himself for Sigurd’s scorn or insistence. Heðin, who’d overheard, turned away. But Sigurd drew Jonathan a few feet back from the crowd, where they could speak in private.
“We will eat all winter from this, do you understand?” He gave Jonathan a hard look, then continued, more gently, “We kill fish and birds and sheep. It’s no different.”
“They’re so big,” Jonathan said.
Sigurd nodded. “And they’re smart, too. They can get away from us, you know, out on the water. And often they do. But when they don’t—” He fell silent. “They come to us,” he said abruptly. “They come up to us. Look.”
All along the curve of the shore whales were hurling themselves out of the ocean and onto the land. The big one, who’d fought hard against the rope, had been hauled in finally and lay heaving near the first, dead one. The pod seemed to be trying to surround him, this fighter, to make a living shield about him. Those who could not get close to him beached themselves anyhow, a huge black infantry following their general into enemy territory. Waves and waves of whales broke over each other, until they lined the beach two and three deep. Some lay in the foam letting the tide shift their long, slim bodies back and forth, as if hesitant to say goodbye to their element. All of them were calling their strange thin sound that had no character but was just a tone and that seemed too delicate for such large beasts.
“But they’re not coming up so that you can kill them,” Jonathan said. It was obvious to him that the whales were rallying around their leader.