The full moon: over a gray whale, 23.5 years ago; over Wasilla late this afternoon; when memory fools; tomorrow, the series will continue

One night,  the full moon hung over the rescue site. It was a cold night and almost everybody had left the ice, a fact that I kind of enjoyed. But this is getting ahead of my story. I did get home from Anchorage this afternoon in time to finish my preliminary edit of my gray whale rescue take - or at least all of what I have so far found. Afterward, in my mind I selected certain images from that edit that I thought I would run in tonight's post, as they seemed to be images that would pick up the story from where I left it two nights ago, so that I could begin to move it forward again.

But I changed my mind and decided to hold off one more night to give myself a chance to gather information to refresh my memory a bit before moving on. Here is why: last night, I was googling about and I came to a story in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, one of a number here and there aimed at telling the "real-life" story - kind of like I'm trying to do.

In the diaglogue section, I found two commentors debating about who had been first to photograph the gray whales, the primary candidates being Oran Caudle, who had videotaped the whales, and myself, a still photographer. One of the commentors used this blog to argue that I had been first. To argue that it had been Caudle, the other countered with two sources of information - Tom Rose's book, Freeing the Whales, which was the starting point but thankfully not the finishing point for the movie, Big Miracle. His other source was my book, Gift of the Whale. The commentor pointed to page 112, where he said that I had written that I had gone out shortly after Caudle.

I decided that I must set him straight and point out that he had somehow misinterpeted my words. So I turned to page 112 to find whatever passage he had misinterpreted so that I could point out what it really said. Guess what? He was right.

This is what I wrote, in my own book, published thirteen-and-a-half years ago:

"On October 12, Geoff and Craig took Oran Caudle from the North Slope Borough TV studio out to videotape the whales... I headed out shortly afterward, following hunter Billy Adams..."

Yet, I had written here that I had gone out to the whales before Oran. When I wrote those words here, I wrote from memory, but my own earlier writings contradict me. My earlier writing must be correct, as the memory was fresher then. I don't know why my memory changed, but it did. This worries me a bit, for more reasons than one.

My basic premise was true - I was the only photographer of any kind to cover the rescue from beginning to end. Once the national media arrived, Oran spent most of his time working in the TV studio to support the national TV media.

Still, I do not like to make a mistake like that. If I had taken the time to read my own story first, I wouldn't have - but I didn't want to take the time. I wanted to get the blog post up. My story was in my memory. Why did I need to read it, anyway?

The idea to blog the gray whale rescue came to me as soon as I learned the movie was being made, but I envisioned going at it in a very different manner than I actually am. I had always wanted to tell the full story - in the single chapter that I devoted to the rescue in Gift of the Whale, I only had the space to tell an abbreviated version.

So I thought that if I blogged it over the same number of days that it actually took the rescue to unfold, I could tell a comprehensive story. To really do it right, I figured that I would need to spend some real time at it - two months at least, maybe three. I would need to track down as many of the key people involved, both inside and outside the Iñupiat community and interview them. I knew that the movie's Malik was going to be a very different person than the real life Malik, so I wanted to spend time with those who knew him best so that I could put his life back together and flesh out his character.

I did not have the financial resources to undertake such a project, but there is a certain grant award that I thought would be just perfect. I contacted the point person for that grant and told her what I wanted to do. She thought it was a good project - but not for the blog. She said I should publish it in another vehicle. But I did not want to tell the story in another vehicle. I wanted to build my blog up and I wanted my comprehensive story to appear blog style in my blog before it appeared anywhere else. I did not want to put it in a vehicle that would compete against my own blog.

So I decided I would find another way - but I never did. Then, as I heard about the pending release of the movie, I knew that it had become impossible to do what I wanted to do. I decided it was a lost cause and that I would just let it go. Then I saw the movie with Margie. When we walked out of the theatre, I knew I had to blog something.

I decided I would just pull up negatives and my memory, read a few little things and blast through the process as quickly as possible. But after making the mistake I wrote about in the above section, I know that while it is now impossible for me to carry out my original plan, I must take the time to be certain I get basic things right.

Starting tomorrow night, I am confident I can pick up where I left off and carry it through to the end, which I will make happen by this weekend - so that I can do what must be done before I leave for Arizona/India on February 27.

So please bear with me for 24 more hours and then we roll with those graywhales. 

This moonshot, by the way, is from late afternoon/early evening today, when I was out on my walk.

Think of that - the very same moon that was reflecting down upon the gray whale above twenty-three-and-half years ago near Barrow was reflecting down upon me today as I walked through my neighborhood here in Wasilla.

Editing and figuring out gray whale piece; moose bunks with us; I go for a bike ride; two more moose stop by during Super Bowl

Just as I stated last night, I had too much editing and plotting facing me today, plus the Super Bowl, and so I am unable to put up Part 3 of my gray whale series just yet. As I also stated last night, I must go to Anchorage Monday morning to return Margie to her babysitting duties and it looks like I will linger there long enough to make it unlikely for me to get full Part 3 up tomorrow night, as well... but maybe. Yet, I have so much yet to do just to figure out what I have yet to do.

