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snatches, preparing himself for a dash to freedom. The circle of light was after all loose and some distance away. Here came the first ship, hard for him.
    The whale dived with a flash of his tail in the air. Above and behind him a harpoon gun went off in the water. He swam straight on under and beyond the ring, but the weights hurt him, and finally he had to come up, had to exhale, marking his position, he knew.
    And the ships came on quite fast, circling him easily, as if he had covered no distance at all. He would fight. The wind blew hard and cold, and the ships bobbed as they came cautiously toward him. The whale could actually see a harpoon gun swing on one ship, and he dived at once and headed for this vessel. Just at the point of ramming—which the whale would not have done because the ship had a metal hull—the whale swerved left.
    Alongside and behind him the weights followed, and one struck the whaler’s side below the surface.
    A gun-fired harpoon sped through the water above the whale’s back, and exploded a few seconds later. The whale rose briefly, seeking a gap through which to escape, but the ships were even closer together. The whale impulsively charged a ship’s side, and at the last moment dived under it. There followed another subaqueous boom that wounded a fin of the whale’s tail. In fact, the whale began to bleed from this and badly. The sudden pain made the whale veer left, back into the deadly circle. By accident, a mine among those on the whale’s left side struck a keel at its exact center, and tore a hole.
    The men on the ships screamed and shouted like mad things. Harpoon guns went off as if fired at random. Two Russian and two Japanese ships were now sinking. The men only half understood one another, but their goal was in common, or had been, to kill the whale. But some commanding officers were now ready to halt the chase in favor of getting out lifeboats and saving their men by transferring them to vessels still afloat.
    One man on a Russian ship saw the dread swath of ripples heading directly for his ship and cried out.
    The whale was aiming with a painful slowness for the Russian vessel, dived under its hull, and one, maybe two explosions followed as soon as the whale had cleared the other side. This tipped the Russian whaler almost on its beam end, causing a harpoon gun to miss its aim, and the harpoon pierced the breast of a Japanese captain who stood boldly on his tossing deck thirty meters away. The distracted Russian sailor started the winch, and the remains of the Japanese captain were dragged overboard and hauled toward the Russian vessel which was beginning to sink.
    “There’s two whales!” yelled a man in Russian.
    “No! NO! ” came a shrill Japanese voice in Russian. “Look! There he is again!”
    A mine exploded.
    As if in retaliation, harpoon guns went off, but they were as likely to hit a man in the water as they were the threshing whale, who had lost his sense of direction, even his picture of the ring now.
    The whale charged anywhere. The mines attached to him were still exploding, wherever he struck.
    Then a harpoon hit the whale. Internally he burst, and he began to writhe in pain and death, inhaling water.
    The winch on the vessel which had fired that harpoon began to turn, dragging the dying whale’s body closer. The impact of the mortally wounded whale against the ship’s side made hardly a thump, the happy sailor’s shouts of triumph rose, then came a terrible boom ! The handsome brass rail around the gunwale, pride of the Japanese captain, cracked before the eyes of the sailor at the winch, then the deck broke and came up to hit him in the face. Seconds later he slid into the cold sea.
    There was nothing of the whale to capture, even to salvage. His tail had been blown off, his vitals scattered by a second harpoon gun. His heavy head had parted from his spinal column, the great head, so full of sperm oil that had been the most valuable part of a whale