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whales did not make a move soon, the ice would harden enough around to really strand them. To complicate matters, he also knew what the whales knew: that if they left this hole, they might not find another. What would happen if they ran out of air before they got back? What if they became disoriented under the ice? The answer to these questions was obvious: They would drown. The gray whales were unlike their cousins, the bowhead whales, who would have had no problem breaking their snouts through the thick slush to breathe. Malik lost count of the number of bowheads he missed over the years as they dove under large ice patches to dodge his harpoons. He was surprised to see how different these gray whales seemed.
    Malik and Roy stood on the beach (or maybe on sea ice near the beach—they couldn’t be sure), waiting for the whales to surface. Sure enough, each one surfaced in its turn every few minutes to breathe. It was their constant surfacing in the same place that kept the ten-by-twenty-foot hole from freezing over. In all his years whaling, Malik never saw anything like this.
    He would have loved to get closer, but this was as far as they could get. The ice was too thick for his boat to get through but not strong enough to support a man’s weight. Unable to do more than watch, the two Eskimos climbed on their ski machines and headed back to Barrow.
    Inuit whalers from the tiny inland village of Nuiqsut, eighty miles southwest of Barrow, learned about the three whales from radio reports broadcast across the region. Several of them gathered at the hamlet’s single telephone (remember, there were no cell phones yet) to call their colleagues up in Barrow. Malik was nonplussed to learn how quickly folks down in Nuiqsut were to harvest the stranded whales. Why shouldn’t they be? The whales were there for the taking. And since the whales were fated to die, why was the ocean bottom more entitled to reap their bounty than the Inuits of Nuiqsut? The “old school” that valued whales not for glory or profit but only for survival was in fact, no school at all. It was myth: the pseudocosmopolitan product of modern environmentalism that aimed to delegitimize the modern by glorifying the past—even if it meant falsifying it.
    When the twentieth century finally got to Barrow, the century was already half over. But the Barrowans quickly made up for lost time. Everything changed … and fast. Most of the change was welcomed, but not all of it. Subsistence whaling was formalized at the very moment whales ceased being a subsistence source. Whales would never again mean the difference between life and death, but instead took on the same meaning the modern world had placed on them since the eighteenth century: commerce. The whales, so central for so long, became a luxury almost overnight. Many Eskimos were apprehensive about how modernization would affect them, but not enough to turn back the clock. The uncertainty of present-day times sure beat the certainty of death by starvation every winter.
    Modernity meant it was now possible to put the soon-to-die whales to good use. Rather than letting them drown, harvesting the whales would inject tens of thousands of dollars into the local economy by providing several hundred people with work for a day or two.
    As Malik and Roy watched the whales gasping for each breath, they knew these whales weren’t trapped where they were found by accident. The very geography that threatened to entomb the whales allowed them to be discovered and, in the end, rescued. The whales were caught among the sand shoals at the very tip of a narrow five-mile-long sandbar marking the northernmost tip of Alaska stretching north–northeast until it slipped into the sea. At its widest point, the Barrow sandspit was a hundred feet across. The far end lay nine miles north of modern Barrow. The fragile earth barrier was all that separated the calmer waters of the Beaufort Sea from the