Anyway, just to assure interested readers that I am still hard at work on the rescue story, I am running this one innocuous photo. I chose it specifically because it is innocuous and so gives nothing away.

I got up fairly early this morning so that I could get the oatmeal cooking while Margie still slept. Caleb appeared right after, then went out to bring in some firewood. He also brought in the news that a moose had bunked down in our front yard.

Here is that moose. There was very little light when I took this picture. I pushed the ISO to 6400 and then underexposed it by two stops, which makes an effective ISO of 25,600. That's why it looks a little ratty, but I don't care - I was able to take it. Someday not too far in the future, I expect to have a camera that will shoot ISO 25,600 and the image quality will be so smooth and plastic that I will not be able to stand it.

After I took the picture, I finished cooking the oatmeal. Margie came out and we ate it. It was good. I had cooked apples into it, added walnuts and sprinkled it with cinnamon.

After we finished the oatmeal, I went on a bike ride and took a picture of Shadow Me disappearing into a shadow. Shadow Me was pretty damned upset by this, but I was fine with it. "I completely disappeared for awhile!" Shadow Me complained after he reappeared. "I didn't even exist for that while."

"No big deal," I said. "After I go to bed, you won't exist for awhile, either."

"Really?" he sad.

"Really."

"Please, please, please," Shadow Me pled, "Please don't go to bed tonight!"

I am going to go to bed anyway.

As it happened, it was only Margie and me here for the Super Bowl. Jacob, Lavina, Kalib, Jobe and Lynxton had all planned to come, but Jobe got sick today - upset tummy. So they stayed home. Even so, my mind had been set on pizza since yesterday, so I ordered a medium with Canadian Bacon, onions, mushrooms, pepper and olives from Fat Boys Fattery, which is back in business in a new location.

That medium was as big as large at many places, and better than most.

As we ate the pizza and watched the Super Bowl, this bull moose came by and joined in the feast.

A bit later, after the moose had left, this moose came strolling past the kitchen window, sometime during the third quarter. I thought maybe it was the moose that had eaten with us, so I stepped out onto the back porch to greet it.

It wasn't. It was a different moose, as anyone can clearly see. It was hungry, though.

It stayed awhile to have a meal of its own. As I have noted before, this has been a hard winter for our local moose. On Channel 2 News last night, they showed some folks in Anchorage butchering a road kill moose for charity - it was only one of several moose that had died by vehicle in Anchorage that day - that's a lot of food for charity, but a lot of suffering for moose.

And I'm sure moose died out here on our valley roads, too. And then there's the train. Moose love to get on the railroad tracks, just to get out of the deep snow. They don't understand about trains. So many die.

And if they stay out in the wilds, then so many starve to death or grow weak and get eaten by wolves. This has been a snowy winter, and cold. 

The moose have suffered.

I am glad that at least three found safety, sleep, and food in our yard today - our yard is really their yard, too. It was their yard before it was ours - even the part now occupied by our house. Sometimes, people move up here and then complain about the moose, say how something out to be done to thin them out, lower their numbers, drive them away from the populated places, because they are too much of a hazard.

In truth - we are the hazard. Yet, we are also a boon - a boon and a hazard. We create these places where they can move about and feed more easily and then they get killed by cars and trains.

The movie, Big Miracle, and what I witnessed in real life, part 2: introducing Malik, Roy Ahmaogak, Price Brower, and the gray whales themselves; first physical contact

The movie, Big Miracle, begins with a scene in which Malik and his young grandson Nathan are in an umiak (skin boat) with their crew, paddling toward a bowhead. Later in the movie, Nathan makes a comment to his Aapa Malik that makes it clear that Malik does not use, or believe in using, motor boats to hunt whales.

Now I introduce you to the real Malik in a picture that I took about a week before Roy Ahmaogak discovered the three stranded gray whales. That's Malik - standing at the front of the boat, his baseball cap on his head, bill upturned, as it always seemed to be. The fluttering flag is the banner of the Patkotak crew of Barrow, captained by Simeon. With Malik as their harpooner, they have just harvested a bowhead and after a tow of many hours are about to land it at the edge of Barrow.

As you can see, Malik is in a motor boat. 

In real life, Malik, as Iñupiat hunters tend to be, was an adaptible and practical person when it came to hunting. In the spring, the Chukchi Sea offshore Barrow is covered by two platforms of ice - the grounded shorefast ice which usually extends four to seven miles offshore - and the polar pack ice, always drifting, floating, swirling around the North Pole.

A lead, sometimes very narrow, sometimes so wide one cannot see acoss it, develops between the shorefast ice and the polar pack. The bowheads that migrate through this lead system to summer feeding grounds in the eastern Beaufort Sea can appear anywhere within the breadth of the lead, but they often travel very close to the edge of the shorefast ice.

