5thCLASS_97_185_jg:Layout 1 5/3/12 17:46 Page 144


1. What do you know about whales and how they communicate? 2. Read the chapter title and look at the artwork. Predict what will happen in the extract.


Call of the Whales SiobhánParkinson


Tyke goes with his anthropologist father to the remote icy wilderness of the Arctic. He has adventures there, such as joining a whale hunt, and makes new friends including an Inuit called Henry. In this extract Henry has been swept away on an ice floe.


Chapter fourteen: Tyke to the Rescue


I wandered off along what we thought of as the shore, but was really the point where the frozen sea met the watery sea. I was further up the coast, a bit away from the spot where the whale had been landed and the big clean-up operation was going on. I could hear the murmur of work and the occasional shout on the air, but I was pretty much out of actual earshot. All I could see of the villagers, when I looked over my shoulder, was constant movement up and down the icy shoreline as men and boys and girls and women moved about, packing and readying themselves for the homeward journey. In one direction, the ice stretched in a glaring white expanse for miles and miles. It was enough to give you a headache looking at it, there was so much gleaming, retina- stretching white. In the other direction was the indigo expanse of the ocean. Since it was spring and the ice was breaking up, small sections of the icy shore were constantly breaking off and drifting out to sea, so that the surface of the water was dotted with the glittering debris of the break-up, little flat ice islands and odd half-melted lumps of ice like tiny icebergs jostling their way along, bumping off each other, drifting together some times, and then floating off again. Overhead the sky was the bluest blue you can imagine, an icy, terrifying blue, far bluer than the skies you see in hot places, and streaked with feathery white cloud on the horizon. There was so much ice and so much sea, so much white and so much blue, that I thought we’d never find Henry. You could walk for miles on the icy shore, calling his name, and all you’d see would be blue and white and white and blue, broken only by the huge inky shapes of the bow-heads flickering through the sea like giant shadows, making large dark zeppelins under the surface, with an occasional dark shape drifting elephantinely to the surface, its blow erupting through the deep blue water into silvery fountains.


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