Anchorage Daily News

Stand on the western bluff of downtown Anchorage facing west (say, just beneath the bronze statue of English explorer Capt. James Cook, who's also facing west), and what do you see?

Mud flats and ocean? Mountains and sky?

Alaska author Nancy Lord can stand in the same general area and picture a whole world of missing belugas.

Like the great pods of the 16-foot white whales that fed on salmon for thousands of years at the mouth of the Beluga River, on the far shore of Cook Inlet due west of Anchorage.

Or just south of there, the belugas that used to swim past the village of Tyonek, where for centuries Dena'ina Indians stood on makeshift platforms in the shallows to spear the whales for meat and hide, oil and bone.

Or farther south still, the countless belugas that she and her partner, Ken Castner, used to see near their salmon setnet site at the West Foreland.

For Lord, that's where the mystery of the Cook Inlet whales began. It's also where the curtain rises on her latest nonfiction book, a literary-science whodunit called "Beluga Days."

Sometime in the mid-1990s, Lord says, she and Castner began noticing that fewer whales were visiting their fish camp each summer. Belugas used to travel past by the score -- just as a pod of about a hundred did in the summer of '92 -- but then there were years when she didn't see any.

It wasn't as if Lord was some kind of panicky whale lover jumping to dire conclusions.

"I killed fish for a living," she writes in the prologue to "Beluga Days." "I was not generally given to sentiment, didn't gush over animals, had no desire to pat whales on their heads."

Still, she liked the belugas, Lord says. She didn't mind competing with them for salmon. She enjoyed living "in a time and place that sustained fish, whales and fisherman -- all of us together." And now she wondered just why they were missing.

ISOLATED POPULATION

What Lord didn't know at first was just how extraordinary the belugas in Cook Inlet actually were. Marine biologists who study them now know they're genetically distinct -- as well as geographically isolated by the Alaska Peninsula -- from all the other belugas on Earth. Scientists think they've been on their own for 10,000 years.

The circumpolar population of belugas isn't endangered. There are about 100,000 of them in northern, mostly Arctic waters worldwide. About 60,000 of them spend their winters in the Bering Sea.

Until recently, exactly where Cook Inlet belugas spent their winters -- or how many there were -- was anyone's guess. Old newspaper and magazine stories and the old-timers Lord interviewed for her book recall a time in the early 20th century when there were many "thousands" of belugas in the upper Inlet.

A commercial whaler named Joseph McGill began harvesting them in 1915, the year Anchorage was founded. A year later, he incorporated the Beluga Whaling Co., which operated at the Beluga River about 35 miles west of town. His method of capturing the whales was deadly and efficient, Lord writes.

Using heavy cotton seine twine, McGill devised a 1,550-foot net, more than five football fields long, to span the entire river at its mouth. As the tide rose and salmon began swimming upstream -- followed closely by belugas feeding on the salmon -- the net lay on the bottom of the river beyond detection. After the whales had passed, McGill would fire up a compressor onshore that pumped air into a hose that ran the length of the net's "cork line," which caused the top of the net to float to the surface, cutting off the whales' escape like a great curtain. Then keg buoys were attached to the net to help it stay afloat under the pummeling of the belugas in retreat. And so they were caught.

"As the tide fell," Lord writes, "the whales were driven to strand and then shot. When the tide rose again, they were towed up the river to the rendering plant."

From 1918 to 1920, McGill harvested 196 belugas, partly for their oil but especially for their hides, from which fine gloves were made. His original firm went bankrupt, but J.A. McGill & Co. rose in its place. At the end of the 1920 season, McGill announced in a press conference that he planned to expand the operation to three rivers in the Anchorage area, harvesting up to a thousand belugas a year. But there is no indication he ever did so, according to Lord's research. Subsequent press accounts referred to McGill as a canner, fish packer and trap owner. In 1929 he committed suicide.

In any event, the whales prevailed. By the 1960s, there were still rough estimates of "thousands of belugas" in Cook Inlet. Shooting them had even become a local sport, one officially endorsed by the Beluga Whale Hunt Club, based in Kenai. The group was most visible during a summer festival known as Kenai Days, during which members paraded a dead whale through town, then ground it up into patties to grill "beluga burgers" for picnicking families.

