Mighty Mystery

THE YEAR OF THE WHALE by Victor B. Scheffer. 213 pages. Scribner. $6.95.

When the Psalmist sang "O Lord, how manifold are thy works!" (104:24], he saved for his climactic example the whale--nature's piece de resistance and everybody's favorite metaphor. But the whale, alas, is referred to more often than studied. A century ago, Herman Melville could say of the sperm whale, "His is an unwritten life." Then he proceeded to write it, of course.

What Moby Dick did not reveal, The Year of the Whale does--and on terms that can stand the comparison. Victor B. Scheffer is a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, but his facts tick off the tongue of a poet. The result is a brilliant and affectionate one-mammal bestiary.

Question of Sex. The sperm whale is a saga of the awesome statistic. Dr. Scheffer begins the year in "a quiet month in autumn in the northeastern Pacific," with his calf whale backing into the world tail first--14 feet long, weighing a ton, ready to swim. Nursing for two years on mother's milk, the little leviathan will gain seven pounds a day. Sexual maturity will arrive at the age of nine, but he will not reach full growth until he is 30 to 45. Then he may be as much as 60 feet long and 60 tons in weight. He will be able to cruise at six knots; in a panic he can do 20. When he is hungry, he will dive for as long as 1 1/4 hours at a time, eat up to two tons of whatever seafood is available every 24 hours.

But behind all these gigantic dimensions lies an immeasurable mystery. Why, for instance, does a Moby Dick attack a ship? Perhaps because the bull whale sees it as a "ship-animal," a sexual rival for his cows, Dr. Scheffer speculates. Yet he is not too sure.

He is positive that whales communicate by ultrasonic signals that sound rather like "a kitchen faucet with a leaky gasket." Indeed, hearing is the whale's indispensable sense: his eyesight is on the way to becoming obsolete, and he has no sense of smell. But Dr. Scheffer cannot explain what part of the whale produces that sound, or how. He knows that the whale is capable of "caregiving behavior" to the wounded within the "family" of 30 or so in which whales travel. Still, in the end, he is not certain how social or even how intelligent the whale is.

In Dr. Scheffer's vision, the whale, for all his mammoth visibility, becomes the ultimate enigma in the enigma of the sea: "A hundred chemicals and a million living sparks and a billion bits of drift, no two alike ... an endless, moving, thin, transparent soup; a cosmic stock forever old and ever new."

Biological Predestiny. Men are killing off sperm whales at the rate of 25,000 a year, perhaps one-tenth of the total stock, and Dr. Scheffer is indignant at the profligacy and lack of "humaneness" with which this is done. But it is the whale's biological predestiny that saddens him most. Nature seems to have no future plans for the whale --an animal with beguiling potential yet lacking the indispensable potential to evolve beyond itself.

Zoology's general rule is that no animal dies of old age. But the whale may come as close as any. For the whale has no "natural" enemies, in the sense of larger animals that habitually feed on him. Only when young or when attacked by his own kind does he need to flee. Though scarred by the sucking disks of the octopus, bitten by the squid, carrying the buried bills of swordfish, a few of this year's crop of calf whales may survive to be 75. But most of those that escape the whalers' harpoons will succumb to what Dr. Scheffer suggests are their real enemies: "The small, erosive, unimpressive costs of living . . . broken teeth and bones, poisonous foods, and all the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to."

Unrecorded Death. In this respect, at least, a whale's death resembles a human's, and takes on something of the tragedy of the unheroic and unnoticed. In a remarkable passage reconstructing the death of a whale tangled in an underground cable off Ecuador, Dr. Scheffer writes: "His is an unrecorded death, for the cable does not break. The soft words flow around his grave; the messages of life and death, the loving words and stupid words, and pesos up and pesos down. . . . The luminescent beasts and the dark beasts and the beasts in between come to rob his tomb and tear the softening bits from his white frame. And the frame, too, unlocks in time, drops to the ocean floor and enters the geologic book, and the pages are closed."

The subject is a whale; the insight is into man. For Dr. Scheffer's supreme achievement is to take the king of the ocean's beasts, careering half-blindly across the world's seas, and cast him as Lear.

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