Old Man and the Sea

It was a lot of meat. I had stopped by the gate leading down to the pier to look at the large plastic bags, about ten of them, filled with dark red meat and pale bones. I assumed someone was returning from their last reindeer hunt of the season. But something didn’t quite look right. The ribs seemed somehow wrong. The blood was such a deep red. The meat was too dark, and there was just so much of it. As I stood and pondered, a tall, unshaven fisherman heaved another two bags up the wooden gangway from the pier. There was a spring in his step and he smiled as he passed me and dropped the heavy bags next to the others, returning again back down to the pier. I narrowed my eyes, looking at these last two bags. There was a smooth black skin on the meat, rimmed by an inner layer of thick white fat. It was whale.

When he next returned from his boat, he was dragging a heavy plastic fishing box by a rope. It was filled with more meat. He smiled again.

“What kind of whale is it?” I asked.

“Minke,” he replied, and grinned. “Ten metres long. I fought it all night, out in the open water, past the islands.”

Minke whales don’t often reach ten metres. It was a big one. I looked down at his small open boat, dark blood frozen in a thick pool on its floor. The boat couldn’t have been more than five metres long. Standing here, in the winter morning sun, it was perhaps a couple of degrees below zero. Out there in the black night on the open ocean, weaving between icy bergs and plates of frozen sea in that small boat, a dying beast thrashing in the dark water, it must have been bitterly cold. And he had caught it, fought it, killed it, butchered it, and brought it in, alone.

Ernest Hemmingway’s Old Man and the Sea had nothing on this guy.