* * *
Clint Ryan watched with interest as the dozen Indians uncovered two thirty-foot pine and pitch canoes—tomolos, they called them—hidden in the brush above the beach. They loaded spears and coils of line aboard and carried the boats to the water. He pitched in to help and was surprised at the lightness of the boats. The pine was hand-split, lapped like long shingles, and well caulked with asphaltum, which was easily found along the California coast.
He thought he would soon be back at sea, which was fine with him, for it kept him away from the paxa and his men. But why were they launching boats? The heavy spears and line were not for fishing. They had to be hunting, hunting something big.
From the dock of the Savannah he had seen many swordfish dozing near the surface, their long dorsal fins flopping from side to side with the rise and fall of the swell. There were hundreds of ocean creatures that would require a spear or even the hard iron and heavy line of a whaling harpoon. He knew the Indians took sea otter, for they brought most of it into the ranchos. The patrones traded for them with the Indians before passing the skins on to the hide ships. Otter hides brought a hundred dollars each in China.
The men launched the boats through the crashing surf and began paddling madly to clear the swells. Before long, they were making good headway into the breeze. Two Indians paddled on each side of the boats, the bottoms of which were covered with piles of skins, woven line, and spears. A spotter, Clint figured, who was also a spearman or harpooner, rode in the bow, and the man guiding the boat with an oar tiller rode the rear.
In the distance, Clint judged twenty miles, lay the Channel Islands, and the boats were heading for them. If that was the destination, they were in for a day of hard paddling. What could they be searching for? He would find out soon enough.
Seven
After several hours of hard paddling, they neared the center of the channel. Clint could make out three distinct islands, still distant. Santa Cruz was the largest of the three, and he knew that it, like Santa Catalina, was often used to conceal cargo from the tax collectors at Monterey.
As he worked the bent hide-covered willow paddle, he kept a close eye for sails. Though his time with the Indians had not been particularly unpleasant, he was ready to find a ship. He wanted to return to the life he had known for the last twelve years. As a youth of seven, as soon as he arrived in Mystic from Ireland, he had been indentured to a tanner. His parents had gotten the fever while on board the ship, and his Scottish mother, Irish father, younger sister, and half the passengers and crew had been buried at sea.
The tanner who held his indenture had not been a kind man, often rewarding Clint for his hard work with kicks. But Clint learned well. At fifteen, when his indenture was up, he left to become a common sailor. Since then he had plied his trade over most of the world’s oceans, on cod ships, brigs, barks, and full-rigged ships. Shanghaied aboard a British man-o-war, he had been a munitions helper for over a year, until he slipped the Brits in the Sandwich Islands and caught a Mystic-bound whaler home.
As the Indians neared the island’s north end, a great gray whale surfaced and blew, and they stopped paddling to watch. Clint waited apprehensively for the order to paddle toward the great whale, anticipating what he knew would be a fruitless attempt with the paltry spears they carried. But the Indians merely rested and watched reverently while the great whale surfaced and then sounded.
They continued on, and so did his thoughts. Clint, like most sailors, was a respectable carpenter, sail maker, cooper, and linesman in addition to his skills as a tanner. He had learned to navigate from a talkative Dutchman who was a skilled second mate and had learned a smattering of a half-dozen languages from the crews of more than a dozen ships. He could hold his own in Spanish. French, Dutch, German, and South Sea Pidgin, and even spoke a little Chinese.
Clint could read in English thanks to the Quaker first mate of a bark, a “friendship”—as ships where the men were well treated were known—that held regular after-hours reading classes for the crewmen. Clint read with fervor everything he could get his hands on. He read Homer, Payne, Bacon, Shakespeare, the Bible, a half-dozen books on navigation, two dozen Almanacs, and a thousand newspapers from a hundred ports.
A school of several hundred porpoises surrounded the shingled canoes, diving, jumping the waves, racing time and each other, but the Indians ignored them also.
The tillerman changed course, and they began to circle the largest of the islands, Santa Cruz. Hawk the bowman of Clint’s boat, raised his hand and the paddlers stopped. Standing in the bow, he scanned the sea. He waved them on, and they rounded a headland where Clint was surprised to see ten more tomolos gathered.
Between the boats and the shore, a thousand creatures bobbed on the surface, Pilot whales, Clint recognized. The distinctive knotted melon-shaped heads and cold black bodies rose and fell quietly in a deep bay. At eighteen feet, the large males were almost as long as the boats, and a hundred times heavier. The cows were a few feet shorter, and the calves ranged in length from four feet up.
