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recover by limiting the number of whales legally permitted to be killed each year and by regulating what kind of whales could be killed and by what nations. Exemptions became the rule. Nations like Japan and the Soviet Union successfully argued with some truth that their whaling industries were needed to help their economies recover from the war. Norway and Iceland made the same argument but with no truth. Although invaded by the Nazis in early 1940, Norway was overrun so quickly it suffered almost no war damage, while Iceland emerged from the war in far better shape than it entered it as a result of its role as the primary Allied staging area for the vital war of the Atlantic.
    The United States and Canada argued that their own Eskimo populations, barely removed from subsistence status, deserved the right to continue subsistence whaling. These “subsistence quotas” were based on the size of each village and the projected number of whales in their areas. As the number of whales increased, so too would the quotas.
    As with most well-intentioned government interventions, the IWC mandates delivered the opposite of what they were intended to produce. Rather than limit subsistence whaling, the IWC quota system created a range of new incentives that markedly increased whaling.
    Now, rather than just hunt for what was needed, Eskimo communities had a valuable new resource; the tradable commodity of whale quotas.
    Each year, Eskimo settlements from Russia to Norway to the United States would eagerly await news of the IWC’s quota announcements to learn how many whales their communities were permitted to take. In 1988, the International Whaling Commission gave the people of Barrow, Alaska, a quota of eight whales it could hunt; many more than they needed to insure that everyone in Barrow had plenty of whale meat. Malik’s strike marked Barrow’s fifth IWC-approved whale. While all five were bowheads, there was no rule that said they had to be.
    Another unintended consequence of IWC action was to create markets for whales that otherwise would never have been hunted. According to the IWC, Barrow whalers were free to fill their eight whale quota with any eight whales they could get their hands on.
    Remember the three California gray whales we left aimlessly frolicking off the Barrow coast? Well, this is both where and how they enter our story. Until the IWC’s quota system, no one in Barrow would have given the gray whales a second thought, let alone invited them home for dinner. But the IWC’s quotas created artificial demand for any kind of whale, tasty or otherwise. The organization established to save whales created new reasons to kill them.
    Thus the three California grays could be legally hunted and killed just as if they were bowhead whales, but only if certified native Alaskan blood—whatever in the world that was—coursed through the hunter’s veins. Even though gray whales were inedible due to their barnacled skin and tough acrid meat, Barrowans still had three more whales they could legally kill before the end of the year—which was rapidly approaching. The IWC’s counterproductive interventions didn’t stop there. Not only were subsistence whaling towns allowed to kill any kind of whales they could catch, they were also allowed to “trade” their quota—that is, sell their excess whales to other villages. Towns could contract whale hunts for other towns, even if they had reached their own annual limits. Call it cap and trade for whales.
    Barrow was not only the oldest continuously settled Eskimo village in the world, but by 1988 it had become the biggest. It was home (adopted or otherwise) to the greatest whaling legends, and some of the greatest whalers, like Malik. Not surprisingly, it also became the home port to a new and valuable little industry—professional subsistence whaling.
    On Thursday, October 6, 1988, Roy Ahmaogak, a member of Malik’s crew,