How The Blind Detective and His Seeing Eye Dog Saved the Narwhals

By Shawn Adair Johnston

It's the year 2079. Narwhals, the last tusked animals still living in the wild on the planet, are being pushed to extinction by poaching in the Canadian Arctic. The poachers are, however, about to confront the most remarkable team of human and non-human investigators ever assembled.

 

This story is told by renowned blind detecti

• Language: English
• Publisher: Atmosphere Press
• Release date: Jul 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9781639880140

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HOW THE BLIND DETECTIVE AND HIS SEEING EYE DOG

SAVED THE NARWHALS

SHAWN ADAIR JOHNSTON

atmosphere press

© 2021 Shawn Adair Johnston

Published by Atmosphere Press

Cover design by Kevin Stone

No part of this book may be reproduced without permission from the author except in brief quotations and in reviews. This is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to real places, persons, or events is entirely coincidental.

atmospherepress.com

Contents

Prologue      3

Part I

Chapter 1: Slaughter       17

Chapter 2: Ghosts of Quebec      35

Chapter 3: The Dinner Party      58

Chapter 4: Post-Party Parlays      75

Chapter 5: Busted      93

Part II

Chapter 6: Peter and Watson       115

Chapter 7: Reckoning      135

Chapter 8: A Visit from General Wolfe      150

Chapter 9: Kidnapped       167

Part III

Chapter 10: Chase      189

Chapter 11: The Big Bang      204

Epilogue      227

Appendix A: Aristotle      232

Appendix B: Emma      249

Prologue

At the beginning of summer, the Arctic Ocean teemed with life and action. The deep blue sky and the thousands of islands that dot the sea were full of countless birds from pelicans to eagles, gorging on the seasonal bounty. The turquoise water boiled with a hundred different species of fish as well as walrus, seals and different types of whales including belugas and narwhals with their unique ivory tusks. While ocean warming had forced many of these animals further north, the ocean–below the water, on the surface, and in the air–positively bubbled with life.

On this summer morning, a pod of narwhals had been detected chasing a large school of halibut big enough to provide an all-day feast. As the narwhals began their breakfast banquet, a very clever and very insidious technological trick was unleashed on the narwhal males, most of whom were endowed with tusks up to ten feet in length. As the sun rose and the feeding began, two narwhal males, one young and one old, were lured towards the fishing boats perpetrating the dirty trick. While the poachers aboard these boats could not avoid being struck by the beauty of the Arctic and these marvelous, tusked mammals, they nonetheless readied their harpoons. The harpoons were illegal, of course, and made a bloody mess of their narwhal victims, but they sure were effective. Some of the poachers genuinely felt sorry for killing these magnificent creatures but they were able to drown their sorrows in the enormous amount of money to be made from sales of the inside-out teeth. As the first male approached the poachers’ boats, the order was given to fire the harpoons. Within twenty minutes, the first victim, an old male, was dead, his tusk brutally hacked off and his body dismembered to attract the sharks capable of disposing of the evidence of these criminal and wicked acts. For the poachers, the summer had gotten off to a good start; not so much for the narwhals. At this rate, their species was going to be wiped from the earth in a few short years.

This is the story of how the blind detective–that is, me–and his intellectually-augmented seeing eye dog–that is, Watson–saved the narwhals, otherwise known as the unicorns of the sea. By no means was it just Watson and me who saved the narwhals. We had a lot of help in saving them such as from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Royal Canadian Navy, Coast Guard, and Air Force. We also got a little bit of critical help from that big country to the south of us, eh? Watson and I were, however, the only civilians to play an important role in identifying and apprehending the bad guys. The world lost the wild African elephant and rhinoceros some years ago because of the value of their ivory tusks, and we simply could not allow the avarice of a small percentage of people to do the same thing to the narwhal.

The criminal probe into narwhal poaching was a bit unique in that, in addition to traditional human law enforcement personnel, it utilized the talents of recently intellectually augmented animals from both the United States and Canada. Watson, my augmented seeing-eye dog, was involved in the investigation and was one of its primary heroes. Also indispensable to the success of the investigation was Aristotle Jones, originally born in California and the first augmented chimp to attain the rank of Sergeant in the R.C.M.P. Equally essential to the success of the investigation was Emma Fitzwater, an augmented porpoise currently employed by the Canadian Coast Guard responsible for patrolling the Saint Lawrence River.

