Spring doesn't come to the Canadian Atlantic coastline with the soft hum of a warm breeze and timid blossoming of the early flowers. Scents of nature don't mingle with the salty smell of the North Atlantic in the stillness of a long day. As the boats crack the silence and invade this majestic landscape, the whiteness of the vista changes its color and turns red. Switching from light red to carmine, the ice floes metamorphose into ice cubes soon to be served with the cocktail of death. It is the slaughter of the beauty, a crime over nature and heartless harvesting of life of the innocents.
The annual seal hunt in Canada has just begun.
The following excerpt is from my short novel Look for Me Under the Rainbow.
“Yes, Danny no longer knew what to believe in and what was true. He realized that the rainbow did not exist, at least not the rainbow from the tale of the Big Seal; probably the tale itself was simply a fabrication. But why? Why was it necessary to lie to youngsters? Danny wondered whether the story of his little sister Mary Jane was true. The little sister who was killed by man . . . On an early, misty morning when a boat arrived and disembarked men . . . All the seals ran away, all except the young. Unprotected, unaware of the danger, they innocently waited for human beings to approach. A man came, lifted a club and struck the fragile little head. One, two, three times . . . Blood spattered the white fur. No cries, no sound. Silent and quick. And then again. One, two, three dull thuds, blood and death. No cries again. Only a blank look of surprise and disappointment . . . Other human beings came from the other side and took the surviving pups in their arms, but the men armed with harpoons and clubs snatched the pups from them and bashed their skulls. One, two, three. Blows, blood and death. Then some other human beings came and took away those who tried to protect the pups with their bodies. They were put on their boat and towed away. The remaining human beings skinned the bodies and loaded the furs in their boat. Leaving behind corpses of less than two-week-old pups, they disappeared in the fog, as suddenly as they had arrived. Mary Jane was among the dead pups. Frozen remains of her tiny body eerily laid motionless on the bloodstained ice, with other pups that were killed that day . . . the day when an entire generation was murdered cruelly. Wiped out. That day, no pup was left alive. That year, the year of the great trouble, the group set out on their northbound journey fourteen weeks earlier. Tormented by pain and grief, they listlessly went on, but there was no joy in their lives. It took them a year to recover from the shock, two years for the life to return into their group . . . and new pups to be born again. And it had all been man’s fault. That same being that smiled at him, caressed his fur and softly whispered to him. Man who you had to stay away from because sooner or later he would be the death of you. Man who feeds on pain and suffering of others. Man whom he had come to love . . .”
Look for Me Under the Rainbow is a tale of the victims, particularly of a harp seal pup named Danny and his family, and Helen and a small group of people gathered under the name of Rainbow Warriors dedicated to protecting them.
If you are interested to find out why Look for Me Under the Rainbow was listed in a program for elementary schools as a reading of choice for seventh graders, you are welcome to check the opening sample pages I have provided for you free of charge, both in Croatian and English, on my official web page.
The fourth edition of Look for Me Under the Rainbow has been published in Croatian in November 2015 by Katarina Zrinski and is available for purchase. If you want to get your copy, you can order it here.
BJ