"Anthony Wall - The Eden Mission (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wall Anthony)

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