It is distinctly possible, however, that you may be wondering how in the world a blind detective could have become such an important actor in this story. How, for that matter, can a blind guy become a successful detective? Now, let me be perfectly honest, I am not the world’s most humble person. Let’s be real, no blind person is going to achieve significant notoriety without a lot of ability and a lot of hard work, including a fair amount of self-promotion. Before calling my investigative business the Third Eye Detective Agency, I used to ask clients to think of me as the Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder of private detectives. More than that, I acknowledge up front that my appeal to the idea that I use my third eye, the mystical visual organ that sees all, reflects a blatantly shameless form of self-aggrandizement.

You understand that as a blind detective, indeed as a blind person, I can win math contests, memorize the Canterbury Tales, or write great poetry. I will never, however, not in a million years, win a pancake flipping contest. No matter my score on an intelligence test, because I am blind, I will always need help in doing many utterly simple things such as not walking off a high cliff or into an active woodchipper. Be honest, you would never volunteer to ask me to shoot an apple off of your head in an archery contest. Things about which you need not worry because you can see what is happening around you, could get me killed. Put a little differently, no matter how smart I am, no matter how independent a thinker I am, I need the kind of help from other people that can only be described as an extreme form of interpersonal dependence. The bad thing about this is the high cost of being so dependent, but the good thing is the many people who enjoy helping someone with a disability. So, accepting reality, I am grateful for the help and love most people give each other. In that case, what I am saying is that if there is any possibility that I can enhance my reputation, get more referrals, or make more money by making some people, especially bad guys and criminals, wonder whether I really do have access to my third eye, well, give me a break. Life is hard and the illusion of a little mystical power bolstering this blind fellow’s detective skills isn’t hurting anybody. Besides, as this story unfolds, you just might be forced to the conclusion that every now and then I do, in fact, use my third eye. Who knows when a ghost might be present that the sighted person could not see, but the blind guy could hear? I suspect that what you want to know is the context in which this story takes place: the where and when of what will be happening.

Right now, it is the year 2079. We are just a little more than two decades away from the beginning of the twenty-second century. Our story takes place in the Canadian province of Quebec. It has retained many unique characteristics including the use of the French language, un-homogenized beer and, perhaps most important, poutine (for the few of you who do not know what poutine is, it is one of the most famous dishes in French speaking Canada consisting of a plate of French fries, smothered in gravy, and covered in cheese curds. While Canada, in general, has embraced this dish, its origin in Quebec remains a point of cultural pride). Quebecers for many reasons and for many centuries have aspired to accentuate their differences from the rest of Canada.  In the large province of Quebec lies the beautiful and very European-like Quebec City. Indeed, the remarkable location and history of Quebec City will itself play an important role in this story.

You might also be interested in what some of the big differences are between now and fifty years ago? While there have been significant medical, technological, and scientific advances during the second half of this century, I think you would have to say that the emergence of intellectually- augmented animals has had a profound impact on culture and the law. Most augmented animals at this point live in Canada, the United States and Western Europe. It was in North America and Western Europe where the technology was developed that made intellectual augmentation possible. While most other parts of the world, particularly East Asia and Latin America, have become much wealthier in the past century, North America and Western Europe continue to enjoy the highest standards of living on the planet. Without the resources of western countries, it would never have been possible to develop the technology capable of intellectually augmenting certain animals. You will definitely see however, that while animal augmentation may have initially seemed somewhat frivolous, the involvement in our society of augmented dogs, porpoises and chimps has genuinely contributed to the lives of countless human beings. 