Ken Tapp, one of the club's original hunting guides (who now lives in Oklahoma), told Lord that soldiers he took out got too seasick to hunt whales, and some of the "sport hunters" were terrible shots. On one outing, a party fired 250 rounds of ammunition and ended up with zero belugas.

The whaling club never really amounted to anything, Tapp says, and he only shot 25 to 30 belugas himself. But it wasn't for want of enough whales to shoot at.

"There were thousands of those doggone things," Tapp told Lord. "I've seen it look like whitecaps. There were tens of thousands. They were as thick as snow geese on the flats."

A few years later, the future of the Cook Inlet belugas seemed fairly secure. The passage of the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act prohibited the killing of all whales, polar bears, walruses, seals, sea otters and any other marine mammals in U.S. waters by anyone except Native Alaskans, who could only harvest them for traditional use.

About the same time, Nancy Lord -- then attending Hampshire College in western Massachusetts -- decided to move to Alaska. She and Castner settled in Homer in 1973. In the years since, Lord, now 51, has worked seasonally in several occupations: as a legislative aide in Juneau, a fisherman in the Inlet, a teacher of creative writing in the Kachemak Bay and Anchorage campuses of the University of Alaska Anchorage.

She also has established herself as one of the most respected authors in the state, with six books to her credit, ranging from fiction (including three collections of short stories) to memoir (two books of personal and historical essays, including "Fishcamp: Life on an Alaskan Shore," 1997) to her most recent foray into personal journalism with "Beluga Days."

She spent about five years researching, reporting and writing her whale book, Lord says.

"My bottom line was always that everything was factual," she says. "I wanted to get the science right and the cultural stuff right ... and then do the best I could on the creative side, just in terms of using language well and trying to create scenes."

An example might be found in the book's prologue, titled "Watching," in which Lord recalls that summer of '92 when she was in the midst of some fish-camp task on the beach at West Foreland and suddenly heard the "sound of something breathing" in the sea. It was the exhalation of a whale, in the company of many more.

"As far as I could see, a long stream of belugas was proceeding north with the tide, looking like a sudden swatch of white-water along the shore," she writes. "The closest ones weren't 30 feet offshore, and they couldn't have been in much more water than would cover them. They must have been nearly brushing bottom as they passed. ...

"My eyes swept the line of them, dozens at a time showing some slice of brilliant white skin. Up and under and up again: The belugas, trooplike, were rolling forward at a steady, traveling pace. In any snapshot of time, I was catching sight of only a fraction -- a fourth? A fifth? ... The whole pod had to number well over one hundred."

DECLINING NUMBERS

As Lord would later learn, counting matters when it comes to beluga whales in Cook Inlet. A 1979 aerial survey by the University of Alaska placed the population at almost 1,300, though several key areas where belugas are found today, Lord says, were excluded from that count.

A 1994 count by the National Marine Fisheries Service, despite being more comprehensive, spotted only 281 whales throughout the Inlet. Factoring in the likely number that were underwater and uncounted during the aerial survey, the agency estimated the likely presence of 653 belugas. But either way, the new numbers suggested a drastic decline.

The count happened to be taken the same year that the Daily News published an extensive front-page article about Native hunters who harvest belugas in Cook Inlet. Only a few local Dena'ina Indians still participated in the harvest, the story said, but in recent years they'd been joined by two or three dozen Inupiat whalers from northern Alaska, including some who lived in the Anchorage area and some who visited seasonally. There was no government record of how many whales they actually harvested each year or how many additional whales they struck and lost. But participants estimated that about 30 families of Native Alaskans killed 15 to 30 Cook Inlet belugas in 1994.

After the story appeared -- over the next few years -- the numbers of hunters and whales harvested grew substantially. In 1998, an estimated 88 Cook Inlet belugas were killed by Native hunters. That same year, a new aerial survey by the National Marine Fisheries Service located only 184 belugas, from which the agency extrapolated a likely population of just 347 whales, about half as many as four years earlier.

Lord had begun attending beluga management meetings as early as 1994. With the revised numbers in 1998, she began attending them in earnest. Some Native leaders by then were calling for a moratorium on Cook Inlet whaling. Others refused to believe there was really a problem. Through it all, Lord says, the staff of the National Marine Fisheries Service continued to build an overwhelming case for listing Cook Inlet belugas as an endangered species. But the agency's policy-makers, perhaps wary of the political impact that protective status might have on oil drilling or commercial fishing in the Inlet, seemed reluctant to take any action.