Then, the most practical and sensible thing to do is to camp at the edge of that ice, with a quiet umiak, and when a bowhead comes swimming close in, to launch, paddle to the whale, and harpoon it. If it is not an instant kill and the whale swims off, motor boats will be launched to give chase.

The fall hunt is a very different matter. While there may be plenty of ice pans and icebergs floating in the ocean, for the most part it tends to be open. In such conditions, a motor boat is a much more practical and efficient tool than an umiak. So, being practical, efficient, intelligent people, the hunters leave the skin boats behind and go out in motor boats - just as Malik and the Patkotak crew had done on this day.

As you can see, quite a bit of ice was floating around in the Chukchi near shore - more than is normal for early October. This early buildup would continue until ice conditions would become just right to trap three young, juvenile gray whales in its clutch.

In addition to the Patkotak Crew, the ABC crew, captained by Arnold Brower, Sr., an elder who would also play a crucial role in the gray whale resuce, landed a bowhead that same evening.

In the spring, the people use manpower to haul the whale out onto the ice, but in the fall, with the whales being brought to land at the edge of the village, it is practical and logical to use big D-9 Cats to pull the whales out of the water, so that is what they do and that is what they did.

Even so, the hard, heavy, work of cutting, dividing, cooking and storing the whale would remain an act of physically demanding, intensive, labor. The work would continue all night long, through the next day and beyond.

As soon as the Patkotak and Brower whales been taken care of and the community fed, Malik went back out into the Chukchi in a motorized, aluminum boat to harpoon for the Savik crew, captained by Lawrence Ahmaogak - Savik. Savik stayed on land and put his son, Roy, in charge.

Also in the boat were Billy Itta and Roy Okpik.

It was an overcast but calm day. Visibility was good, broken by small patches of fog. After they had been out awhile, Roy and crew heard a report of a nearby bowhead, spotted by hunters in other boats. Malik instructed Roy to head towards those boats. Some crews had tried to go for the whale, but it had dived and eluded them.

"When we got close," Roy recalled afterward, "the whale stayed up. It never tried to go away. It just stayed up, as if it wanted to give itself to us."

Malik stood at the front of the boat. He raised the harpoon over his shoulder as Billy readied himself with the shoulder gun. The whale waited as Roy steered the boat until it was practically on top of the bowhead. Malik, who had been known to jump right onto the back of a whale to harpoon it, thrust his weapon into the whale, sinking the harpoon, attaching the float and firing the bomb-loaded darting gun. Billy then fired the shoulder gun and Okpik tossed the float. The explosions of the bombs reverberated through the boat. Nearby crews helped put another four bombs into the whale and in 15 minutes it was dead - its gift given and received.

A total of 22 boats joined in the tow and it took many hours to drag the bowhead through the water to shore, where the hunters were greeted by many happy people. That's Malik, in the foreground at right, exchanging a hug with Darlene Matumeak Kagak. Behind him is Roy Ahmaogak, holding his young son, Bennie. James Matumeak reaches out to embrace them both.

To their side is Jana Harcharek, an educator who, in 2009, was named Iñupiat of the Year for her leadership in in developing Iñupiaq language curriculum for students of all ages.

When Roy had finished up his part of doing the cutting, storing, putting up the whale and feeding the community, he took a bit of rest. When he awoke, he got the urge to go back down to the ocean to see how conditions looked - perhaps even to spot a whale. Barrow had used up its strike quota but to the east, heavy ice conditions had forced the village of Nuiqsut to stop its hunt without using their three strikes. If conditions stayed good enough here, the odds were good that Nuiqsut's remaining strikes would be transferred to Barrow.

Roy wanted to be ready.

This time, Roy traveled not by boat but by snowmachine. He left his home in the Browerville subdivision of Barrow and traveled on and along the broad sand spit that ends at Point Barrow, about ten miles away.

It was Friday, October 7, 1988. Near Plover Point, just south of Point Barrow, he saw something quite unexpected. There was no open water now, but slush, locked in place between the shore and a high pressure ridge that had formed a few miles out.

Roy was surprised to see three gray whales, surfacing in three holes that they kept open in the slush. If they had been bowheads, the slush would not have bothered them. They would have sliced through it as if it were nothing.

But gray whales do not have the same thick, tough, ice-breaking heads that bowheads do.

Roy returned to Barrow and reported what he had seen to the North Slope Borough Department of Wildlife Management. 

Before much more time passed, Billy Adams, a whaler who worked with NSB Wildlife Management, led me by snowmachine to the shore from where the whales could be seen.

The slush had yet to harden into ice. It could not be walked on. Now, only two holes remained open, one a couple of hundred yards from shore, the other maybe 200 feet.

The holes were empty when Billy first pointed then out to me. Then, a snout rose into one, followed by that hollow, blast of a sound that a whale makes when it exhales.

Soon, another whale followed. Shortly thereafter, another. A bit later, the third - the smallest one, the tip of its snout already eroding from pushing through and scraping against the slushy ice.