It turns out that the technological basis for intellectual augmentation of certain animals was an unanticipated side effect of the nanotechnology designed to treat Alzheimer’s dementia. The demographic group known as baby boomers started going senile at ever faster rates around forty or fifty years ago. Whatever the precise cause of this epidemic, it became clear that the entire gross national product of the world’s well-to-do countries would be necessary to house, feed and supervise the ever-expanding senile masses. Maybe even more eventful than the race to the moon was the race to find a cure for dementia before all developed countries went totally bankrupt. I believe that this is one of the best things that have happened in the past few decades, the elimination of almost all forms of dementia. People still get sick and die, of course, but the kind of unique painfulness of dementia, especially of Alzheimer’s, has been eliminated. It was the nanotechnology more than anything else that ended the suffering of people with dementia.

Through the application of nanotechnology, the development of microscopic or molecular machines, it was possible to resupply the brains of demented patients with artificial or synthetic neurons or brain cells, restoring cognitive ability. These vanishingly small but profoundly powerful brain implants worked so well for the demented that one clever scientist asked what would happen if they were placed into the brains of chimps or porpoises. Before augmentation of non-human species was allowed to begin in Canada, there was a debate in Parliament that was more or less replicated in other developed nations regarding legal and ethical implications of raising certain animals up to the level of self-conscious beings remarkably similar to human beings. That debate is ongoing and has taken slightly different forms in different countries. Thus far, the only animals which have been legally permitted to receive augmentation have been chimps, porpoises, and dogs. With augmentation, chimps compare intellectually with young adults, while porpoises compare intellectually with human adolescents. Before any chimp or porpoise was augmented, serious attempts were made to assess the animal’s potential desire for more human-like cognitive ability. In the following manuscript, Aristotle, our augmented chimp and Emma, our augmented porpoise, will tell their stories, communicating some sense of the nature of their respective intellectual skills both before and after augmentation. Suffice it to say for now that augmented chimps have turned out to share many of the same emotional and philosophic conflicts pretty much universal to us humans. Porpoises have an altogether different kind of intellectual world though with augmentation they can and do relate well to humans.

Dogs, though possessing extraordinary intelligence regarding human beings, function cognitively more at the level of a pre or young teen. There was simply no way to assess a dog’s differential desire for intellectual augmentation since virtually all dogs to begin with want to spend as much time with people as possible. While the idea of a talking dog is profoundly appealing to most people, Parliament determined that those dogs who could or did work as seeing-eye dogs for the blind would have priority in receiving the procedure. I am proud to say that I had the opportunity to testify in front of one of the relevant committees in Parliament and allegedly had some impact in persuading our politicians to make this decision. Personally, the advent of a seeing-eye dog capable of at least some abstract thought, as well as speech, may have done more to take the sting out of blindness than even the invention of beer. You will see during this story, that Watson is not only a remarkably helpful friend but that he also turned out to be the perfect and complementary companion for a blind investigator.

The final bit of technology needed to achieve intellectual augmentation dealt with synthetic voice boxes and vocal cords. The expansion of the brains of certain animals provided them with the potential ability to speak. That potential, however, required the ability to make the actual physical sounds underlying speech. I am no expert in this but apparently the voice production technology is somewhat different for the three creatures legally allowed augmentation. Porpoises, for example, breathe and whistle through the blowhole on the top of their head. Dogs and chimps breathe through their noses and mouths and both can vocalize to some extent impelling breath through the throat and mouth. Apparently, chimps only needed voice boxes though dogs needed both voice boxes and vocal cords. Each of the speech styles of these three different animals is unique: porpoises whistle and pop, chimps sound like they have gravel in their mouth and dogs…. well, dogs sound just like the enthusiastic and sometimes drooling animals they are. Yup.

With these newly augmented animals has come a ferocious debate regarding the nature of their legal and political rights. Chimps in addition to sharing nearly 100% of our genome, have, under certain circumstances, attained the full rights of citizenship including the right to vote if they can pass the appropriate test. A few have even graduated from college though none have so far obtained a graduate or law degree. Perhaps this speaks well of them. No porpoise has yet attained full citizenship status nor graduated from college. They do have many legal rights, however, such as the ability to own property, enter into contractual arrangements and participate in the work force. To this point, most but not all augmented chimps and porpoises work for military, law enforcement or governmental entities. Augmented dogs are no longer legally defined as property and abusing or killing an augmented dog is now a serious felony which could get the perpetrator up to ten years in prison. So far, though, no augmented dog has yet graduated from high school, but as you will discover, one dog in particular is trying very hard to do so. Otherwise the debate rages on as to how many other animals, and which ones, should be legally eligible for augmentation. Given the many challenging questions that augmenting just the current three species has generated, Parliament is moving slowly in its consideration of who will be next.

