Whale of a Tale

The two surviving California gray whales made a run for it Friday, free of an ice pack north of the Arctic Circle because an international brigade of humans went through about $1 million struggling to break them out.

What are we to make of all this? One skeptic thought that the whales of the world would be better off with these three out of the gene pool because they were dumb enough to be left behind by other grays heading for Baja California. That is not a good spirit.

It was impressive that people who normally do not have a civil word for one another--like oil workers and environmentalists, and Alaska National Guardsmen and Soviet sailors--were all in it together.

The Soviet icebreakers were crucial, but if the whales make it to Baja they will have Eskimo whale hunters to thank, people who kill whales for a living but who cut through sheets of ice with chain saws day after day to make breathing holes for the stranded grays.

True, Eskimos know that the gray whale is an endangered species. They know that grays don’t taste very good. But that would not keep keep the Eskimos on the ice for three weeks. Some bond, perhaps, that only hunters and hunted understand.