The conversations ultimately led him to hand down new rules to govern hunting female whales with offspring, meant to communicate respect to whales and signal that people were aware of their feelings and needs. In his final years, he discussed what he had witnessed with Christian ministers and Utqiaġvik’s whaling captains. He turned out to be right on all three counts.īrower lived six years after the episode, dying in 1992 at the age of 67. When he awoke in his hospital bed as if from a trance, he knew precisely which man had made the kill, how the whale had died, and whose ice cellar the meat was stored in. He looked at the faces of the men in the umiak, including those of his own sons. There, in the ice-blue underwater world, Brower saw Iñupiat hunters in a sealskin boat closing in on the calf’s mother.īrower felt the shuddering harpoon enter the whale’s body. They traveled together through the town and past the indistinct edge where the tundra gives way to the Arctic Ocean. was lying in a hospital bed in Anchorage, Alaska, close to death, when he was visited by a baby whale.Īlthough Brower’s body remained in Anchorage, the young bowhead took him more than 1,000 kilometers north to Barrow (now Utqiaġvik), where Brower’s family lived. Listen now, download, or subscribe to “Hakai Magazine Audio Edition” through your favorite podcast app. This article is also available in audio format. Stream or download audio For this article ![]() Authored byĪp| 3,100 words, about 16 minutes Share this article Reproduced with the permission of Dorset Fine Arts When Whales and Humans Talk Arctic people have been communicating with cetaceans for centuries-and scientists are finally taking note.
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