As we approach the beginning of the twenty second century, the war scare of the past few decades has abated substantially.  With global warming and the partial ice recession in the far north, sea lanes have opened and hundreds of islands in the Canadian Arctic can now be inhabited for at least part of the year. Canadians are aware, of course, of how the Russian government in the early 2000’s laid claim to virtually all the islands in the Arctic Ocean, most definitely including a tremendous number of islands on the Canadian side of the North Pole. In addition to sending ice breakers, fishing trawlers and even military ships into what was clearly the Canadian Arctic, they began exploring and even drilling for oil on undeniably Canadian territory. While green energies had continued to expand, so had the population of the planet and both oil and natural gas remained the single most available and lucrative forms of energy.

While Russia was becoming more aggressive in the Arctic, China had dramatically expanded its building of artificial islands in the Western Pacific. In order to push the United States out of that part of the world, and totally dominate ship traffic, some of their manufactured islands were as many as five hundred kilometers from the Chinese mainland. Given America’s interest in the Arctic and Canada’s interest in East Asia, this dangerous behavior on the part of Russia and China led to something of a rapprochement between the U.S. and Canada as they joined forces against a common threat. Of course, a very special and unique relationship has always existed between the U.S. and Canada: the longest more or less unguarded border in the world and more intermarriages than between any other two nations. Strains in the relationship had increased as the Canadian government trended more towards the European style with America staying somewhat more traditionally American. And let’s be honest about the fact that for us Canadians, having the most powerful country in all of human history sharing a 6000-kilometer-long border with us is daunting.

The important point here, however, is that both countries were confronted by aggressive adversaries who were clearly in league with each other. The Russians were supported in their territory grab in the Canadian Arctic having promised much of the new oil to China. The Russians supported the Chinese power grab in the Western Pacific having been promised unfettered maritime and naval movement. Suffice it to say that there were some rather scary hostile incidents which the experts claim came closer to all-out nuclear war than since the so-called Cuban missile crisis. Canadian Armed Forces, supported by American assets, confronted the Russian aggression in the Arctic and drove it back over to the Russian side of the North Pole. By far the tensest moments were when, with American help, Canadian Armed Forces confiscated and even blew up some of the oil drilling equipment the Russians had placed on our Canadian islands. There is still some resentment in Canada towards Germany and France, NATO members yet, who refused to actively support Canada. While Canada was unable to provide the U.S. with a great deal of military support in its destruction of some of the Chinese islands being built, the Royal Canadian Navy was there showing the flag and providing maximal moral support. It was definitely a bit touch-and-go and just plain nerve-wracking for a while. We all realized that if we did not stand up to these two bullies, it would just get worse. Well, we stood up and while it was scary, it clearly proved the right thing to do.

Interestingly, one of the factors contributing to our success in the Artic and the American success in the western Pacific derived from the application of the nanotechnology I described above to military operations. Extraordinary effort was put into developing defensive weapons capable of neutralizing but not killing enemy combatants. The smart nets that were invented to drop over Russian ships and oil rigs proved brilliant in disrupting their dangerous aggression without killing or even mortally injuring a single soldier or seaman. Since that time Canada and the U.S. have remained very close though the short-lived talk about Canada becoming the fifty-first state was rapidly and ruthlessly shot down. We may love our American neighbors; indeed, we are children of the same mother, but you just can’t get authentic fish and chips down there.

So, the world remains a dangerous place. Meanwhile, although horrendous environmental disaster has largely been staved off, we no longer have rhinoceroses or African elephants living in the wild. At the same time that the Russians were pursuing their illegitimate claims to the Canadian Arctic, they were decimating the narwhal population on their side of the North Pole. Only about twenty thousand narwhals remain, almost all of them in the Canadian Arctic, mostly around Baffin Island and the opening to Hudson’s Bay.

