didn’t want the whale to get away, but finally the barnacle-encrusted fluke severed it for him. The boat returned to shore, and Ollivierre walked up the beach unassisted, his tibia showing and his foot as heavy as cement. Two men on the beach fainted at the sight.
There is no such thing as an uneventful whale hunt; by definition it’s either a disaster or almost one. As soon as the harpoon is fast in the whale, the crew drops the mast and Dan tightens up on the loggerhead to force the whale to tow the boat through the water, foredeck awash, men crammed into the stern, a twenty-knot wake spreading out behind. Too much speed and the boat will go under; too much slack and the whale will run out the line. (There is one account of a blue whale that towed a ninety-foot twin-screw chaser boat, its engines going full bore astern, for fifty miles before tiring.) Every time the whale lets up, the crewmen put their hands on the line and start hauling it back in. The idea is to get close enough for Ollivierre to use either a hand lance or a forty-five-pound bomb gun, whose design dates back to the 1870s. It fires a shotgun shell screwed to a six-inch brass tube filled with powder that’s ignited by a ten-second fuse. Ollivierre packs his own explosives and uses them with tremendous discretion.
The alternative to the gun is a light lance with a rounded head that doesn’t catch inside the whale; standing in the bow, Ollivierre thrusts again and again until he finds the heart. “De whole thing is dangerous, but de going in and de killing of it is de most dangerous,” he says. He’s been known to leap onto the back of the whale and sit with his legs wrapped around the harpoon, stabbing. Sometimes the whale sounds, and Ollivierre goes down with it; if it goes too deep, he lets go and the crew pulls him back to the boat. When his lance has found the heart, dark arterial blood spouts out the blowhole. The huge animal stops thrashing, and its long white flippers splay outward. Two men go over the side with a rope and tie up the mouth; otherwise water will fill the innards and the whale will sink.
As dangerous as it is, only one Bequian has ever lost his life in a whaleboat: a harpooner named Dixon Durham, who was beheaded by a whale’s flukes in 1885. So cleanly was he slapped from the boat that no one else on board was even touched. The closest Ollivierre has come to being Bequia’s second statistic was in 1992, when the line caught on a midship thwart and pulled his boat under. He and his crew were miles from Bequia, and no one was following them; Ollivierre knew that without the boat, they would all drown. He grabbed the bow and was carried down into the quiet green depths. Equipment was rising up all around him: oars, ropes, wooden tubs. He hung on to the bow and clawed desperately for the knife at his belt. By some miracle the rope broke, and the whole mess—boat, harpoons, and harpooner—floated back up into the world.
Ollivierre found his VHF radio floating among the wreckage and called for help. Several days later, some fishermen in Guyana heard a terrible slapping on the mudflats outside their village and went to investigate. They found Ollivierre’s whale stranded on the beach, beating the world with her flippers as she died.
The next day, Ollivierre, Hazell, and Corea are back up at the lookout, keeping an eye on the sea. Corea, who was partially crippled by an ocean wave at age nineteen, is one of the last of the old whalers. Hazell is the future of Bequia whaling, if there is such a thing. They sit on the hilltop all morning without seeing a sign. No one knows where the whales are. A late migration? A different route? Are there just no more whales?
After a couple of hours Ollivierre is ready to call it quits for the day. If the others see a spout, they can just run over to his house and tell him. More than anything he just seems weary; he’s whaled for thirty-seven years and fished up until a few years ago. Enough is enough. He says good-bye and walks slowly down the hill. Corea watches him go and scours the channel one more time.
Hazell squats on a rock in the shade with half his life still ahead of him. He is neither old nor young, a man caught between worlds, between generations. Down the hill is a scarred old man who’s trying to teach him everything he knows; across the ocean is a council of nations playing tug-of-war with a twenty-seven-foot sailboat. Hazell would try to reconcile the two, if it were possible, but it’s not. And so he’s left with one simple task: to visualize what it will be like to face his first whale.
