Big Miracle Read Online Free Page A

got a phone call from someone in the village of Nuiqsut, a tiny inland Eskimo settlement eighty miles south of Barrow. The Eskimos of Nuiqsut survived by roaming the frozen tundra in search of land animals. Nobody from Nuiqsut would have had a clue what to do with a whale had one managed to flop its way across eighty miles of tundra to their front door. Whaling was as alien to Nuiqsut as tarpon fishing was to Barrowans. At least it was before the IWC.
    The Nuiqsut caller asked Roy if he could help hunt for any of the three whales allotted to the village’s quota. If Roy got lucky, he and his crew could make a tidy profit partnering with Nuiqsut to sell those whales on the international market. One whale could fetch $50,000 in 1988, if not more. That was plenty enough to interest Roy Ahmaogak.
    Over the next few days the weather took a nasty turn toward winter. Temperatures plummeted to twenty degrees below zero. Strong winds pushed the massive polar ice pack south on its annual surge toward the Barrow coast. Each day saw new ice that was forming around the shore expand farther out to sea. In the next few weeks, the new ice would stretch for miles covering the surface of the Chukchi Sea, eventually the constantly expanding and contracting polar ice pack. When the two met, the new shoreside ice would be consumed by and subsumed into the floating pack, perhaps never again to melt.
    As large as Australia in winter, the polar ice pack is thought to be the biggest single piece of ice in our solar system. For millions of years, the polar ice pack has floated frozen across the top of the world thousands of feet thick. For nine months of the year, it stretches across 3,000 miles of sea from Alaska to Norway. In summer, the circumference of the pack shrinks as its outer edges melt away. Every year, gigantic icebergs the size of Rhode Island break off and float freely in the icy Arctic Ocean until reconnected to the encroaching pack during the next change of season. During July and early August, the last of the snow and ice melt away from Barrow’s beaches. By the beginning of October, summer in the Arctic is only a memory.
    Winter was back.
    Roy told the caller from Nuiqsut he would look, but was not optimistic. It was too late in the year, he said. Surely, by now, all the whales would have left the area on their way south for winter breeding and birthing. Nonetheless, Roy Ahmaogak spent a good part of Friday, October 7, 1988, riding his ski machine up and down the coast around Point Barrow on the lookout for any signs of straggler whales. Daylight hours and temperatures were both fading fast. By the time he ended his search, the temperature had dropped to twenty-five degrees below zero. Roy turned his ski machine around and started back to Barrow across the eighteen miles of glassy-smooth Arctic Ocean ice, convinced there were no whales to be found.
    But as he passed the long sandbar north of Point Barrow on his ride back to town, he drove right past the stranded whales just after they had surfaced for air. Roy excitedly jumped off his ski machine, hoping to find bowheads. Instead, when they popped back up he saw they were California grays. They weren’t flocking anymore. Now, trapped under a growing ice patch, they appeared in full panic. Since the thin ice around the whales was too weak to support his weight Roy could not get any closer to them. Still, he was plenty close enough to clearly make them out. It appeared as if the whales were clinging to an air hole barely big enough to fit their heads through.
    It looked like their game was up. As soon as that hole froze over, which wouldn’t be long, the whales would drown. As much as Roy might have wanted to help, he knew there was nothing anybody could, or perhaps even should do, to help these now helpless giants. This was nature. Who knew how many whales died every year after failing to escape the icy Arctic waters in time? The carcasses of decayed whales that washed