Sporting ivory tusks up to three meters long, these animals are remnants of an ancient time.  With the extinction of wild African elephants, a single narwhal tusk could fetch up to one million dollars on the international black market. The Canadian Coast Guard was stretched thin, however, and most experts believed we were losing the battle to save the narwhals from total worldwide extinction. Once the number of narwhals fell below a certain level it would no longer be possible for their population to be sustained. It would be goodbye to the last species on earth that nature had endowed with those magnificent ivory tusks, animals whose excitation of human greed and conceit may have doomed them.

Adult narwhals can grow to a length of four to six meters weighing between one and two tons. Their skin is mottled though dark in color as juveniles. Their skin becomes lighter colored over time and old males can appear almost entirely white. Their most notable feature, of course, is the ivory tusk that projects up out of their upper jaw.  Tusks are more common among males than females with a small percentage of males possessing two tusks though the second tusk is usually shorter than the first one.  Norse sailors apparently mistook narwhals for unicorns which is how they acquired their nickname as unicorns of the sea. This story concerns these magnificent animals and how a combined effort of humans, animals and technology worked together to save their species.

PART I

Chapter 1

Slaughter

The old male was enjoying the beginning of the warm season and the giant schools of fish that accompanied it. While we would call his two favorite types of fish halibut and cod, he knew them by sight and smell. During the warm season, when the ice thinned and left large patches of open water, the schools of fish were virtually uncountable, not that he bothered to count them even if he could. What he did, what he had been doing for a very long time, was eat them. He thought these two kinds of fish were especially delicious and he enjoyed the way he ate them. It was positively fun sneaking up on a big school of fish and then using his tusk to stun as many of them as he could. Once there were enough immobilized flopping fish, he would swim up to them and suck them into his huge mouth with the power of an industrial strength vacuum cleaner.  He particularly liked sucking down a giant cluster of what we would call squid because of how tasty they were and the way they tickled his throat as they flowed in.

He also liked the warm season because he got to see more of his friends and family members. While definitely social animals, most males, especially the older ones, spent much of their time alone. He was usually within range to hear someone singing or for someone else to hear him singing. During the cold season though, he had to work harder to find food so getting together in big groups was impractical. But during the warm season when food was everywhere, getting together in large family or friendship groups was much easier. Right now, for example, he could see what we would call some of his sisters swimming along with their newborn calves. He wasn’t interested in the kind of chase games that the young ones liked playing, not at his age, but he still really enjoyed watching and listening to them. Unfortunately, he did not know that someone, neither friend nor family member, was currently watching him.

The Queen of Quebec is a sixty-foot-long fishing trawler plying the Canadian Artic between Baffin Island and Hudson’s Bay, ostensibly in search of halibut and cod. She is an older ship and while she does not possess the expensive equipment capable of flash-freezing the catch, she does have all the most modern electronics for tracking weather, the sea bottom, fish schools and narwhals. She has two huge cargo holds where the temperature is kept below freezing where she can store thousands of pounds of fish, keeping it commercially viable until she returns to the fish processing factories in Quebec where she sells her cargo. It is also possible, of course, to hide narwhal tusks at the bottom of these two storage compartments which would be sold to customers other than the local fish processors.

Emile Gaston, a Quebecer in his mid-forties, was the owner and skipper of this trawler. His was a modest operation and while it was an old boat, it was thoroughly automated requiring him to hire only four hands. These four men, with the oldest and second in command named Jacques, were all born and raised in the Quebec City metropolitan area, the second largest city in the province. This was a tight knit group who all knew each other as well as each other’s families, including children, aunts, uncles, and cousins. While the Gaston family was a little higher on the social hierarchy than the families of his crew, they were an egalitarian group whose primary identity was as Quebecoise.  However, they felt like second class citizens in a country where their distant relatives had lived for three to four hundred years. Fishing was in their blood, but with warming oceans and dwindling fish stocks, commercial fishing was a hard job and getting harder every year.

Jacques informed the skipper that they had in their sights