Dan'l smiled, as though he were pleased. "I thought you meant to lower,"
he said. "You do well to change your mind. Stay aboard here; leave us to
handle him."
Which was like a goad to Noll, as Dan'l must have known it would be. The
captain laughed angrily, and thrust Dan'l aside, and took the mate's own
boat with Roy on the after thwart, and lowered. Faith was anxious; she
found chance to say to Brander, as the other boats were striking the
water: "Look after him, Mr. Brander." And Brander nodded reassuringly.
Dan'l climbed into the rigging to watch the battle; he scarce took his
glass from his eye. What he hoped for, whether he thought chance and the
whale might wipe Noll from his path, only Dan'l knew.
This whale, as it chanced, was sighted at early morning; and this was as
well. A big bull, the creature lay quietly, just awash, while the
captain's boat came upon it from behind. He stirred not at all till Noll
Wing swung hard on the long steering oar and brought them in against
the black side and bellowed to Silva:
"Let go! Let go the irons!"
Silva knew his work as well as any man; and he got both harpoons home to
the hitches, and threw the line clear as the bull leaped bodily forward
and upward, half out of the water, and whirled in a smothering turmoil
of spray and tortured foam to escape the blades that bit him. Noll swung
them out of his way, shouted to Silva:
"Aft, now! Let me be at him, man...."
And Silva came stumbling back across the thwarts to take the steering
oar, while Noll went forward and chose his lance and braced himself in
the bow.
The whale, his first torment dulled, had stopped his struggle and lay
still, swinging slowly around in the water. It was as though he looked
about to discover what it was that had attacked him; and old Tichel--the
other boats were standing by in a half circle about Noll and the
whale--bawled across the water:
"'Ware, sir. He's looking for you."
Noll heard and waved his hand defiantly; and at the same time, the whale
saw Noll's boat and charged it.
The whale, as has been said, would be invulnerable if his wit but
matched his bulk. It does not. Furthermore, the average whale will not
fight at all, but runs; and it is his efforts to escape that blindly
cause the damage, and even the tragedies of the fisheries. But when he
does attack, he attacks almost always in the same way. The sperm whale,
the cachalot, trusts to his jaw; he bites; and his enemy is not the men
in the boat, but the boat itself. Perhaps he cannot see the men; his
eye is small and set far back on either side of his great head.
Certainly, when once a boat is smashed, it is rare for a whale to
deliberately try to destroy the men in the water. The sperm whale tries
to bite; the right whale--it is from him your whalebone comes--strikes
with his vast flukes. He will lie quietly in the water and brush his
flukes back and forth across the surface, feeling for his enemy. If his
flukes touch a floating tub, an oar, a man, they coil up like an
enormous spring, and slap down with a blow that crushes utterly whatever
they may strike. The whalemen have a proverb: "'Ware the sperm whale's
jaw, and the right whale's flukes." And there is more truth than poetry
in that.
When a sperm whale destroys a boat with his flukes, it is probably
accident; but he bites with malice prepense and pernicious. The whale
which Noll had struck set out to catch Noll's boat and smash it in his
jaws.
His very eagerness was, for a long time, his destruction. The whale was
bulky; a full hundred feet long, and accordingly unwieldy. A man on foot
can, if he be sufficiently quick, dodge a bull in an open field; by the
same token, a thirty-foot whaleboat, flat-bottomed, answering like magic
to the very thought of the men who handle her, can dodge a
hundred-barrel bull whale. Noll's boat dodged; the men used their oars
at Noll's command, and Silva in the stern swung her around as on a pivot
with a single sweep. The whale surged past, the water boiling away from
its huge head.
Surged past, and turned to charge again.... This time, as it passed,
Noll touched the creature with his lance, but the prick of it was no
more than the dart in the neck of a fighting bull. It goaded the whale,
and nothing more. He charged with fury; his very fury was their safety.
Noll struck the whale at a little after nine o'clock in the morning. At
noon, the vast beast was still fighting, with no sign of weariness. It
charged back and forth, back and forth; and the men swung the boat out
of his way; and their muscles strained, their teeth ground together, the
sweat poured from them with their efforts. They were intoxicated with
the battle. Noll, in the bow, bellowed and shouted his defiance; the men
yelled at every stroke; they shook their fists at the whale as he raged
past them. And Silva, astern, snatching them again and again from the
jaws of destruction, grinned between tight lips, and plied his oar, and
cried to Noll to strike.
At a little after noon, the whale swung past Noll with such momentum
that he was carried out to the rim of the circle in which the fight was
staged, and saw Tichel's boat there. Any boat was fair game to the
monster; and Tichel had grown careless with watching the breath-taking
struggle. He had forgotten his own peril; he expected the whale to turn
back on Noll again....
It did not; it swung for him, and its jaws sheared through the very
waist of his boat, so that the two halves fell away on either side of
the vast head. The men had time to jump clear; there was no man
hurt--save for the strangling of the salt water--and the whale seemed to
feel himself the victor, for he lay still as though to rest upon his
laurels.
Willis Cox was nearest; he drove his boat that way, and stood in the
bow, with lance in hand to strike. But Noll, hauling up desperately on
the line, bellowed to him: "Let be, Willis. He's mine." And Willis
sheered off.
Then the whale felt the tug of the line, and whirled once more to the
battle. Willis picked up Tichel and his men, towed the halves of the
boat away, back to the ship.... The _Sally_ was standing by, a mile from
the battle. Such whales as this could sink the _Sally_ herself with a
battering blow in the flank. It was dangerous to come too near. Willis
put Tichel and his men aboard, and went back to wait and be ready to
answer any command from Noll.
