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up on shore every spring proved the answer was “plenty.”
    When he got back to Barrow, Roy unloaded his bear rifle and assorted standard-issue Arctic survival gear from the ski machine, and went inside to warm up. After snatching a bite to eat, Roy called two biologist friends, Craig George and Geoff Carroll, who ran the local wildlife management office. He told them what he had just seen on the ice. To ask who could have predicted that a routine report of a routine whale stranding literally at the top of the world would end up becoming the biggest animal rescue ever attempted is the wrong question. A better question might be, Why would anyone have made such a prediction? Sure, small isolated events can trigger greater global events—think World War I—but whales stranded at the top of world, not by man but nature?
    Within just three weeks, at least twenty-six television networks from all over the world would converge upon one of the world’s most isolated and hard-to-get-to towns, just to broadcast live, up-to-the-minute reports about three California gray whales popping their heads in and out of small holes in the Arctic ice. The images would captivate the world—or at least captivate those drawn to television news. The most widely covered media nonevent in the history of electronic news was now officially underway. Suddenly the nonevent had very much transformed itself into something very real.
    Of course, for Eskimos the only news was that the whale stranding itself was news. Noah Webster defined news as “new information about things previously unknown.” Everyone in Barrow knew that gray whales died under Arctic ice. So what was newsworthy about this? Apparently plenty. The rapidly unfolding rescue of the three whales would cost tens of millions of dollars, involve the president of the United States, the general secretary of the Soviet Union, push a democratic government to the brink of collapse, and capture the attention, if not the imagination, of millions around the world before two of the three whales would eventually be freed. Journalists from competing networks would trample each other in pursuit of new angles of a nonstory while becoming far bigger stories in and of themselves.
    The whale rescue would unite environmentalists and oilmen, Inuits and whites, Alaska and the Lower 48 states, the United States and the Soviet Union, and two people seven thousand miles apart who would meet and marry.
    Lucky whales.

2
    From the Edge of the World to the Center of the Media Universe
    On Saturday morning, October 8, the day after Roy Ahmaogak found the three whales, he and Malik drove their ski machines along the Point Barrow sandbar to the spot where Roy had seen them. As they got closer, Malik’s windswept face lit up. He had an intimate kinship with whales that environmentalist do-gooders had a hard time understanding. From miles away, Malik knew enough about whales and their environment to see that the three whale spouts were hanging unusually close to each other.
    Malik grew excited as they approached. Roy grew relieved to see the whales had made it through the night. The two Eskimos parked their five-hundred-pound ski machines on the snow-covered sand at the edge of the spit. The ocean ice was too weak to hold the machines. In fact, the area around the whales wasn’t really ice at all. It was still just a thick slush, but hardening by the minute.
    The closer Malik got to the whales, the more he wondered why they didn’t just swim away. Were they too afraid to swim out to open waters? Maybe they were afraid to leave the breathing hole to explore the unfamiliar water farther out toward the open channel? In the Arctic, the autumn’s weather was always the most unpredictable. Did the whales know that, too? It was impossible for man to predict ice conditions for more than a few hours. Perhaps the whales’ internal weathermen were no better?
    Malik feared that if the