After a bit, the whales moved to the other hole, and then they kept going back and forth between the two holes. It was both wonderful and horrible to witness. Wonderful, because it is always wonderful to see a whale, and to hear the hollow, blasts of their breath. Horrible, because in those breaths I heard both their desire and desperation to live - and I did not believe they had much time left to live. Their deaths could potentially be drawn out and miserable, as the slush hardened and the ice slowly enclosed over and suffocated them to death.

The best thing, it seemed to be me, would be for skilled hunters to come and quickly put them out of their misery. Yes, so far, all the hunters that I heard had agreed that these gray whales should be given some time, to see if maybe a hard wind would blow from the west and sweep the distant pressure ridge and this slush out to sea and so free the whales. If that failed, then perhaps the hunters themselves might think of something - I couldn't imagine what, but, again and again, I had been amazed at the incredible resourcefulness the hunters had shown in dealing with all kinds of challenges on their frigid ocean homeland.

Yet, how could they possibly deal with this?

Traditionally, the Iñupiat never hunted grays on a regular basis. A wounded gray whale can be very dangerous. The skin is so riddled with barnacles that the maktak - the skin and the blubber attached to it - does not make good food - but of course, the flesh would be good. Historically, when hunters have found sea mammals, be they seals, walrus, belugas... whatever... stranded in an ice hole, it was like a gift given to them from the creator, something to accept and rejoice over.

Still, in this case, the whalers were ready to wait a bit, give the whales some time, talk it over, see what developed.

How did these whales get into this predicament?

They were all young whales, juveniles with much to learn. No one can be certain, but perhaps they were like teenagers, lollygagging and having a good time doing whatever they pleased while their older and wiser forebearers and their more obediant young peers hurried off on their way to Mexico.

Freeze up came very early. The three gray whales found themselves trapped.

On the shore, just a yard or two from the slush, I found this seagull, frozen in the snow. Billy and I climbed onto our snowmachines and drove back to Barrow.

I think it was two days later when I boarded a North Slope Borough Search and Rescue helicopter along with Dr. Thomas Albert, Senior Scientist of the NSB Wildlife management and some other biologists. Between my first visit and this one, Oran Caudle, a videographer who worked at the North Slope Borough TV Studio, had been helicoptered out to shoot some video from the shore.

I knew that if word of these trapped whales reached the outside world, the major media would flood into Barrow. I had seen the huge amount of interest generated by the exploits of "Humphrey," the humpback whale who had repeatedly swum into the Sacramento River, migrated upstream and then had to be rescued.

I was certain that these whales would generate the same interest - but perhaps even more so, because their situation was so much more dire - impossible, it appeared to me.

I hoped that I could just quietly follow whatever was about to unfold until this saga reached what I was certain would be its tragic end. I did not want to disturbed by outside media. I hoped that Oran would demonstrate the good sense to keep quiet about what he saw and keep the tape close until the event had played itself out.

Before landing, we flew out over the hole for the aerial view.

Whale in the hole.

We landed on the shore. The slush had turned solid, but was still very thin. Helicopter pilot Price Brower, an Iñupiat whaler himself, tested the ice with his foot and determined that it was strong enough for us to walk on. So we headed toward the holes. but I was nervous. I judged the ice to be no more than three inches thick, if that. Salt water ice has an elasticity to it that freshwater ice does not, and I could feel the ice fall and rise beneath my boots as we walked toward the holes - somewhat the same effect that one might experience walking on a water bed - but not quite so pronounced.

I feared the action of the whales might cause the ice to crack and break beneath our feet.

Price seemed confident, so we all followed.

And then, right at the edge of the hole, helicopter pilot and Iñupiat whale hunter Price Brower dropped down onto his tummy. He inched his way toward the hole. Even as he did, the snout of the whale directly in front of him glided slowly through the water towards him.

Price reached out and touched the whale. The first physical contact between humanity and the stuck whales had been made. It would not be the last.

When we got back to Barrow, I learned Oran Caudle had done the very thing that I had hoped he would not - he had sent his footage to Channel 2 in Anchorage.

I knew that was it. The world's attention would now be riveted on Barrow, and on the whales. I felt that a natural tragedy was about to unfold, and the world would witness it, live on TV. I would not get to shoot my exclusive, solitary, tragic, essay, but would have to contend with the sharp elbows and hard shoves of the national news media - TV cameramen in particular.

I made prints of the final two images above and put them on the next jet to Anchorage, addrressed to the Anchorage Daily News. The Daily News ran the photo of Price and the whale looking at each other across the full width of its front page, with the one of the touch inset directly below it.

The photo editor asked me if they could put them on AP. I said go ahead. So off these pictures went, to appear in the newspapers of the world, both large and small.

Because of this, when I would later be talking with my peers in print media, they would blame me for setting off the whole insane, terrible, wonderful, absurd, cruel, compassionate, ruckus that followed.

But no, it wasn't my fault. I was not to blame. It was Oran Caudle's fault, for sending the video out, for sending moving images of our fellow, breathing, gasping, creatures, the whales, struggling against all odds for another breath, into practically every TV-equipped living room in the world.

