Wu Ming-Yi - The Man with the Compound Eyes

It was already late autumn. Amundsen decided to winter in Canada, taking some time out for a trip down the Mississippi. Renting a boat and navigating this river had been a boyhood dream of his, ever since he had seen a cartoon called The Adventures of Tom Sawyer . Tom and Huck, Tom and Huck, Amundsen sang as he steered the boat, feeling himself fortunate to enjoy this kind of nostalgic interlude.

Amundsen returned to Newfoundland in early spring and met up with his whaling buddies to reclaim the repaired boat. A Canadian seaman named Kent invited him to hunt seals in Labrador, his homeland and a major breeding ground for harp seals. Amundsen had hunted seals in Europe, and it was actually not that hard. As an adventure lover, Amundsen was lukewarm about the idea, but could not really refuse Kent’s avid hospitality.

This was the season when pregnant seals congregated on the beach to give birth and nurse their pups. Amundsen and Kent and other hunters moored their boats along a floe and entered “the ice zone” on foot. The floe was dull and gray, making a fellow like Amundsen, who came from a land of ice and snow, feel right at home. The pod of seals was like a class of carefree kids on a field trip, looking around, enjoying the scenery.

On the way to the ice, Kent had filled Amundsen in on some basic seal lore. “Baby seals are called ‘whitecoats’ because they are covered in snow-white fur. Two weeks later when they start developing silver fur they’re ‘ragged-jackets.’ Another nineteen or so days after that, when they’ve entirely molted, they turn into silver-gray ‘beaters.’ Actually, when seal fur was fashionable in Europe, ‘whitecoat’ fur was the kind favored by the rich ladies, but now it’s against the law to hunt whitecoats. The government says we can only hunt the beaters. I just don’t get it! What difference does it make? Either way, it’s still killing a seal!”

“But I don’t have a hunting gun. You’d have to help me borrow one.”

“No problem.”

The weapon Kent handed him the next day wasn’t a gun. It was a special kind of club called a hakapik, about the length of a baseball bat but with a metal hammerhead and hook attachment on the one end.

“How do you use it?” Amundsen asked, doubtfully.

“You bludgeon the seal’s head with it. Bang , it’s dead. A good hunter can kill a seal with a single blow, then skin it,” Kent said. “Let the games begin.”

When the hunting party got close to the ice floe, the alert seals started to bark like crazy and flee en masse into the water. They could not move very fast on the ice, but once they made it into the water they were out of reach, out of range. But the seal pups ran very slowly, and some couldn’t swim too well, either. Some, too scared even to dive in, were soon caught by the hunters. Watching from off to one side, Amundsen discovered that killing a seal with one blow wasn’t easy, even for a big guy like him, mainly because the ice floe was swaying slightly and the seals would try to dodge. Most seals took quite a few hits, screaming and cowering, their heads all bloody, before they stopped resisting, by which time they were either badly injured or out cold. When a seal submitted, the hunter would turn the club the other way around, hook the animal’s neck and drag it over to the boat. The blood would drip down from the end of the club, as if the club itself had suffered a mortal wound.

As the seals could not attack, Amundsen could not bring himself to strike. To him, whaling in the olden days meant risking a life for a life. At least that’s how he and his old-school comrades still hunted whales, out of a conviction that whaling was an important part of Scandinavian culture. This was different: the seals were weak and vulnerable creatures with big eyes and pathetic cries. Amundsen just did not know how to do this. It would be okay if I used a gun, he thought. For the first time in his life Amundsen felt that for the killer to use a different tool changed the meaning of the act.

The seals were skinned right at the boat. One hunter used a razor to slice the skin, starting from the gash on the seal’s head, while another helped him slowly peel off the animal’s skin, just like removing a pair of too-tight jeans. Seal blood kept welling up, flowing onto the ice. Without eyelids, the seals that hadn’t made it off the ice all seemed to be staring at him, glassy-eyed. Amundsen was a man long accustomed to slaughter, but this sight chilled him.

“Why not wait until they’re dead before skinning them?”

“It’s quicker to peel the skin off when they’re alive,” said Kent, sensing the doubt in Amundsen’s tone. “It’s true many hunters don’t check whether the seal’s skull has been shattered. I always make sure the seal is dead, but I don’t blame those who don’t. Too slow, no dough, right?”

Then a seasoned hunter called Alfie caught two male seals, cut off their penises with a knife, but did not skin them.

Amundsen asked, “Who’s buying seal penises?”

“An adult’s fur isn’t worth anything, but its dick is. Asians eat it. They think it’s like Viagra, that if they eat it they’ll have the sex drive of a seal. If seals want someone to blame they should blame those fools who eat seal dicks. Actually, seals don’t have a very good sex drive, at least not compared with me,” Kent quipped.

Amundsen said nothing on the way back. He did not blame Kent or the other hunters or himself. He did not think his faith in whaling was misplaced. He simply sensed he’d gone hollow somewhere inside. Kent saw the qualms, the hurt and the questioning look in Amundsen’s eyes, and the self-reproach he too had once felt returned. He avoided his friend’s eyes and patted him on the shoulder, saying, “Life’s not easy for these hunters. They just scrape by. It’s the middlemen who make all the money. Sealing is the only thing some of these guys can do. It’s all they have. If you don’t let them seal, they’ll starve.”

Something wavered somewhere deep in Amundsen’s heart.

Amundsen went back to Norway several months later. He ate the pickled fish Sara prepared for him. The fish eyes had been gutted, and when Amundsen stared at the eye sockets, the swiveling eyes of those seals, so juvenile, like the eyes of schoolchildren, inadvertently returned. It wasn’t “killing” the seals that had struck him, but the “way” the seals were killed. People had to kill to make a living. Like it or not, that could not change, just like it wasn’t right or wrong for the Inuit people to kill seals for survival. But people weren’t just killing seals for survival anymore, and, more importantly, the hunters clearly had the energy and the ability to check whether the seals were still suffering, but their hearts remained unmoved. It must have taken them long years of training to turn their hearts to stone. Men who had to hunt for food did not have hearts of stone. They were full of gratitude toward the hunted animal, just as the eyes of their womenfolk and children waiting eagerly at home were full of anticipation. But the sealing he had witnessed in Labrador was nothing like that. Everything had changed.

At the dinner table, knife and fork untouched, he related his sealing experience to Sara.

“You don’t think it’s right? Daddy?”

“I don’t know. There are still lots of seals. But there used to be lots of whales, too, and people had no sympathy for them. They saw whales as disposable. Sometimes they killed massive numbers of whales, taking only the thickest strips of blubber and not bothering with the rest. Then there came a day when there were not many whales left in the sea. Lately I’ve started to feel that even if people could never kill the last whale or seal, even if there were always another, we should only take what we need to live and no more.”