"Opinionatedly Yours"
#15: August 5, 1998
Touched
By Barry Kent MacKay

At seven in the evening there were, at that latitude, still several hours of daylight left. We each of us paid $40.00, Canadian, and climbed into the orange school bus parked near the shed where the tours originated. We had walked there from where we were staying, at the Churchill Motel. Just about everything is within walking distance of everything else, in "downtown" Churchill, Manitoba.

When loaded with our fellow tourists, the bus took us the short distance to a backwater channel, in behind the towering grain elevators that seem to define this subarctic community at the end of a rail line that originates deep in the checkered expanses of the prairies to the south. There are no roads out of Churchill.

We were given bright red life-jackets and aimed toward a boat with ample seating capacity and various amenities. We would, we were told, pay a visit to a fort on an island in the Churchill River. I noticed two Parks Canada employees carrying a rifle case. Polar bears are normally not shot in Churchill ... quite the contrary ... but it is deemed to be good to have the means to scare them away if they get too close, or perhaps dispatch them in extreme situations.

We noticed, however, that a rubber dinghy was also going out onto the river. Some tourists who had earlier been the fort had the option going out in the dinghy. Four or five did so. Could we, also, use the dinghy?

Yes.

So the four of us climbed aboard and a jolly, ginger-bearded schoolteacher and summer tour guide, who had done a master's degree on the beluga whale, took us out into the Churchill River.

River? Don't let that word mislead you. We were on a broad expanse of calm, cold, very dark water that was a blend of an enormous volume of fresh water draining off the surrounding tundra and the tidal surge of incoming salt water from Hudson's Bay.

Arctic terns, so silvery and elegant of form, flew by overhead, some carrying limp capelin in their thin, blood-colored beaks. Crisply patterned Bonaparte's gulls swirled overhead. There were eiders near to shore and an occasional arctic loon flying by overhead.

And the whales were there, within minutes of swinging around the end of the docks and out into the river.

I was in Churchill to investigate claims that snow geese were placing the subarctic ecosystem in peril, as a result of increasing numbers of the birds "grubbing" for vegetation. These concerns have led to calls for a massive cull of over two million snow geese, additional to the birds already killed by hunters. With me was Dr. Vernon Thomas, a professor from the University of Guelph who has long studied snow goose ecology and with whom I had co-authored a rebuttal to concerns raised about the snow geese. Also present were Susan Hagood, and Kathy Milani, both of the Humane Society of the United States. Susan had been working on the issue for some time. Kathy was our video photographer. Our whale-watching expedition was the one "touristy" thing we did during our visit to the north.

Earlier we had rented a fixed-wing aircraft, a Saab 340-B with room for three passengers. (Susan graciously remained behind.) We took it first south, over Cape Churchill, and La Perouse Bay, around the bend of the cape and south a little way toward Thompson Point. We saw six polar bears, thousands of caribou, huge swirling flocks of migrant shorebirds and, of course, the many thousands of snow geese that were the purpose of our trip. We were there to explore the arguments that the snow geese were destroying the environment and thus should be culled. They aren't; they shouldn't be -- but that's another story.

Then we had refueled and headed north, all the way to Tha-anne River, in the Northwest Territories, where we put down on the water to examine a small island geese had visited, while caribou stared at us from shore. We had flown over large schools of belugas, the white whales that gather near Churchill each summer. They move about in groups of two, three, four and sometimes five or six animals, lined up in rows. The smaller, gray animals are the younger ones ... the biggest and whitest are the adults.

Now we wanted to see them up close, so we indulged ourselves in the one "touristy" thing we did during our week-long visit to Churchill; we went whale-watching.

Eventually the distinctive silhouette of the Churchill grain elevators sank below the horizon. The Churchill is, at its mouth, a very wide river. There were belugas everywhere, curving their backs above the dark waters. Sometimes it was a single animal, sometimes two or even three at a time.

They seldom stick their heads above water, nor do they breach or jump or do any of the spectacular things other cetaceans do. You don't see their flukes break the surface. All you usually see above water is just the back of the melon (the rounded forehead), where the blowhole is, and a slight curve of the back.

But they do come close. The propeller of the boat, protectively screened so it can't hurt the mammals, fascinates them, and they tend to follow close behind, lined up side by side. Sometimes they bumped the rubbery bottom of the boat, gently shoving it a few degrees this way or that. When the tour guide cut the engine and lowered a microphone over the side, we could hear their twittering and cheeping noises ... indeed, sometimes we heard them without the microphone. We were told that they often would tug the microphone, play with it, and sometimes try to carry it away with them.

Trying to photograph them was frustrating. Our tour guide never chased the whales, nor even headed toward them. As they appeared he'd cut the motor. By standing up in the dinghy we could see into the water. By following the shapes of the whales -- lighter green against deep, dark green -- we could sometimes predict where they'd break the surface, and eventually I obtained a series of pictures of curved backs and blowholes. They aren't very exciting. I hope Kathy did better with her video camera. Only once did I see the eyes of a beluga at the surface.

"You can touch them," said our guide. A plump lady stretched herself out on the rubber side of the dinghy and, after several attempts, made contact. She did that for a long time. I found that I envied her for her closeness to the animals. Finally she backed off and I tried it, feeling a little embarrassed. I object to the swim-with-dolphins programs and always argue that we should give wild animals their space. We should enjoy wildlife, by all means, but we should minimize interaction with wild animals. We should, generally speaking, not encourage tameness nor contact. That's what I've preached, and yet here there was space aplenty. It was we who were trapped by the confines of our tiny vessel; the whales were free and at home.

And so I was impressed that the whales were in control of the situation. They would glide by a meter or two below me, on their sides or backs, looking at me with their dark eyes, making eye contact.

Prior to coming to Churchill the only belugas I had seen had been held prisoner in an aquarium. My colleagues and I had previously successfully fought to keep them out of captivity at the Biodome, in Montreal. But here they were in the environment they were designed by the selective forces of evolution to inhabit, in a vast space amid their companions.

Are they hunted?

Yes.

A couple of weeks earlier some Inuit had shot one. What does that do to the whale-watching business, which, after all, depends on the cooperation of the whales themselves? Our guide would not say anything negative about the Inuit, who, he pointed out, could obtain a large supply of food for their isolated communities, far to the north, from a single animal, but yes, the animals seemed stressed and nervous after such a hunt.

Yet here they were, close to our little boat amid the vast expanse of dark water.

I plunged my hand down toward a beluga. Nothing. I tried again, soaking my sleeve in chill water. "You can't do it that way," said the guide, with a laugh. "They will tell you when."

I realized that the water magnified them, making them appear a short distance below the surface, when, in fact, they were deeper beyond what I could reach. Finally one put his head just below me, out of the water. I reached, and briefly touched him ... or her.

I did it again, a few minutes later ... the contact lasting less than a second, and entirely at the discretion of the whale.

"You won't tell that I did that?" I asked my companions.

They solemnly assured me that my reputation as an objective naturalist and animal protectionist was intact.

But then I began to wonder. Who touched whom?

It's apparently only the younger, "adolescent" whales who play this game. It is a game fraught with an element of risk. Whatever these strange beings are who sometimes visit them, some of their kind are known to kill, yet others, most, seem genuinely harmless, even friendly.

And was there not, somewhere below me, a brave young whale who could report to her friends or family, "I touched a human!"

I wonder.