I merely acted in self-defense, so as not to be totally innundated by the media onslaught that I knew would soon follow. 

Even though I knew it would come, I didn't really know. How could anyone have known? The events that would soon take place would eclipse all preconception.

Now that I have started this gray whale series on my blog, I am committed and determined to finish it, but it is only now, as I prepare to post at 9:18 PM what I had anticipated posting between 3:00 and 4:00 PM that I have fully realized what a challenge I have given myself, what a time-consuming burden I have undertaken.

I am not an organized person. While the bulk of my gray whale rescue contact sheets negatives are all together, several are spread about elsewhere. I have not even located them all yet. I have no scanner with which to digitize them. Unless I had already scanned the images for my book, Gift of the Whale, the only means I have to digitize them is to photograph the negatives with one of my digital SLR cameras, then convert the negative images to a positives in Photoshop and then tweak that fairly low-grade (but still better, I think, than those produced by the low-cast scanners on the market) into a blog presentable image.

The process is more complicated and takes much longer than I had anticipated. Before I continue on, I need to regroup a bit, figure some things out, come up with better, swifter, methodology. I need to spend some real time figuring out not only what is in my contact sheets, but I must locate the negatives that are missing. I am confident that they are within six feet of where I now sit, but that doesn't mean they will be at all easy to find.

Tomorrow is Super Bowl Sunday. I figure that at least the US, if not the world, will be absorbed by the game. I think I will watch it, too. My family, or much of my family (Melanie is traveling in Southwest Alaska, Rex with Cortney in Hawaii and Caleb will probably join his buddies - I don't know what Lisa will do) will be here. So a great deal of my time is going to go, right there - to Super Bowl Sunday. I hope to eat more pizza than is good for me.

Other than this, I plan to spend the rest of my time exploring, figuring out what I have, trying to improve my camera "scanning" method and flow.

Maybe I will post something tomorrow, maybe not. By Monday, I hope to come back strong in the continuation of this series and then keep blasting away at it until it is done. It won't be early Monday, though. Early Monday, I must drive Marge back to Anchorage, so she can resume her babysitting duties.

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Complete series index:

Part 1: Context bowhead hunt

Part 2: Roy finds the whales; Malik

Part 3: Scouting trip

Part 4: NBC on the ice

Part 5: To rescue or euthanize

Part 6: Governor Cowper, ice punch, chainsaw holes

Part 7: Malik provides caribou for dinner

Part 8: CNN learns home is sacred place

Part 9: World's largest jet; Screw Tractor

Part 10: Think like a whale

Part 11: Portrait: Billy Adams and Malik

Part 12: Onboard Soviet icebreakers

Part 13: Malik walks with whales, says goodbye

Part 14: Rescue concludes

Part 15: Epilogue

The movie, Big Miracle, and what I witnessed in real life, part 1: Context - bowhead hunt

The movie, Big Miracle, released today in threatres nationwide, begins with a Barrow bowhead whale hunt, so I will begin my series on the Great Gray Whale Rescue of 1988 with a bowhead hunt as well - actually, fragments of different Barrow hunts, culminating in the spring of 1988 - the same year that the rescue took place.

I was awestruck by the whale in the opening scene of the movie, in part because I have never seen a bowhead from quite that perspective in real life, yet I have seen them almost exactly like that in my dreams. The difference being that in my dreams the bowhead always turns upward, pulls the surface of the sea up in a dome with it until finally its snout breaks through the dome and then the water cascades down its sides as it climbs straight up through the air towards me.

The bowhead whale above breached in front of the whale camp of George Ahmaogak, Sr. during a time of cease fire. Elsewhere on the water, crews were in the process of landing two bowheads. Until that task could be completed, no further strikes could be made. This happened in the year 1994 - when I returned to the Ahmaogak camp nine years after my first sojourn with them.

This whale has been keeping the Iñupiat people alive now since the days of antiquity. To some, it may seem incongrous, but the Iñupiat people not only know the whale better than does anyone else, they have a deep love and respect for the bowhead whale, the likes of which is held by no other group of people. They depend on the whale, they need the whale, they know the whale, they respect the whale, they love the whale, they hunt the whale.

The Iñupiat and the bowhead have shared this sacred, life-giving relationship for thousands of years. In these modern times, the Iñupiat, a modern people, remain bound to the whale just as their ancestors were.

This is George Ahmaogak, who, in May of 1985, opened the door that allowed me to enter the world of the Iñupiat, and of whaling in particular. That May, I spent 12 days on the ice with him and his crew. It was a hard season. No whale was landed in Barrow in that time.

George taught me many lessons, some of them difficult. Chief among these lessons was one that I would hear confirmed many times by the elders afterward: a hunter must be skilled and stealthful, a hunter must also be respectful and generous toward others. No matter how skilled the hunter is, he is not skilled enough to land this great animal unless it first chooses to give itself to him.

The whale will only give itself to respectful, generous hunters, who keep their ice cellars clean and share their food with others - especially the elderly, the sick, and those who cannot hunt for themselves.

