That Whale with the Harpoon in Its Neck Reminds Us of the Pizzly Bear

When we heard about the bowhead whale what was killed up in Alaska recently with the 150-year-old weapons found in it we had only a slight inclination to look up some weird Seattle shit from a century and a half ago. Turns out that the last time this whale was getting stuck with pointy objects the second-oldest lighthouse in Washington was being built. Whoop-de-doo, an old light.

We have a stronger inclination, though, to wonder what this whale has been up to in the intervening years, and, in fact, every time some remarkable animal is killed/discovered we have similar thoughts. Happened to us also with the Grizzlar Bear; the Griz/Polar Bear mashup that was killed/discovered up in the Northwest Territories last year. No one believed that such a hybrid could occur, but this thing was a full-grown, adult bear. Its parents mated, gestated and he was born. He was a cub, a juvenile and finally an adult living out his bear life way up north and no person had ever seen him to remark on his weirdness. For at least a decade he was just out there doing his thing unseen. He was eating, sleeping, who knows, doing what bears do when they don't realize they're freaks of nature. It seems difficult to believe that this huge freaky animal could exist for so long and never come into contact with a human, but such is life up in the Northwest Territories, apparently. It's remote. This whale, similarly, lived out a life in an environment that's outside the reach of people with their fancy museums and their prying archaeologists. For 150 years he just floated around the ocean, living out his whale life with a harpoon in his neck. At some point he survived a hunt, but what was he doing in, say, 1947? What was he doing in October of 1974? Floating around and doing whale shit, that's what, with no one bothering him about the damn harpoon.

It's nice to be reminded that as of today there's still an "out there" where whales and bears live--freaky genetic mutant whales and bears with ancient relics swimming around in their blubber--unmolested. Of course, for every one of these notables there are presumably a lot more normal bears and whales and whatnot tooling around out there that are born, live their twenty or a hundred and fifty years and die without ever making headlines in Seattle or appearing in HD on Sunday nights. There are also presumably a bunch of freaks out there who will live and die before we can ever know them enough to write blog posts about how weird they were. It's unfortunate that when these freaks come in close for a sniff a Grizzlar gets shot and killed, and a whale gets harpooned, again, and, this time, killed. Better off staying out there.