They are seven men paddling hard on the open ocean.
The giant canoe, hewn from a Western Red Cedar the size of a spirit, beats back the white waves that burst forth from the cold-green tumultuous sea. So hard is the ocean that it looks sometimes like leather, stinging like a green whip when it catches the men in the faces. The sun is hidden by clouds the color of saliva. They paddle hard, their hands bleeding from the broken blisters. The salt water stings them. They are cold and hungry. A white geyser explodes from the ocean like a white tree or a ghost. The men paddle harder � the geyser, the great white tree, the ocean broken by beast.
*
After the first attempt the hunters come back empty-handed. The tribe does not groan to show their disappointment. Optimism is like air in the rain.
The cedar canoe skids into land with a thick sound against the sandy shore.
The hunters� mothers are there:
You were not successful, they say, their words stinging like green water in their cracked faces.
There is silence, and rain hitting them all. The men in the canoe clutch their cedar paddles with their breaking, bloody hands. They only nod, can only nod, and drag the canoe up the shore. They eat without speaking, before returning to the ocean the next day.
Raven stares at them from the top of the totem poles as they return home. The moon rises.
*
There is shutter-click of a camera and there are the boat�s engines as loud as all the oceans.
They paddle hard, blisters forming on their hands beneath their gloves. The salt water stings their lips. They are cold and hungry; one man unwraps and bites into a granola bar. A man shouts from the fishing boat.
A geyser rises from the ocean like the ghost of a white tree.
The men paddle harder. On the TV screens back at the reservation, the hunters� mothers watch the wake of the fishing boat curve sharply, and they cheer as the camera pans up to show the large, faint outline of a grey whale.
On the water they are breathing hard, sometimes glancing at the cruising fishing boat that travels with them. Their hands are freezing beneath their gloves.
It is 1999; this is the tribe�s first whale hunt in three quarters of a century. The men have spoken of the honor they�ve been given, to once again board a cedar canoe and launch into Neah Bay with the aim to kill a grey whale. CNN and NBC and ABC have sent helicopters to hover in the air above them. From the sky the canoe looks small. Their hunt seems impossible and a vanity. Boats speckle Neah Bay like polka dots. Protesters. Law enforcement. The news crews.
The news crews: birds� eye-views.
Sometimes the men feel they are crazy to paddle out into the cold Pacific Ocean with a steel harpoon to kill a whale. Sometimes they think they are crazy not to have tried for so long. They paddle onward because the man in front paddles too. The man at the front paddles because there are six men behind him paddling. They are hunting because their ancestors did, but when they come to shore with a whale�s dead carcass in tow, they are sure they will know what it means to be successful, to be one of the People who Live near the Rocks and Seagulls.
II.
*
The men rise in their huts. Raven watches from the top of the totem pole, and then passes over the horizon with the quiet sinking of the moon. The reflection a rippling twin that sails through the ocean to meet melt into one distant moon before disappearing into day.
One hunter says something like a prayer to himself. He warms his cracked hands by a fire.
The barely bluish hue of the fog and the rising of the sun. The water is placid and cold beneath the thin scrim of moisture in the air. The hunters� mothers do not look at them; they do not bid them luck. The men take paddles to water and stroke stroke stroke. The wounds in their bare hands open again, spilling purple blood into the cedar canoe. The tide is going out and takes them. A seagull caws and watches them from the tip of the rocky peninsula at the north end of the harbor. Father and Son Rock, the treaty will call it. The canoe slices the light fog like seeds of dandelions on the water.
Early morning independence. Times like these and the young men feel they are the only men in the world, while still knowing their ancestors have paddled this very course for generations. They remain honored; if they return this day with a whale, they will go to sleep that night as men, no longer with the prefacing adjective of �young.�
It is the seven of them and a whale and the ocean.
The ocean rushes past their cedar strokes and they take what little access it gives them. With each stroke they are getting closer to the end. After a while they see the white cedar rise from the ocean. Father and Son Rock rises slightly from the horizon, far away. They are alone. They remain silent; they paddle faster. They no longer feel their bleeding hands. Their goal is tangible in real sight, and doubt eliminates itself without effort.
When they return, much later, they are exhausted of their energy; but they are full of joy and a sense of being taller and larger than the past. Behind the canoe they tow an 18-foot gray whale. Hours before they had floated on the open water, sewing up the mouth of a beautiful beast to keep out the ocean it no longer inhabits.
Tears met water and salt on their raw faces.
The hunters took a whale from the sea and gave it their blood and tears, pieces of their skin. One hunter drowns on the journey back. Thrown from the canoe. His hand sinks into the green tumult just out of reach of his brother�s extended paddle.
The ocean is beautiful in the light, and deadly in the night.
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