Hence, the title of my book, from which these pictures come: Gift of the Whale: The Iñupiat Bowhead Hunt - A Sacred Tradition.

This is one of the hard lessons that he taught me. Whaling is hard work. Just to establish a camp, crews must make trails across the sea ice that can exceed 15 miles in length. They must cut their way through many pressure ridges.

I came to take pictures, but when it was time to cut through a pressure ridge, I could barely get off a frame or two before George would hand me a pick axe and order, "Put that camera down and get to work!"

This was an even harder lesson. A shard of ice can easily poke a hole through the bearded seal skins that cover the umiak, or even break the frame. To ensure that this does not happen, whalers, usually young and fit, run with the boat. Several times, we had to move camp. Each time, George ordered, "Put that camera down and run with the boat."

I did not put the camera down, though. I kept it with me and every now and then lifted it above my bursting lungs and tried to get a frame off.

This effort would completely fall apart in the pressure ridges, where I stumbled and fell a couple of times. Once, I struggled to get back on my feet - retching, feeling like I was heaving up my guts altogether. I got no mercy from George. He stopped his machine, got off, stomped back to me, scolded me, mocked my poor "run with the boat technique" and then demonstrated how to do it right. "You are a shock absorber! A human shock absorber!"

And so I was.

It was hard. I did not want to swing a pick. I did not want to run with the boat; I wanted to take pictures, which is hard enough even when you are not swinging a pick - but, just like a young boy, I had to earn my right to be in camp. I learned things I would never have known if I had not undergone all the different tasks that George put me through.

I first went out with George in the spring of 1985, on a freelance assignment for We Alaskans, the no longer published Sunday magazine of the Anchorage Daily News. At the end of that year, I started up Uiñiq - a new pictoral magazine of life in the eight Iñupiat villages of the North Slope Borough.

I wanted to document the efforts of a single whaling captain and crew to bring in a bowhead. As George was then Mayor of the North Slope Borough. As the Borough funded Uiñiq, it seemed to me that it would be a conflict of interest if I were to focus on the Mayor's crew. So I had to find a crew - but whose crew?

In the spring of 1986, I had no crew to follow, so I basically stayed on land but kept my ears peeled as to what was happening on the ice. When I would hear that a crew had struck and landed a whale, I would seek out a snowmachine ride and then head for the landing site. This happened two or three times, and each time the butchering process was well under way by the time I got there. There wasn't much left for me to take pictures of.

Then, the final alloted strike of the season was made. A good lady by the name of Sally Brower let me ride on her sled and she drove me to the site where Jonathan Aiken, Sr., better known by his Iñupiaq name, Kunuk, had brought his whale. The whale was pulled out of the water even as we approached. I jumped off the sled as Kunuk climbed atop the whale with two of his tutaliks - his grandsons.

I shot this picture. I quickly ascertained that Kunuk was a quiet, humble, man - gentle and kind. I knew his was the crew I wanted to follow.

I made the request of Kunuk - that he let me follow his crew. For the next 11 months, whenever I would follow up, usually through his oldest son, Johnny Lee Aiken, the response would always be, "he's thinking about it. We'll let you know."

Soon, final preparations for the spring hunt of 87 were under way. Next, I was listening to KBRW and I heard the announcment that the Aiken crew was about to give out candy at Kunuk's house. This meant they would be going down to the ice within an hour or so.

So, feeling very depressed, I went over to get some candy and to see the crew off. Maybe, if I did so respectfully and without complaint, and then Kunuk thought about it for another year, he might take me in.

When I arrived. Kunuk and all his crew were dressed in their hunting parkas, with their bright, freshly sewn, white covers. Kunuk looked at me through dark sunglasses that gave me no hint of what was happening in his eyes.

"You coming?" he asked.

Here is Kunuk, pulling the umiak as his crew follows. I took these pictures, then scurried back to where I stayed, donned my arctic gear, hustled back to Kunuk's house and soon caught a ride out to camp.

Kunuk's camp, May, 1987 - waiting for a whale.

Kunuk's crew, May, 1987 - watching as a whale moves up the lead, past another crew.

Kunuk's crew, May, 1987 - they paddle for the whale.

Kunuk's crew, May, 1987 - they look for the whale after it dives.

Kunuk's crew, May, 1987 - they scrape the slush off their paddles before it hardens into solid ice. "Oh, well," Kunuk says.

Whalers like the east wind, but not the west. The east wind keeps the pack-ice separated from the shorefast ice - it holds the lead open. The west wind blows the pack ice back to the shorefast ice and closes the lead. If a large iceberg crashes into the ice, it can shatter and break it apart. Unwary whalers can be pitched into the sea or crushed in crumbling ice.

The wind has shifted to the west. Kunuk studies the advancing ice.

Kunuk deems the advancing ice to be too dangerous. He gives the order to break down camp, pack up and head for safe ice closer to land. In about 15 - 20 minutes after I took this picture, this campsite was completely vacated.

Kunuk and crew - on their way to safe ice.

