Leviathan or The Whale

like carved stone in the grip, an ornate weight out of a cathedral mason’s yard, belonging to the same place as a gargoyle. Little wonder that fairytale unicorns were, and still are, portrayed with a narwhal’s horn.
    It was only in 1685, when Francis Willughby described the narwhal in his
Icthyographia
, that the fraud was exposed. Further evidence came in the shape of the animals themselves, confronting us with their reality. In the 1880s a narwhal swam up the Humber and the Ouse to York, a medieval apparition in the shadow of the minster; a few years later, a beluga was shot in the same waterway, trying to make its way back to the north. In 1949 a pair of female narwhals appeared as far south as Rainham, Essex, and the River Medway in Kent.
    Nowadays, microscopic examination has revealed the real magic of the narwhal’s tusk. Unlike other teeth, its surface has open tubules connected to inner nerves; it is, in effect, a giant sense organ, lined with ten million nerve endings to enable the animal to detect subtle changes in temperature and pressure. This may explain why narwhals raise their tusks above water, as if to sniff the air. Other research indicates that the tusk is not only a sensory probe, but may also be a transmitter or receiver of sound, and even of electricity. Such discoveries exceed the narwhal’s mythical powers. Its legendary spike is no dead bone, but an enervated growth producing ‘tactile sensations’ which ‘might be interpreted as pleasurable’. Males rubbing their tusks together were formerly thought to be duelling over females; clearly, this behaviour has other aspects. So sensitive are these appendages that if broken, the animal suffers such severe pain that, in a remarkably philanthropic gesture, another narwhal will insert the tip of its own tusk in the exposed space, and break off the end to plug the aching gap.
    Given such facts, who could resist a narwhal, with its shadowed damask, shrouded in black and white and grey and brown, monochrome daubs on a painter’s palette? Perversely, it is the animal’s other end that I find most beautiful: its wonderfully ornate flukes, flowing from a central notch in an exuberant sweep to the tips and back in an ogee curve to the tail stock. They may look back to front, but they are made for performance as much as any spoiler on a sports car.
    The reader may guess that I am inordinately fond of the holarctic whales. Like belugas, narwhals also change colour as they age. It is an improbable sequence. They are born light grey, a nursery colour that endears them to their mothers; as they approach maturity, they darken to a purplish black. This then separates into black or dark brown spots, so that young adults resemble leopards or thrushes; in old age these marks recede, revealing the white below, just as the fine hair of an elderly woman turns silvery grey, making them seem wise as well as old.
    This transformation is often thwarted by fishing nets or Inuit harpoons. The narwhal’s blubber is a particular delicacy, and when a harpooned animal is hauled out of the sea, slices are eaten warm from its carcase as
mak taq
–a vitamin-rich fast-food to forestall scurvy. The Inuit carve its tusks into decorative objects, a useless embellishment for a thing of natural beauty. Yet to them, the narwhal is an entirely utilitarian catch: its lance makes fishing rods and its intestines supply the line; its fine oil is burned in moss lamps. In the past, both the narwhal and beluga have furnished soft leather for gloves, pale grey, white or mottled, ready decorated for a dandy’s hands. One Hull company manufactured beluga bootlaces, with a somewhat self-defeating warning on the box, ‘should not be pulled or jerked violently’.
    In the mid-twentieth century, Canada imposed licences for hunting belugas, although native peoples and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were still allowed to kill them ‘for their own domestic use and for feeding their dogs’. Thousands of narwhals and belugas are still hunted every year from small boats or shot at from the ice, a cull in which nature itself is complicit. In winter, the inlets up which the animals swim can freeze over, creating a barrier too wide for them to cross in one breath. The whales are sealed in a blue-green world, one that threatens to become their collective tomb.
    It is a heart-rending notion. At Point Barrow, Alaska, nine hundred belugas were forced to share an ice hole or
savssat
one hundred