"Anthony Wall - The Eden Mission" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wall Anthony)

Three small striped faces grimaced in alarm.

The bullet from the high-powered rifle entered through Ranee's right eye, ploughed on and shattered her brain. She moaned once, then collapsed over the body of the sambur. Suddenly she was devoid of grace and strength, her life switched off like an electric current.

The poacher lowered his gun. A pity to spoil the pelt with a second shot. He'd wait until he was sure the big cat was dead. But not too long--the wardens might catch him. Still, it was worth the risk when a tiger-skin coat could fetch Ј63,000 in a Tokyo shop.

That same day, eight thousand miles away, another armed man was preparing to pursue his quarry. He was perched on a boat's seesawing bow. Cursing the cold, he stared ahead at the sullen blue-black swell of the Southern Ocean. Sooner or later he would spot what he was looking for--a tell-tale spout that signalled the coming battle. Then there would be no time to feel cold, no time to feel at all. Meanwhile he should give thanks that he wasn't on the Antarctic mainland, where the temperature had been known to fall as low as minus 130 degrees Fahrenheit.

Far to starboard an iceberg loomed. Miles long, a hundred feet high, glittering like a gigantic diamond. The man still scanned the horizon. To help him locate his target, the boat had echo-sounders and a look-out up on the masthead, but the man trusted his own eyes and instincts more than anything else.

On a nearby ice-floe thousands of Adelie penguins, like spectators, stood in rows.

A shout came from the look-out. Already the gunner below was manoeuvring the harpoon cannon into position, his attention focused on the slanting jets that rose from the sea half a mile ahead. The whale had just surfaced and was spouting, at fifteen-second intervals, before taking breath for another deep dive.

With engine racing, the catcher boat closed in ... 800 yards, 400, 200. The gunner licked his lips. One good clean shot should do it. He looked down on the enormous wrinkled body, took aim--behind the head--and fired. A loud report was followed by a whine of running rope as the six-foot, 160-pound steel harpoon arrowed through the air at sixty miles an hour. It hit home with terrific force. The tip exploded deep inside the creature, sending out barbs. Threshing its tail flukes, the whale began an ordeal of panic and pain.

The gunner surveyed the red streamers trailing from his tethered victim. It would die soon enough.

But not everyone who witnessed the gory spectacle remained as unmoved as the harpoonist. The medical officer, watching from the factory ship where the carcass would eventually be processed, felt shame and disgust. A sperm whale, he noted, adjusting his binoculars. Officially protected by international agreement. That didn't stop these men. The whole business of whaling sickened him. As a doctor he was trained to save life, not take it, and he sympathised more with the whales than with the whalers whose health he was employed to safeguard.

The medical officer frowned, reflecting on what he knew about whales. Not fish but mammals: air-breathing, warm-blooded, bearing their young live, nourishing them on milk. A sperm whale had the heaviest brain of any animal--six times the weight of a human's. Did this mean high intelligence? Some scientists believed so. Certainly sperm whales were socially responsible creatures. When a calf was born, females would lift it to the surface for its first breath. They would guard the mother from attack during the birth, "baby-sit" the youngster while she went diving for food, even suckle a strange calf. If a whale had a deformed jaw and couldn't catch prey, other whales would feed it.

Peering through his binoculars, the medical officer grimly observed that the harpooned sperm whale kept up its hopeless fight.

What a cruel waste! he thought. Science could learn so much from an amazing mammal like this. How was it able to dive two miles deep and stay under for as many hours? The pressure down there would crush a man beyond all recognition. How did the whale communicate over hundreds of miles? How did it use echoes to find its prey in the ocean gloom, to stun fish, diagnose illness in another whale? Questions--to which the answers could prove invaluable. But instead of learning, men threatened to wipe the species out.

Aboard the catcher boat no such thoughts crossed the gunner's mind. He was busy trying to solve a sixty-foot, sixty-ton problem: a sperm whale that refused to give up. The harpoon had not found the vital spot--the gunner blamed the choppy sea for spoiling his aim--and now the whale was towing the 110 ton boat behind it. Even with the engine reversed, the craft kept moving forward. The gunner got ready to fire a second harpoon.

In the blood-stained water the mammoth beast continued its agonising struggle. He was a mature male, a bull. His slate-blue body bore scars, souvenirs of epic battles with giant squid he had hunted in the dark depths. The biggest of these pink monsters, whose human-like eyes were more than fifteen inches across, weighed 42 tons and measured 66 feet. But even their powerful beaks and ten suckered tentacles were no match for the whale's eight-inch teeth.

The gunner fired the second harpoon.

The whale gave a convulsive shudder. His life was nearly over. A life that had begun thirty years ago as a tiny calf in the sparkling Indian Ocean. At the age of five he had left his mother and joined other young males in a bachelor group. When his blubber thickened, he migrated to colder waters where food was more plentiful. At 25 he became master of a "pod" of twelve cows which remained with their calves in tropical seas.

Although he was dwarfed by the hundred-foot blue whale, could not sing like the sweet-voiced humpback whale--both of which fed on plankton--his sort were the largest of the toothed whales, the same majestic breed as Moby Dick.

Each year he made the long journey back from the Antarctic to mate. But not this year. For three decades, the bull had eluded harpoons. Now he died, spouting thick blood.

The gunner nodded with satisfaction. Soon the vast corpse was winched alongside. Then, swinging slowly, the catcher boat chugged towards the factory ship whose stern gaped open like a mouth to swallow the whale. Once inside, it was hauled up a ramp.

The whale was efficiently disposed of. Its domed head yielded fifteen barrels of spermaceti oil for use in cosmetics; its body, oil for lubricants and leather softening; its belly, ambergris (the residue of squids' beaks) for perfume. Other products would later include crayons, candles, soap, pet food, fertiliser, glue. All these could be obtained from vegetable sources. But as long as unscrupulous people paid, whalers would go on breaking the law.

Sadly, as he saw the mighty animal disappear, the medical officer walked away. Behind him a helicopter lifted off with a swish and swirl of blades. Whale-spotting? He wondered, not for the first time, what was really happening aboard the factory ship. Whaling was bad enough--but he suspected something still more sinister. However, he had learned that it wasn't wise to ask too many questions round here.

In the Antarctic, you could vanish without trace.

Far, far to the north, off the coast of Norway, an oil-tanker crawled through fog. Usually the captain loathed such conditions. But today he was pleased--for the clammy cloud would conceal his activities. Leaning forward on the bridge, he gave orders to wash out the ship's tanks. Within minutes a sticky stinking stream of brown liquid was gurgling into the sea. Even when unloaded, a tanker retains about 2,000 tons of oil at the bottom of its tanks. That sludge has to be removed before a new cargo is taken on. Why pay to have the tanks cleaned in port if you could do it for nothing yourself? The captain's action was irresponsible, illegal and punishable with a heavy fine. But who can arrest an invisible culprit? He blessed the fog as the ship stole away from the scene of the crime.

Hours later a violent storm blew up, clearing the fog. Buffeted by wind, sea-birds sought refuge on the calmest water--which was those patches slicked with oil. Not long after, the first grease-caked casualties started to stagger ashore. Guillemots, gannets, puffins, razor-bills, little auks, kittiwakes. The final death toll would be fifty thousand.