The busyness continued for days. Everywhere you looked, people were packing things and checking things and getting things ready. There was a buzz about the place, and the children were in a state of high excitement. They were too excited even to stare much at me, which is what they usually did.
Then one morning a helicopter landed, right in front of Matulik’s house. It wasn’t the village helicopter. It was a government one, I think, or something official-looking anyway, green with brown markings – not very good camouflage colouring for this blue-and-white landscape.
A man wearing polished city shoes, a suit and a puffy anorak jumped out, his hair standing up like a shocked hedgehog in the whirl of the choppers.
‘Matulik?’ he bellowed, over the roar of the machine.
Matulik came out of the house, his hands clamped to his ears against the noise.
‘Send it away!’ he shouted, taking one hand off his head and gesturing wildly at the helicopter.
The city-dressed man gestured to the pilot, and the helicopter lifted and whippa-chunk, whippa-chunk, whippa-chunked away.
As soon as the noise dropped to a level where people could hear, the city man spoke to Matulik.
‘The whale run this year has been unusually heavy,’ he said, without greeting.
‘Uh-huh?’ said Matulik, his hands on his hips now.
‘The next two villages down the coast have already caught more than their quota.’
‘And?’
‘Well, that means you can’t go whaling this year. You people have already taken more than you’re allowed. Don’t you talk to each other? Can’t you work it out between you?’
Matulik said nothing, just nodded and shook his head, nodded and shook in turn, his mouth twisted in an ungiving grimace.
‘Well?’ said the man.
‘I got a telephone,’ said Matulik in the end.
‘What?’ said the man.
‘You coulda phoned me.’
‘Oh,’ said the man. ‘I didn’t have your number.’
‘How many gallons of fuel you use to come tell me this?’ asked Matulik, waving in the direction the helicopter had gone.
The man didn’t reply. He slid his thinly shod foot along the ice underfoot and said nothing.
‘You don’ seem to me to be too concerned about the environment,’ said Matulik, ‘if you can ride up here in a chopper to tell me a message you coulda telled me by phone.’
‘I told you,’ said the man. ‘I didn’t know you had a phone. I don’t have your number.’
‘Well, next time, why don’ you check the phone book?’ said Matulik, and turned back towards his house.
‘Do I take it that you’ll cancel the hunt from this village?’ called the man.
‘Take what you like,’ said Matulik. ‘And take yourself outta here pretty damn fast.’
He didn’t look back. He walked right into his house again and shut the door.
I didn’t see any of this. I was over the other side of the village working with some of the boyers from the other crews to get our tents ready for the camp. I heard the helicopter, but I thought it was the one the villagers used for checking the ice. It was only when I got back to Matulik’s house for lunch that Dad filled me in on what had happened. He was brimming with excitement.
We sat with Matulik and Matulik’s wife Leah for lunch in their kitchen. It wasn’t as interesting as Turaq’s kitchen – the curtains matched in that boring way – but I liked it anyway. It had a familiar feeling about it, even though we’d only been there a few days.
Matulik was still quivering with rage about the visit from the government man or whoever he was.
‘You people,’ he said to my dad, ‘don’ you got no manners? Comin’ here like that, shouting orders to me.’
‘Well…’ said Dad.
I could see he wanted to assure Matulik it had nothing to do with us, but he didn’t want to say anything that would make things worse.
‘Sorry,’ said Matulik then. ‘I know it’s nothing to do with you. You’re not from the government, right? Or the International Whaling Commission.’
‘We’re not even from the same continent as your government,’ said Dad vehemently.
There was a silence for a while, except for the sound of knives and forks and people chewing quietly.
‘So, what are you going to do?’ Dad asked.
‘Nothing,’ said Matulik.
‘You mean, you won’t go out on the ice?’
‘No, I mean do nothing different.’
‘But the quota. What happens if you exceed the quota?’
‘We don’t exceed the quota. We never do. We agreed to the quota, we think it’s right not to take too many whales – we’ve always known that.
‘But we fix up the quotas between ourselves, see. We don’t need a man in city shoes come in a helicopter to tell us. If the other villages have taken extra whales, they tell the folks at the main whaling centre, a few miles up along the coast, and they fix it so nobody takes any whales in the fall, that’s all. It’s not a spring quota, it’s a year quota. We can even it out over the year, simple. We know how to manage these things.’
‘I see,’ said Dad. ‘Well, that’s good.’
‘You people!’ Matulik said, but he was saying it to himself, almost like a curse.
I didn’t know then about all the conflict there’d been between people like us and people like Matulik, over whaling, over sealing, over trading, over prices for produce, over land. I hadn’t a clue, really.