By Susan Milius
What Martin Nweeia noticed first when he encountered narwhals, he says, was the sound. In May 2000, as spring was just reaching Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, a famed local hunter took Nweeia out on the ice searching the open water for those tusk-bearing, high-Arctic whales. “I was sitting on a bucket out on the ice doing polar bear watch,” he says. At that time of year, daylight lasts around the clock, and at 3 a.m., the gray sky had orange streaks. “The water was like glass, and a light mist was rolling in,” he says. “Then, I heard the breathing.”
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Nweeia soon traced the sound to the dark bodies of at least 10 narwhals that had risen to the surface out in the open water. Their heavy, low-frequency, methodical breaths carried through the night as if “they were breathing in my ear,” Nweeia says. It took considerable discipline, he says, to break the spell of their arrival and wake the hunter to go after them.