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off; probably from having scraped up against the sharp edges of the air hole. It swam with much less authority than the other two whales.
    It seemed like the larger and older whales stayed under longer in order to give the smaller whale more time to breathe. How old was this third whale? Was it a baby … or somewhat older? Geoff and Craig could not immediately tell, but that it was a young one they had no doubt. When the two bigger whales surfaced, they rammed up through the sharp sides of the hole. Whales are many things but self-destructive is not one of them. The whales weren’t purposely trying to hurt themselves; they were trying to expand their shrinking air hole. Their ramming kept slush from turning to ice. Here was more evidence that these whales possessed a keen and sharply developed social intelligence.
    Billy knew a bowhead could break breathing holes in ice up to half a foot thick. These grays had trouble even with soft ice. No wonder it was grays and not their bowhead cousins that drowned under the ice. Each whale took several turns breathing and then dove for about five minutes. Craig dug into his knapsack and probed for his 35-millimeter camera. He had borrowed it from the borough to document the whales. Whatever photos he took would belong to the government. But this was a fantasy performance; he wanted copies of every shot for his photo album.
    For almost an hour, the three men consumed as much sensory imagery as they could absorb. There was nothing they could do to actually help the whales yet since they still couldn’t reach them. All they could do was watch and learn. None of their training and experience prepared them for this. They knew how to study whales. They were paid to help Inuits hunt and kill them. They didn’t know how or even if they could help these whales.
    The whales were tantalizingly close … so close that the men were lured to test the ice. The three men trod upon uncertain ground, which of course was not ground at all, but frozen ocean. Giddy at their unexpected good fortune, they carefully walked out until the ice could hold them no longer. Now they were only fifty feet or so away from the whales. From what little they could see, the hole did not appear much bigger than any of the whale’s head.
    Billy went to his sled to fetch the hollow aluminum pole he used to probe ice. He scampered nimbly back to where Geoff and Craig kneeled at safety’s edge. Billy carefully measured a few paces beyond his companions and pushed the end of his pole deep into the hardened surface. He had to lean quite hard to get the ice to break. Once through, the pole easily probed the slush. Billy knew it would not stay slush for long.
    Craig held the camera under his parka to shelter it from the cold. The brittle film nearly snapped in the sub-zero weather. (The days of digital cameras had yet to arrive.) Learning from the past when he would rip or break the film from winding the spool too roughly, this time he wound deliberately and tenderly. The sun vanished behind a low-lying bank of thick Arctic fog as he waited for the whales to begin their next breathing cycle. He popped open the back of his camera to adjust for the changing light conditions by replacing the film.
    The forecast high for that Tuesday, October 11, was four degrees above zero degrees Fahrenheit, seventeen degrees colder than the average for this time of year. Since it seldom got that cold at that time of year without insulating cloud cover, the men knew they might confront “whiteout,” a dangerous but common Arctic weather condition. The slightest wind can trigger it by whipping the dry, almost weightless snow into the air, blending it so uniformly with the white sky that all else is obscured. Whiteout blinds everything in its midst, but since it usually sticks very low to the ground, the Arctic’s most deadly predator, the polar bear, which on its hind legs can stand up to fourteen feet high,