Leviathan or The Whale

are now used to save them. Alerted to an incident, the
Ibis
reaches the scene as soon as possible; an entangled whale may eventually die from starvation or infection, but more immediately, it can drown. The rescuers use a rigid inflatable boat to approach the animal and attach sea anchors to slow its progress, just as whalers used wooden kegs, and Native Americans attached inflated sealskins to harpooned whales. Wearing an ice hockey mask and a helmet (on which is fixed a video camera to record the event), Stormy attempts to cut the victim free. His equipment may be twenty-first century, but in silhouette he resembles a Victorian harpooneer, only instead of a barbed spear, he wields a long-handled hook to slice through the cat’s cradle of line.
    As Stormy bears witness, an angry whale is a dangerous whale. These are not the equivalent of cetacean cows grazing over verdant oceanic pastures (although they are closely related to ruminants, and have multiple stomachs to digest their food). Rather, they are surprisingly flexible creatures–much more so than other baleen whales, despite being twice as heavy as humpbacks, and positively barrel-shaped compared to the streamlined but largely unbending finbacks–able almost to touch their flukes with their snouts, an act of acrobatics necessary for turning in tight circles when pursuing their minute, ever-shifting prey.
    On his computer, Stormy runs video clips of entanglement scenes. The sheer muscular power of the animal is vividly apparent. Twisting and turning like a gigantic salmon, the whale’s tail thrashes in a manner that brings those nineteenth-century scenes alive. With one flick of the tail, this wilful creature could truly send a boat flying into the air, ‘his very panics…more to be dreaded than his most fearfulness and malicious assaults!’ as Ishmael observes.
    Stormy’s relationship with the right whales is intimate by virtue of such close encounters. He speaks of the prehistoric vision they present, the sun glinting through their baleen. And while he finds the use of the word ‘intelligent’ less than useful in conjunction with animals, he does not hesitate in calling them ‘wicked’, creatures that know their power. The whalers knew this well. Unable, like the sperm whale, to see straight ahead or behind, the right whale could ‘sweep with his tail or flukes from one eye to the other, thus rendering any approach to his body, from abreast, impossible or highly dangerous’.
    After a rescue, Stormy often cannot remember what he has done. He reasons this is because his short-term memory deals only with essential details; only when he watches the playback does he relive the moment. Once, a fishing hook on the line snagged on Stormy’s lifejacket as the animal dived, threatening to take him down too, like Ahab tethered to Moby Dick. Mayo had split-seconds to cut himself free; in the water there would be no escape as the momentum dragged back his arm, making it impossible to use his knife.
    …And were the whale then to run the line out to the end in a single, smoking minute as he sometimes does, he would not stop there, for the doomed boat would infallibly be dragged down after him into the profundity of the sea…
    The Line,
Moby-Dick

    On his computer, Stormy’s colleague, Scott Landry, shows me other images of entanglement: animals with nylon line cutting so deep that the flesh has begun to grow over it, even as it weeps and bleeds; whale lice or cyamids colonize these weakened areas, signs of an ailing animal. It is upsetting to see sleek bodies turning ghostly grey, sapped by the cords that bind them. Byproducts of global endeavour rather than subjects of it as they once were, they must have sinned mightily to be so ill rewarded by fate. A last picture shows a dead whale on a beach, livid and pink, visibly diminishing as a recognizable creature, although its eye still stares and weeps.
    We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals…We patronise them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animals shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of