A long winter swell will be running. The sunlight will catch the spray like diamonds. He’ll be in the bow with his thigh against the foredeck and the harpoon held high. The past and the future will fall away, until there are no politics, no boycotts, no journalists. There will be just one man with an ancient weapon and his heart in his throat.
ESCAPE FROM KASHMIR
The guerrillas appeared on the ridgeline shortly before dusk and walked down the bare hillside into the Americans’ camp without bothering to unsling their guns. They were lean and dark and had everything they needed on their persons: horse blankets over their shoulders; ammunition belts across their chests; old tennis shoes on their feet. Most of them were very young, but one was at least thirty and hard-looking around the eyes—“a killer,” one witness said. Jane Schelly, a schoolteacher from Spokane, Washington, watched them come.
“There were ten or twelve of them,” she says, “and they were dressed to move. They didn’t point their guns or anything; they just told us to sit down. Our guides told us they were looking for Israelis.”
Schelly and her husband, Donald Hutchings, were experienced trekkers in their early forties who took a month every summer to travel somewhere in the world: the Tatra Mountains in Slovakia; the Annapurna Massif; Bolivia. Hutchings, a neuropsychologist, was a skilled technical climber who had led expeditions in Alaska and the Cascade Range. He knew about altitude sickness, he knew about ropes, and he was completely at ease on rock and in snow. The couple had considered climbing farther east, in Nepal, but had set their sights instead on the Zanskar Mountains in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. For centuries, British colonists and Indian royalty had traveled to the region to escape the summer heat, and over the past twenty years it had become a mecca for Western trekkers who didn’t want to test themselves in the higher areas of the Himalayas. It is a staggeringly beautiful land of pine forests and glaciers and—since an Indian government massacre of thirty or forty protesters in its capital, Srinagar, in 1990—simmering civil war.
The conflict had decimated tourism, but by 1995 Indian officials in Delhi had begun reassuring Westerners that the high country and parts of Srinagar were safe, so in June of that year Schelly and Hutchings headed up there with only the vaguest misgivings. Even the State Department, which issues warnings about dangerous places (and had Kashmir on the list at the time), will admit that Americans visiting such places are far more likely to die in a car accident than as a result of a terrorist attack. The couple hired two native guides and two ponymen (and their horses) and trekked up into the Zanskar Mountains. After ten days, on July 4, they were camped in the Lidder Valley, at eight thousand feet.
The militants, heads wrapped in scarves, secured Schelly and Hutchings’s camp, rounded up a Japanese man and a pair of Swiss women who were camped nearby, and then left all of them under guard while the rest of the band hiked farther up the Lidder. A mile and a quarter away was a large meadow—the Yellowstone of Kashmir, as Schelly put it—that was guaranteed to yield a bonanza of Western trekkers. Sure enough, the militants returned to the lower camp two hours later with a forty-two-year-old American named John Childs, his native guide, and two Englishmen, Keith Mangan and Paul Wells. Childs, separated with two daughters, was traveling without his family.
The leader of the militant group, Schelly would learn later, was Abdul Hamid Turki, a seasoned guerrilla who had fought the Russians in Afghanistan and was now a field commander for a Pakistan-based separatist group called Harkat-ul Ansar. He ordered all the hostages to sit down at the entrance to one tent. Childs, nervous, looked down at the ground, trying to avoid eye contact with anyone. He was already convinced that the guerrillas were going to kill him, and he was looking for a chance to escape. A cold rain started to fall, and Turki asked for all their passports. The documents were collected, the militants attempted to read the papers upside down, and then they declared that all the Western men would have to come with them to talk to their senior commander. That was a three-hour walk away, in the village of Aru; they would be detained overnight and released in the morning, said the militants. Schelly was to walk to the upper camp with one of her guides.
“After I left, the men [were told] to lie down and pull their jackets over their heads, and that if they looked up, they’d be shot,” says Schelly, who learned these details later from Child’s guide. “The [kidnappers] went through the tents, stealing stuff. And then they took the guys off. By ten o’clock I’d gone to the upper camp and
