At fifty, Merlin was considered young, not yet an elder. Shotguns hung in racks on the wall. There were two snowmobiles outside; fishing nets were drying in the yard. I saw three sets of rubber boots, two outboard motors against a wall, grease-smeared oilcans, clean fishing hooks.
“Do you know how these whale bombs work, Joe?”
Answer the question. Don’t push him. He’s testing you. You’re on North Slope time here, not D.C. time.
“Tell me, Merlin.”
He stood and stretched, getting the tension in his muscles out, and then he strode to the wall and easily hefted an evil-looking harpoon, about six feet long. The wooden shaft ended in a steel, wickedly barbed arrow-shaped protuberance.
“Most people think the harpoon is the whole thing, but it’s just the steel part on top. Look down the shaft and we come to this little plunger, see? A trigger. See it?”
I want to know about your cousin, not the damn harpoon.
“Yes, I see it.”
“Well, if the harpooner throws well and hits the bowhead — you only have a few seconds to do it before it dives — and you aim just behind the head… the harpoon goes in up to the plunger, then the whale’s skin depresses the plunger, the plunger acts as a trigger, and the trigger fires the missile from the wooden shaft. A good throw blows up the heart. No suffering. Quick death.”
“Then the whole wooden shaft there is a gun?”
“That’s right. Hollow inside.” He placed the harpoon back on the rack. “There! That ought to do it,” Merlin said. “These things are humane. The harpoon stays in, and the shaft floats away, so we can recover it. The harpoon is attached to a floating buoy that marks the whale’s location if it dives and tries to get away, still alive.”
“Merlin, I’m not here to talk about hunting.”
“Sure you are.” Merlin signaled me to follow him into the house, walking out the door. Over his big shoulder he said, “Just a different kind. Clay worked for the mayor, actually. He kept tabs on visitors. Too many of them are like you, Colonel. They don’t tell us the whole truth about why they’re here, just what they want us to know.”
Well! He had a point there, I had to admit.
We passed outside and entered his one-story wooden house through a cold room — called a cunnychuck—where we left our shoes among hanging jackets, muddy boots, parkas, and anoraks. The living room was hot, from gas heat, and I smelled coffee brewing. A TV was on, tuned to MSNBC. The couch and sitting chair were Haitian cotton. The pile was colored gold. There was an exercise walker, from where Merlin’s wife, Edith, waved to me. She wore spandex pants, a long floral-motif snow shirt, and sneakers and she was glued by earbud to Al Sharpton on MSNBC. The walls were decorated as in most homes I’d visited here, packed with family photos: graduation shots of nephews and nieces, high school football shot on a blue Astroturf field, Hawaii shots of Merlin and Edith on vacation — looking miserable in the heat — a shot of Merlin’s crew on the ice, carving up a harvested bowhead with half the town helping. People atop the whale wielding carving knives affixed to long poles. People loading meat onto sleds. A smiling hunter holding out a piece of heart. I saw Clay Qaqulik in back.
Inside homes you always met extended families, in person, or in photos that filled up walls.
Merlin said, putting two thick ceramic mugs on the kitchen table, “Straight talk?”
“Straight talk.”
“Clay was doing fine at the FBI until a North Slope case came up. Walrus ivory smuggling. Couple of low-rent jerks from Nome coming up with machine guns and a boat, leaving carcasses behind, harvesting the tusks and shipping pieces to Chicago, claiming they came from elephants. Know what the FBI did when the complaint came in?”
“What?”
“Laughed, Joe. That’s what Clay told me his supervisor did: laughed. ‘Fucking walruses,’ the guy told Clay. ‘We’ve got drugs coming in from Panama. We’ve got threats against the vice president when he visits Juneau next month. We’ve got bank robbers in Anchorage — and you want to go look for a couple of guys shooting walruses? Give it to ATF.’ Clay quit the next day.”
“What was he doing for you?”
“Not me, Joe. Us! The people who need walruses and whales to eat. Over half our food comes from subsistence hunting. And more than that, our culture. Walruses aren’t just something to look at in a zoo, man. Not here. They’re who we are for four thousand years.”
He gestured tiredly at Al Sharpton on TV, who was haranguing a Republican senator about an upcoming vote on aid to the Central African Republic.
“That gets more play than us,” he said.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
Merlin went to a different cupboard and opened it and instead of cups and saucers pulled out a three-foot-long rolled-up paper, like a blueprint, which he spread on the checkered tablecloth, after pushing away the remains of a pancake breakfast. He weighed the paper down with a sugar bowl on one end, a maple syrup bottle on the other. It was a map showing the North Slope borough, the same shape as the admiral’s topographical depiction in Washington, only the admiral’s map showed a cute caribou and a wolf on the bottom, and highlighted the wilderness, lakes and mountains — the vast, open possibility. Merlin’s map showed the same area in plain, gridded white — as if the earth had been wiped away and what remained were perfect squares laid out as mathematically as in a Los Angeles real-estate guide. The squares were numbered. The tundra, lakes, and mountains had been reduced to mere geometry. I read out loud. “‘Land allocation in the North Slope.’”
“Joe, our heroes here are Eben Hopson and Willie Hensley, who created the borough so we’d have some power over people who want to rip this place apart. They were fought by the state, the oil companies, by anyone who wanted access to land. But we won. And now we have our own borough. We can tax companies. That gives us money to pay lobbyists in Washington, lawyers, and scientists of our own to counter whoever wants to run over us. Greenpeace wants to stop our whaling. Interior wants us to stop eating birds. Oil companies want to drill offshore. Well, it’s not so easy to come in and do whatever you want anymore. But it is always a fight. Hell, Joe, do you know how we became Americans in the first place? Russia sold us to you. No one asked us first.”
“You don’t want to be Americans?”
“Of course we want to be Americans. We’ve got the highest percentage of veterans in our population than anywhere else in the U.S. But like every other damn community, we want some power over our own fate.”
“How did Detective Clay Qaqulik fit in to this?”
“Well, helpful Clay Qaqulik guided an Arkansas senator out to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and listened to him on his cell phone, telling someone to try to get a gigantic open-pit mine in the place. Cook Clay Qaqulik made breakfast for the visiting president of the Northern Lights Drill Company, of Sweden, who, ignoring the Eskimo menial, bragged to advisers that even though he’d promised to build a pipeline if they found oil offshore, he’d move the oil by ship, save on taxes, cheat us. To them, Clay was a quaint piece of landscape, a dumb rube, and they said things around him that he reported. Well, I bet that Swede was surprised when Senator Maxwell demanded that they sign a paper promising a pipeline.