Wayward whale swims deep into Alaska wilds

Published 9:00 pm Saturday, September 22, 2001

Associated Press

FAIRBANKS, Alaska — A beluga swam more than 400 miles up the Yukon River from Norton Sound, made a sharp turn north at the Koyukuk River and was spotted Friday afternoon about 145 miles upstream heading for Allakaket.

"This is the biggest excitement ever," Thelma Williams Nicholia, Hughes city administrator, told the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. "No one’s ever seen a whale around here, not even the elders."

Village children were let out of school and taken by riverboat for whale watching.

Hughes, population 78, is about 210 miles northwest of Fairbanks.

Ralph Williams, who lives about a half-mile downriver from Hughes, first spotted the whale about 7:30 Friday morning.

"He heard something outside and thought it was a moose," Nicholia said. "He looked out toward the river, and there was the whale. It was coming up for air and shooting water. He couldn’t believe his eyes."

Williams crossed the river and alerted villagers. A small convoy of riverboats began to form to trail the visitor.

"It must be a crazy whale," Lester Sam of Hughes said. "I was so excited about it. I don’t expect to see that thing around here."

Sam, who has lived 60 years along Alaska rivers, spent more than three hours on the water Friday trailing and watching the whale from afar.

He was impressed with the whale’s ability to find a navigable channel. Six miles upriver from Hughes, the Koyukuk runs through a narrow, shallow passage that the villagers did not believe the whale could traverse. Sam said the beluga swam back and forth six times until it found a passage.

Bob Small, marine mammals coordinator for the state, concluded that the whale was a subadult when he heard it was gray and 12 to 15 feet long. Full-grown belugas are white.

Small said there most likely will be no rescue effort to try and turn the beluga around.

"In a situation like this, we should just let the animal figure it out," he said. "They’re intelligent animals and not worth our while to get in the water and do something to it."

Not everyone is thrilled with the unusual visitor.

"The elders think it’s ‘hutlaanee,’ that it’s not right," Nicholia said. "I know one elder was praying because she thought it was hutlaanee."

According to Athabascan linguist Eliza Jones, the traditional usage of hutlaanee presages something bad.

"If you see something like that, it means there is going to be some sort of epidemic of sickness," Jones said.

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