Closed lead time is a good time to hunt eider ducks, which pass by the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, the millions.

It is also a time to relax on the caribou skins in the tent, to drink coffee (I never did drink coffee until I started to hang out with whalers) tell stories, and play pinochle. Raymond Kalayuak studies his hand as Eli Solomon peers over his shoulders.

On a few different occassions that season, we would hear that another crew had received the gift of the whale. Some of the crew would go to help with the landing - I would sometimes follow, nervous that a whale might come to Kunuk while I was off taking pictures such as this.

Some might look at a whale and say, "What a giant animal - how could the people possibly consume it all? But Barrow is a big community. After helping land and cut up a whale, different members of Kunuk's crew stood with their shares. They would get more at the feasts of Nalukatak, Thanksgiving and Christmas, but still one whale would not be even close to enough.

They needed more.

In 1977, based on information produced by scientists who did not yet know how to count bowhead whales in the Arctic, the International Whaling Commission and the US government believed the western Arctic bowhead population to number as few as 600 whales and no more than 1800. So IWC imposed a moratorium - a quota of zero - and the US agreed to enforce it.

From their own observations, the Iñupiat and other Alaska Eskimo whalers knew the government numbers to be wrong and so organized the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission and sent their leaders to IWC and Washington.

IWC and the US backed off a bit, but imposed a severe quota of only 12 landed whales, with no more than 18 strikes, for all ten (now 11) of Alaska's recognized whaling villages. Barrow's quota was four landed with no more than five strikes to land them. A decades long census effort was launched in cooperation between the US, AEWC, and the North Slope Borough. AEWC would manage the hunt, but would be under constant scrutiny. Eskimo whalers taught scientists how to better live on the ice and observe what was happening, there were aerial surverys and high-tech sound systems set up to detect and count whales that could not be seen from atop the ice or due to fog and weather condition.

In time, the census, subjected to rigorous peer review and then accepted by IWC and the US, proved that the bowhead population numbered more than 10,000 and is growing every year. The current, five-year block quota averages out to 67 strikes per year and the population continues to grow.

In 1987, the quota was still very tiny. It was not enough. Hunters had to double down on their efforts to catch caribou, seal, walrus and other animals of the Arctic - which supplement, but cannot replace, whale. Because they lead active lives in a frigid climate, they consume five to ten times the amount of flesh that other Americans do.

On April 26, 1988, the Aiken crew was the first to go down to the ice. They were soon joined by two other crews - Jacob Adams and Oliver Leavitt. I came too. We had to cut our way through a jumble of young, broken, jagged, sharded ice to get to the tenuous spot that Kunuk had chosen for our campsite.

As always, when swing a pick, I worked up a sweat. In previous years, that sweat had caused me to freeze not to death but into a state of perpetual misery. Nobody ever heard one word of complaint out of me, but I suffered. Now, I planned to sit out all day and all night for at least 24 hours and wait for a whale. I did not want to freeze. So, shortly after the tent was established, I went inside to change into dry clothes. I felt very nervous about this. What if a whale came right at the moment that I had removed my sweat-soaked clothing?

I thought about my previous three seasons on the ice. In all that time, only one whale had come within paddling distance of camp. What were the odds that one would now come in the few minutes it would take me to change into dry clothes?

I started to strip off my wet clothes, still feeling nervous. Claybo had laid down upon the caribou skins covering the tent floor to take a nap.

At the moment that I stripped down to my skivvies, Johnny whipped open the tent flap. "Whale!" he whispered. I jammed my feet back into my boots, didn't worry about anything else, grabbed my cameras and slipped quietly out through the tent flap. I was surprised to see the whale RIGHT THERE, just yards in front of the tent. It had the appearance of almost bowing to to Kunuk, who had raised his harpoon. To me, it looked felt like the whale was offering itself, just as I had been taught it would.

My angle was bad. Staying crouched, I slipped maybe four feet to my right, then saw that I could not take even one more second to better my position, so I raised my camera. My breath hit the manual Canon F-1 viewfinder and froze on it, covering it with frost. I could not see through the viewfinder to focus and this was in the time of manual focus. I did not have a motor drive but only a thumb lever. I focused on instinct, fired the shutter, cranked my thumb as fast as I could.

Kunuk thrust the harpoon into the whale, triggering the darting gun that would fire a bomb. Eli Solomon followed with the shoulder gun, to fire another bomb. The whale disappeared beneath the surface. We felt the reverberations of the two bombs come up through the water and the ice. We waited...

... in just seconds, the whale rolled to the surface, flipper up. Kunuk raised his hands above his head. "Praise God!" he prayed in thanks. It was an instant kill. 

Johnny and Claybo embraced. They were joyous. This whale had brought its gift to their crew. They would now have the honor of feeding the community.

Two months later, the Aiken crew joined with three other successful crews. Crew members gathered around the prepared whale, joined hands, and prayed. The feast of Nalukataq was about to begin. All who came would be fed generously. All would leave with generous portions to take home with them - as they would in the upcoming feasts at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

A blanket made from the skins of one of the successful umiaks was brought out. The first people to be tossed during breaks in the afternoon serving were children. Come night, in the time of 24 hour sunshine, the youth and adults took over the blanket.