The fifth hour of the battle was beginning.... The whale was tireless;
and Noll, in the bow of his boat, seemed as untired as the beast he
fought. But his men, even Silva, were wearying behind him. It was this
weariness that presently gave the whale his chance. He charged, and
Silva's thrust on the long oar was a shade too late. The boat slipped
out of reach of the crashing jaws; but the driving flukes caught it and
it was overturned. The gear flew out....
Noll, in the bow, clung to the gunwale for an instant as the boat was
overthrown. Long enough to wrench out the pin that held the line in the
boat's bow. Silva, astern, would have cut; his hatchet was ready. But
Noll shouted: "No, by God! Let be...."
Then they were all in the water, tumbling in the surges thrown back by
the passage of the monster.... And the whale drove by, turned, saw no
boat upon the water, thought victory was come....
Brander, at this time, was a quarter-mile away. When the boat went
over, he yelled to his men: "Pull.... Oh, pull!" And they bent their
stout oars with the first hot tug; fresh men, untired, hungry these
hours past for a chance at the battle. Brander started toward where lay
the capsized boat, the swimming men....
And Noll Wing lifted a commanding arm and beckoned him to make all
speed. Brander urged his men: "Spring hard! Spring.... Hard. Now, on!"
A whaleboat is as speedy as any craft short of a racing shell; and
Brander's men knew their work. They cut across the vision of the loafing
whale; and the beast turned upon this new attacker with undiminished
vigor.
Brander's eyes narrowed as he judged their distance from the drifting
boat; he swerved a little to meet the coming whale head on. The whale
plowed at him; they met fifty yards to one side of the spot where the
boat was floating; and as they met, Brander dodged past the whale's very
jaw, and slid astern of him. Before the whale could turn, he was
alongside the capsized boat, dragging Noll over his own gunwale.
He dragged Noll in; and he saw then that the captain held in his hand a
loop of the line that was fast to the whale. And Brander grinned with
delighted appreciation. Noll straightened, brushed Brander back out of
the way without regarding him, passed the line to the men in Brander's
boat. "Haul in," he roared. "Get that stowed aboard here. By God, we'll
get that whale...."
They worked like mad, coiling the slack line in the waist, while Noll
fitted it into the crotch and pinned it there. The whale was back at
them, by then; they dodged again. And this time, as the creature swung
past, Loum--Brander's boat-steerer--brought them in close against the
monster's flank before dodging out to evade the smashing flukes. In that
instant, Noll saw his chance, and drove home his lance to half its
length.
It was the first fair wound the whale had taken; a wound not fatal, not
even serious. Nevertheless, it seemed to take the fight out of the
beast. He sulked for a moment, then began--for the first time in more
than five hours' fighting--to run.
The line whipped out through the crotch in the bow; the men tailed on to
it, and let it go as slowly as might be, while Loum swung the steering
oar to keep them in the creature's track. Noll, in the bow, was like a
man glorified; his cap was tugged tight about his head; he had flung
away his coat, and his shirt was open half way to the waist. The spray
lashed him; his wet garments clung to his great torso. His right hand
held the lance, point upward, butt in the bottom of the boat; his left
rested on the line that quivered to the tugging of the whale. His knee
was braced on the bow.... A heroic figure, a figure of strength
magnificent, he was like a statue as the whaleboat sliced the waves; and
his lips smiled, and his eyes were keen and grim. The line slipped out
through the burning fingers of the men; the whale raced on.
Abruptly Noll snapped over his shoulder: "Haul in, Mr. Brander," And
Brander, at Noll's back, gave the word to the men; and they began to
take back the line they had given the whale in the beginning. It came in
slowly, stubbornly.... But it came. They drew up on the whale that fled
before them. They drew up till the smashing strokes of the flukes as the
creature swam no more than cleared their bow. Drew up there, and sheered
out under the thrust of Loum's long oar, and still drew on.... They were
abreast of the flukes; they swung in ahead of them.... They slid,
suddenly, against the whale's very side.
The end came with curious abruptness. The whale, at the touch of the
boat against his side, rolled a little away from them so that his belly
was half exposed. The "life" of a whale, that mass of centering blood
vessels which the lance must find, lies low. Noll knew where it lay; and
as the whale thus rolled, he saw his mark.... He drove the lean lance
hard; drove it so hard there was no time to pull it out for a second
thrust. Nor any need. It was snatched from his hands as the whale rolled
back toward them. Loum's oar swung; they loosed line and shot away at a
tangent to the whale's course. And Noll cried exultantly, hands flung
high: "Let me, let me, be. He's done!"
They saw, within a matter of seconds, that he was right. The whale
stopped; he slowly turned; he lay quiet for an instant as though
counting his hurts. The misty white of his spout was reddened by a
crimson tint; it became a crimson flood. It roared out of the spout
hole, driven by the monster's panting breath.... And the whale turned
slowly on his side a little, began to swim.
A tiny trout, hooked through the head and thrown back into the pool,
will sometimes race in desperate circles, battering helplessly against
the bank, the bottom of the pool, the sunken logs.... Thus this
monstrous creature now swam; a circle that centered about the boat where
Noll and the others watched; that tore the water and flung it in on
them. Faster and faster, till it seemed his great heart must burst with
his own labors. And at the end, flung half clear of the water, threw his
vast bulk forward, surged idly ahead, slowly.... Was still.