Fire by Sebastian Junger Page B

heard a mile away. I pull off the road near Ollivierre’s house and feel my way down a steep set of cement stairs to the water’s edge. The surf smashes white against the outer reefs; everything else is the blue-black of the tropics just before dawn. The whalers arrive ten minutes later, as promised, moving single file down the beach. They stow their gear without a word and put their shoulders to the gunwales of the Why Ask; she rolls heavily over four cinnamonwood logs and slips into the sea. The wind has abated enough to sail to the preferred lookout on Mustique; otherwise we’d have to make do with the hill above Ollivierre’s.
    Within minutes they’re under way: Captain Dan at the tiller, Ollivierre up front, and Biddy Adams, Eustace, Arnold Hazell, and Kingsley Stowe amidships. They pull at the eighteen-foot oars, plunging into the surf. Once clear of the reef they step the mast, cinch the shrouds, becket the sprit and boom. They scramble to work within the awkward confines of the boat as Ollivierre barks orders from the bow.
    The Why Ask is heartbreakingly graceful under sail, as much a creature of the sea as the animals she’s designed to kill. She was built on the beach with the horizon as a level and Ollivierre’s memory as a plan. Boatwrights have used such phrases as “lightly borne” and “sweet-sheared and buoyant” to describe whaleboats of the last century, and they apply equally to the Why Ask.
    The boat quickly makes the crossing to Mustique, where the crew spends half the day on a hilltop overlooking the channel. With an older whaler named Harold Corea stationed above Ollivierre’s house with a walkie-talkie, they have doubled the sweep of ocean they can observe. In addition, they often get tips from fishermen, pilots, or people who just happen to look out their windows at the right moment. These people are always rewarded with whale meat if the chase is successful.
    In the early days, between 1880 and 1920, there were nine shore whaling stations throughout the Grenadines, including six on Bequia, and together they surveyed hundreds of square miles of ocean. They’d catch perhaps fifteen whales in a good year, a tremendous boon to the local economy. In 1920, 20 percent of the adult male population of Bequia was employed in the whaling industry.
    Five years later all that changed; a Norwegian factory ship set up operation off Grenada and annihilated the humpback population within a year and a half. Almost no whales were caught by islanders between 1925 and 1948, and none at all for eight years after that. The whaling stations folded one by one, and by the 1950s only the Ollivierre family was left. Today the humpback population has recovered slightly—the IWC now considers the species “vulnerable” rather than “endangered”—but sightings off Bequia are still rare. Last year the crew put out after a whale only once; so far this season they have yet to see a spout.
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    T he boat returns from Mustique in the afternoon with nothing to report. The crew shrugs it off: Waiting is as much a part of whaling as throwing the harpoon.
    On those lucky occasions when Ollivierre spots a whale from Mustique, he fixes its position in his mind, sails to the spot, and waits. If there’s no wind, the crew is at the oars, pulling hard against oarlocks that have been lined with fabric to keep them quiet. Humpbacks generally dive for ten or fifteen minutes and then come up for air; each time they do, Ollivierre works the boat in closer. The harpoon, protected by a wooden sheath, rests in a scooped-out section of the foredeck called the clumsy cleat; when the harpoon is removed, it fits the curve of Ollivierre’s thigh perfectly.
    The harpoon is heavy and brutally simple. A thick cinnamonwood shaft has been dressed with an ax and pounded into the socket of a throwing iron. The head itself is made of brass and has been ground down to the edge of a