Big Boy Neakok performed his famous flips.

In the movie Big Miracle, Malik is the captain who guides the paddling of the umiak toward the whale in the opening scene. He is a fictitious Malik, but is named for a real Malik who I have been told harpooned more bowheads in his life than any other hunter. In the movie, Malik proves to be the leading force in the whale rescue. The real life Malik would play a similar role, but with different nuance.

Tomorrow, I will introduce readers to the real Malik, together with Roy Ahmaogak, who found the three gray whales while out scouting in the hope of spotting bowheads. The three graywhales will appear in tomorrow's post as well.

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Complete series index:

Part 1: Context bowhead hunt

Part 2: Roy finds the whales; Malik

Part 3: Scouting trip

Part 4: NBC on the ice

Part 5: To rescue or euthanize

Part 6: Governor Cowper, ice punch, chainsaw holes

Part 7: Malik provides caribou for dinner

Part 8: CNN learns home is sacred place

Part 9: World's largest jet; Screw Tractor

Part 10: Think like a whale

Part 11: Portrait: Billy Adams and Malik

Part 12: Onboard Soviet icebreakers

Part 13: Malik walks with whales, says goodbye

Part 14: Rescue concludes

Part 15: Epilogue

One raven feasted, the other complained; Kalib battles Melanie over her cake; train wreck - Friday, I will begin my gray whale rescue series

This morning, I saw two ravens in the road. One was eating something. What could it be?

It was a toad! One of those famous Wasilla Anti-Freeze toads! As the raven gobbled up the toad, the other raven grew upset and began to shriek at it. "Share the toad! Share the toad!" the second raven screamed. "I always share my toad with you! Share the toad! Share the toad! Mabel! Share the toad!"

But Mabel did not share. She gobbled down that toad and didn't even care that the other raven had none.

Thereafter, I went out for my daily bike ride. I have riden every day this week. I am kind of sad, though. I have just over two weeks left to ride and then I leave for Arizona and from there on to India. I will not be back until March 23. My winter bike riding will be over, so soon. Maybe I will be able to get in a little more winter biking after I return, but not much.

I might not be able to get any more at all. March 23 could be cold, March 23 could be warm, with slush everywhere. There is no way to know just yet. If I have my way, I will go to the Arctic Slope not long after I return. It will still be cold up there, but I won't be able to take my bike with me.

And I don't know if I will be able to go, anyway. I have no contracts with anybody right now. I have no paying work lined up. I do not know what will become of Uiñiq. Maybe its day is past. Our cash is just about gone. I am expecting one more check for another project I did and I am hoping that can carry us through until I get back from India and can figure out how to carry on, but I don't know.

Still, I am optimistic I will get paying work and I will get up to the Slope this spring. I have to. I must. The Slope is in my DNA.

As I drew near to home on my bike, this dog came chasing after me, barking. The dog that I believe was the mother to this dog once teamed up with another dog, who might also have been a forebearer to this one, invaded our yard and killed our wonderful orange and white tabby, Thunder Paws.

After that, I had a lot of hatred in me for that dog and its people for awhile, but I have pushed that hatred away. At their core, the people are good people and the dog was just being a dog - albeit a mean dog. Plus, after it raised some bloody hell with someone else's pet, it got put down.

It does one no good to carry a grudge against a dead dog.

In the early evening, I got in the car and drove towards Anchorage. There had been a super warm up. The temperature was a couple of degrees above freezing. The roads were treacherously slick. Lots of cars had slid off.

I drove kind of slow, but not real slow.

I went to town because it is Melanie's 31st birthday. Kalib tried to prevent her from blowing out her candles. He wanted to blow them out. Funny - on his last birthday, he did not want to blow out the candles at all.

Finally, Kalib let Melanie blow out her candles. Except for Caleb, the whole family was there, but I am lazy tonight.

She failed to blow out the last candle. So Kalib blew it out for her.

Jobe got tossed almost to the ceiling. I was tired and lazy, and did not want to move from the couch where I sat, so I didn't. Then I felt kind of bad about that, because I could see that picture was directly below, where I could have caught Jobe rising into his own shadow.

So I moved to the floor to get it, but Jobe ran off. The opportunity had been lost. Photography is like that.

Baby Lynx seems to be all better now. He has put his viral infection behind him.

Just before I left, bringing Margie with me, one night early, I found Kalib, Thomas, Thomas, Thomas and Thomas's friend, James, pushing Thomas over the edge of a cliff.

This is why I do not let Kalib and Jobe play unsupervised with the electric HO Thomas the Train that Sujitha gifted to us at Christmas.

Tomorrow, Friday, February 3, the movie Big Miracle will be released nationwide. I also plan to start blogging my own experience. I usually don't get my post up until late at night or even after midnight, but I will try to get my first post, which will start out where the movie starts out, up fairly early.