"The National Marine Fisheries Service moved glacially," Lord writes in a chapter titled "The Whale in the Room." "To list or not to list. That was the question. Its people announced that they didn't want to be heavy-handed."

Ultimately, the hunters themselves acted. At a meeting leading up to the 1999 season, the Native whalers present promised to "stand down" and not hunt Cook Inlet belugas that year. Then, in a rider to a Senate appropriations bill, Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens inserted language to prohibit the hunting of Cook Inlet belugas for two years, absent an explicit agreement on a whale harvesting quota between the NMFS and "affected Alaskan Native organizations."

The 1999 whaling season came and went without any reports of hunters violating the ban.

"I felt as though I spent the summer holding my breath," Lord says. "My sympathies were everywhere. Everywhere except with whomever -- maybe the system itself -- was responsible for the dithering that had led to, and perhaps past, the 11th hour. I couldn't see that there was much choice anymore short of an endangered species listing and a longer-than-my-lifetime recovery period."

The following summer, however, the National Marine Fisheries Service ruled that the Cook Inlet belugas were not endangered, just "depleted." The finding prompted a lawsuit by a coalition of environmental groups and Native activist Joel Blatchford, a former Cook Inlet whale hunter, who argued that the belugas definitely were endangered and that NMFS was not doing its job. A judge, however, dismissed their case.

All of which merely launches the story Lord has to tell in "Beluga Days."

THE HUMAN STORY

In the balance of her book, she tracks marine biologists who track the whales. She visits Native hunters in Tyonek and Point Lay, a village on the Chukchi Sea highly dependent on belugas. She travels to the St. Lawrence River in eastern Canada, where environmental pollution has harmed a similarly small and isolated beluga population. She considers several other factors -- including global warming, oil exploration and the doubling of Alaska's population since she arrived -- that might also influence beluga habitat and health.

She learns more about belugas: their facility for "singing"; their heightened sense of echolocation, which helps them find salmon even in muddy tidal basins; their tendency to seek refuge in shallows, like the alluvial shoreline of Cook Inlet, when killer whales are near.

And her story -- the decline of Cook Inlet belugas -- continues. In 2003, as Lord's book went to press, the National Marine Fisheries Service announced that its survey the previous summer showed that the estimated population had fallen to an all-time low of 313 belugas. Last summer, an aerial survey spotted only 174 whales, the lowest number yet. (A revised total population estimate won't be available until early next year.)

In the end, however, "Beluga Days" is as much a human story as a narrative of a species on the brink, as witnessed by Lord's portrait of the Hayden family, which used to fish for salmon on the west side of Cook Inlet and sometimes hunted belugas.

One day in the 1960s (when non-Natives could still catch whales), George Hayden and his son Buck heard that an amusement park in the Lower 48 was in the market for a live beluga. They decided to try to catch one -- and did, Buck Hayden told Lord, who interviewed him by telephone at his current home in California.

They captured a 6-foot beluga calf in a net. They decided it could survive without its mother, so they rolled it into their dory and began motoring back to camp. But somewhere along the way, Buck says, he began to have misgivings.

"We were bringing him home, and I was wetting him down -- but I just couldn't do it," he said. "It was one thing hunting them for sport, but this going in there and capturing this young whale away from his mother -- I just couldn't do it.

"I told Dad to shut down the motors, that we were going to put him over. He never said a word. I've always been grateful to him for not arguing with me. ... Maybe he was feeling a little bit like I was, too -- that we'd crossed a line. I know that sounds funny, that we could shoot the mothers without batting an eye, but that we couldn't do -- stealing the baby."

Now he realizes that those days of a younger, more innocent Cook Inlet are long gone, along with the luxury of living without restrictions. Alaska needs rules nowadays, Buck says. So do the belugas.

"The idea of them becoming extinct never occurred to us," he told Lord. "We were the only ones shooting them -- there were thousands. Sometimes you could see them from one horizon to the other, coming up the Inlet."

Daily News reporter George Bryson can be reached at gbryson@adn.com.