I have always liked animals. When I was in graduate school I became involved with the rescue and rehabilitation of injured birds of prey at the Vermont Raptor Center. Before my time there was through I had made it into a nearly full-time job. I placarded my vehicle with signs that said WILDLIFE RESCUE, and was taking as many as three or four calls a week for injured animals, birds and otherwise, from all over Vermont and New Hampshire. God bless long-suffering Dr. Gribble, my graduate advisor who tolerated my little extracurricular activities and still gave me a Ph.D. anyway.

While in grad school I became friends with a lovely young lady named Dawn. We both worked with the birds for a while, although her passion had always been for whales. When she graduated from Dartmouth she took herself away to Memorial University of Newfoundland, which is located in a particularly whale-intensive area of the world, so that she could undertake the study of these remarkable creatures.

One day during the late Spring I got to missing her, so I decided to go and visit. It was my first time in Newfoundland, and I must admit that St. Johns is one of the most remarkably charming towns I have ever seen. I got to stand on Cape Spear. I climbed on the old gun emplacements that protected the harbor in World War II. I saw the spot where the news wireless reports reached land of the Titanic disaster. And I got to learn that the people of Newfoundland have their own distinct language, evolved from that of the oceangoing codfish, that is incomprehensible to any other race or species. I tried hard, but could not make head nor tail of anything that was said to me. If Dawn had not been there to translate for me, I would still be standing on a St. Johns streetcorner trying to explain to someone where I was "to". In fact, the only time that I was able to get the gyst of a conversation unaided was when I witnessed one fishing vessel carelessly ram into the stern of another that was moored at the docks. The captain of the moored vessel ran onto deck and began to pepper his speech with refreshingly familiar words:

"'Ey, buddy! "Ya fookin' fookin' , and ya fookin' fookhead, fookin' fook! Fook ye, Buddy!"

I felt so much more at ease knowing that no matter where one might go in this world, one can always find a universal language being spoken.

Dawn was a member of a research group that was also responsible for whale rescues, and she had told me that I might have the good fortune to take part in one while I was there. Indeed, midway into the visit a call came of a dead humpback whale swimming about in the waters of Mobile Bay. Now, I said "swimming," and I really meant that. It seems that whales are so perfectly hydrodynamic that even when dead, the motion of the water over their bodies causes them to be propelled along at 2-3 knots. Thus, it was going to be necessary to hunt this deceased quarry down; even though it was somewhat beyond rescue, it was important to ecological science to determine what killed it, and if action had to be taken to prevent further such calamities.

So the call came in, and quick as a wink we were on our way to headquarters. Dawn helped me zip into a "survival suit," which they tell me is designed to keep you alive in the frigid waters. Mobile Bay had icebergs in its mouth at the time. Remember Titanic? It was a tremendous comfort knowing that if I was going to die in frigid water, it would be in a bright orange rubber suit rather than in an expensive 1912-vintage smoking jacket. Once into our survival suits, we hopped into a van and sputtered down the coast to the shores of Mobile Bay.

Now, we have all seen Jacques Cousteau tooling around the oceans of the world in a Zodiac, those cute little rubber rafts with outboard motors powerful enough to propel an oil tanker. Don't they look like fun? Skip, skip, skip, bounding ever-so-gracefully over the water...at least, that's what it looks like on TV. In reality you are squatting on a paper-thin sheet of rubber that is slamming repeatedly down onto concrete-hard waves, and the only thing to hold onto as you race along at 127 MPH is an alarmingly slack length of rope that is attached at four points around the rim of the thing. I was terrified. With every bounce it felt like we were going to catch some air and flip over. "Make sure you hang onto the rope tightly," Dawn helpfully advised. I couldn't have let go if you'd taken a saw to my fingers.

"Keep a sharp look out," John, the leader of the group, called out.

"What exactly are we looking for?" I shouted over the engine's roar.

"Something that looks like a whale," he called back. "Only dead."

I don't know how long we cruised the bay. We saw a few spouts of surfacing whales farther out where the icebergs were ("Those aren't dead," John pointed out) and occasionally a puffin would come up and investigate our boat, but our search turned up nothing. It wasn't until we were almost back to shore that we happened upon the poor beast. It was floating belly up, grounded on rocks in some shallows about 100 feet from the shore. It was hardly a moment for celebration, seeing this grand animal in such a sorry state, but we were elated nonetheless that the long search was over. The hard part was behind us now.

Or so I thought.

John maneuvered the Zodiac as close as he could, but the rocks prevented us from getting any closer than six or seven feet. That was close enough, however, for me to experience the exquisite aroma of deceased whale. It is the perfect combination of rotting mammal and rotting fish -- the best of both worlds, one might say. Dawn had given me some Vicks vapor rub to put under my nose in an effort to kill the smell. The whale easily overpowered the menthol, and my poor stomach was having a particularly difficult time staying quiet.

Not as difficult a time, though, as John and the crew were having trying to secure a line to the animal. Since we could not get in very close they had resorted to flinging a nylon rope in an effort to snag a flipper. That might sound like an easy task, and perhaps it would have been if any one of us in the boat had been a cowboy. As it was, we were all marine biologists (and one lone chemist), and not a soul had any talent for lassoing wild animals, even dead ones. Everyone was getting quite frustrated after the ninth or tenth try. It was looking more and more like the whole effort, including the wild stoneskipping ride over the icy water, was going to be in vain.

Now, here is where I need to mention that I have a particularly big mouth. That selfsame mouth has an annoying habit of moving without my brain telling it to. In fact, the mouth is quite often happily engaged in spirited exercise while the brain is preoccupied with plotting world domination or trying to remember where it left the car keys, and the brain is frequently shocked to wake up suddenly and realize that the mouth has been running on without it for God only knows how long.

That was the situation that arose right then on the Zodiac. My brain was contentedly dreaming of how nice and warm it was going to be when we finally gave up this senseless farce and of how nice a good fire would feel with a bit of buttered rum in one hand and a bowl of figgy duff in the other, and was horrified to be handed a dispatch in which it was reported that the mouth had been going off on its own again. In fact, it had just piped up with, "Say! If we could maneuver the boat close enough, I'll bet someone could leap off onto the whale and put a line around its pectoral fin."

At the right you will kindly notice a photograph that was snapped that afternoon from a camera aboard the Zodiac. The angle from which it was taken makes the action look like it is happening much closer to shore than it actually was. The object in the center is of course the aforementioned whale; the orange shape atop it is a human being in a survival suit.

Now click on the picture itself for a closeup shot...