Well. Clint thought, if this is what is to be, it’s a damn sight better than going after the grays. He could see a chance of taking the pilots.
Hawk instructed the other boat and, in conjunction with a long line of boats, began working the herd of whales as sheepdogs work their flock, paddling quickly, changing direction, herding.
Hawk picked up two rocks the size of small cannonballs from within the pile of hides and, like the bowmen in the other boats, leaned far overboard, striking the stones together underwater. The whales roiled the water in front of the boats and soon swam shoulder to shoulder, a solid pulsing mass of gleaming black in a sea of foam and heaving swells,
Birds joined in the clamor, diving and working the smaller fish and sardines who scattered in front of the solid wall of whales. The birds screeched, reveling in the unexpected banquet. Even the whales cried and whistled like a pack of underwater hounds after an aquatic fox.
Only the men were silent.
Clint, his paddle digging deep as they pulled ever closer, wondered what would happen if the whales should turn on them. He imagined being in the water with a thousand black bodies, each outweighing him several hundred times. But like a good sailor, when the captain piped, he danced. He paddled until his shoulders ached and his mouth was cotton.
They worked the herd nearer and nearer the shore, and Clint realized they had no intention of harpooning the animals but were in hopes of beaching them. He had seen whales on the beach in many parts of the world. Sometimes the animals would inexplicably beach themselves. Even when guided to deep water by helpful bystanders, they had been known to return, beaching themselves again and again until the helpful watchers gave up in frustration.
A small inlet, not more than fifty paces across, lay behind a shallow wall of rocks. As the whales stacked up against the rocks, Clint wondered again why the animals did not turn on the boats—the warriors would have been no match for even one if the big males—but they did not.
With a crush, several were forced over the rocks into the inlet. They left bloody trails where the rocks tore at their flesh, but quickly the surge washed the rocks clean. There had been no choice for the whales: either broach the rocks, or be crushed by the whales behind them. When a dozen had crossed the shallow reef, Hawk waved the boats away and, with the others, skirted the great herd. Most of the remaining animals turned and headed for deep water, but a few milled about outside the reef, their cries encouraging the escape of those trapped.
At Hawk’s direction, his boat joined the others on a nearby white-sand beach. Clint heard Spanish being spoken by some of the other Indians, but he stayed with his group.
After an hour, with the sun low in the west, they rose and walked to the lagoon. One of the largest of the trapped pilot whales had been stranded high on the rocks, almost out of the water, so the hunters started on him. Though they drove spears into the animal, he seemed resigned to his fate, almost thankful that hi
s unnatural ordeal on the rocks had ended.
Quickly the men stripped away the fat, then the meat. While some butchered, others hauled the meat ashore and strung it high in the branches of nearby scrub oaks. Flocks of birds gathered to feed on the offal and steal the smaller scraps hung in the trees, but the Indians ignored them, and Clint could see why.
There was plenty for men and birds alike, thousands and thousands of pounds of meat trapped in the lagoon, as much as they could haul back to the mainland in a hundred trips with the two boats. Small big-eared foxes of a variety Clint had never seen crept out of the undergrowth and worked shyly around the men, ignoring them, but wary of the bigger birds.
Then the men began capturing the whales still swimming in the shallow lagoon. Ropes of milkweed, nettle, and wild hemp were used to encircle the whales’ tails and hold them while other Indians mounted them and drove their spears home.
The whales humped and bucked, shaming the toughest bronc and men were thrown easily from the backs of the animals. They did not go unscathed. The rocks and the rugged bottom got their share of flesh, and the men’s blood mingled with that of the whales until soon the lagoon was muddied with blood.
Clint watched as gulls fought a tug-of-war over a long intestine, then he glanced to the sea beyond the reef and noticed a fin cutting the foam. He pointed it out to Hawk, who nodded, but ignored the threat. The first shark was soon joined by others until more than twenty cruised the water. They did not attempt to breach the reef but were content to fight for the scraps and offal that washed out to them.
Clint rigged a block and tackle, using a scrub oak trunk as an anchor and a few Spanish words to instruct some of the men from other groups. Hawk watched with interest while Clint employed the slipshod rig to haul the whale carcasses up on the shoreside rocks, making the butchering job much easier. Hawk smiled at his newfound friend who, as he had expected, was proving himself. Sup had not been wrong.
By dark, the men were exhausted. They roasted oily pilot-whale meat over an open fire and slept on the beach.