Old Horton stopped at the edge of the plank walk that joined our green cottage to Camp Ground Road. ”C`mon, boy,” he shouted. ”Blackfish runnin`
!”
The next picture I recall from that early spring afternoon in 1942 is being in Phipps` boat with old Horton in the bow, howling like he`d gone crazy and pounding the hull with his hand.
Back and forth the skiff went, the Johnson outboard wailing at the upper edge of its horsepower, guiding all-too-willing suicidal whales toward First Encounter beach.
Firmly aground, the beasts, long-finned pilot whales (called blackfish by the Cape Codders), heaved their sides and beat their flukes against the strand-slap-slap-slap-slap-a terrifying sound to me.
Later, hard-faced men wearing sweaters and high rubber boots moved among them, wielding the awful lances, while boys from the village danced atop the drying black carcasses.
The words and images of long ago returned as I watched a scene in David Attenborough`s graphic, sometimes terrifying, always stunning documentary,
”The Trials of Life” (Turner Home Entertainment, 1992, six color cassettes, each 97 minutes, $19.98 or $119.98 for the set). The jolt that rocketed me back to childhood was filmed at a sea lion rookery on an island off Patagonia.
Hundreds of barking pinnipeds and their pups are frolicking in the surf when out of the sea and right up onto the beach roars a 30-foot, 8-ton killer whale chasing a meal. It`s almost a game: one whale, two, sometimes three crash onto the beach, and shimmy off. The sea lions try to avoid them, but there appears to be little panic.
In an extraordinary bit of footage, one of the whales bags a sea lion and rushes it-as yet unharmed-into the sea and begins to play with it ”as if exalting in triumph,” Attenborough says.
The hapless sea lion is tossed back and forth between the mouths of the joyous behemoths, flipped high into the air and flicked by flukes like the birdie in a strange game of aquatic badminton until it is mercifully devoured. ”Trials of Life” is a brilliant and ambitious undertaking that many youngsters, especially teens, will enjoy and derive benefit from. But it also contains scenes that probably will shock kids (and their parents) whose exposure to the wild is the local zoo. The sea lion scenes are a good example. The same pod of 12 very intelligent, superbly skilled hunters appears off the island each year, Attenborough explains. Their nutritional needs, he notes dryly, amount to three sea lions a day. They never go hungry.
It sounds perfectly gruesome, but it`s fascinating to watch, and after a while perfectly natural. Save for the whale, Patagonia might be overrun with sea lions.
The series was produced by Turner Network Television, the BBC and Australian Broadcasting Corp. and won critical praise when it premiered on the Turner cable network.
There are also the odd, quirky facts: Did you know, for example, that if the eggs of the Australian salt-water crocodile incubate in their terrestrial nest at 30 degrees Celsius, the babies will all be female? Or at 32 degrees, all male? Or at 31 degrees, half and half?
In November, with the moon in the third quarter, 100 million Christmas Island crabs lay 100,000 eggs each in the sea. It`s a tricky business; these ladies are land crabs and can`t swim.
A practical hermit crab is photographed transplanting an anemone from coral to its shell; the anemone`s spines ward off the octopus, the crab`s enemy. To get the anemone off the coral, the crab tickles it.
Lions hunt, tent caterpillars follow well-marked paths, English jays remember where 1,000 acorns are buried, and arctic terns practice celestial navigation.
While ”Trials of Life” is similar in design to Attenborough`s monumental ”Life on Earth,” the new documentary is more intimate, less subtle, more desperate.
Human greed and antipathy are squeezing many species into extinction. The menagerie here, from termites to whales, lobsters to albatrosses, is no cartoon collection of sexless, anthropomorphic fuzzie-wuzzies.
In scenes alternately startling, frightening, funny, awe-inspiring and lustful, Attenborough`s movable kingdom is born, grows, harvests, hunts, courts, loves, couples, parents, ages and dies in color and often with the natural sound.
The six volumes are divided into birth and growth; feeding and hunting/
escaping; migration and communication; homemaking and living together;
fighting and relationships; and courtship and ”continuing the line,” as Attenborough phrases it.
This last is straightforward, strong stuff. It is definitely not for young children, or those parents sensitive to having theiryoungsters of any age view mating on the screen.
