Environment: Free At Last! Bon Voyage!

The whales finally escape their icy Arctic prison

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The last major obstacle to freedom was a towering ridge of Arctic ice, 400 yds. wide and 30 ft. high. The Soviet icebreaker Admiral Makarov, which had been heading home when it was diverted to aid in the rescue, took nearly a day to reduce the barrier to rubble. By late afternoon a sister ship, the Vladimir Arseniev, plowed within 400 yds. of two California gray whales that had been trapped in the ice off Point Barrow, Alaska. Sensing that their escape was at hand, the whales, nicknamed Putu (Ice Hole) and Siku (Ice), swam out of their icy prison into the slush-filled channel, cheered on by more than 100 spectators. Said Arnold Brower Jr., a local whaling captain: "I feel like my burden is lifted."

So did many others around the world who saw the rescue on TV last week. For eight days scientists and local oil-company personnel had acted as Pied Pipers, coaxing the exhausted leviathans toward an open lead in the ice pack, while Eskimos, many of them whalers, sawed breathing holes in the 6-in.-thick ice. The effort had its setbacks. The third member of the original trio vanished under the ice and was presumed dead. It took two days to lure Putu and Siku around a shoal. And a "hoverbarge" being towed from Prudhoe Bay bogged down and got stuck in the ice.

By the time the Soviet ships joined Operation Breakthrough, enthusiasm for the $1 million-plus project had waned. Scientists openly criticized the rescue mission. During a discussion of whether using dynamite to break up the ice would damage the whales' hearing, biologist Ron Morris of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration joked, "We'd probably fit them with hearing aids and eyeglasses."

The Eskimos, too, tired of the occupation army. "They are all making a big deal out of nature's way of feeding other animals," said local whaler Bob Aiken. Putu and Siku, for their part, lingered in the channel for more than a day. They still had to navigate some 7,000 miles southward to their Baja California winter home. But at long last they had been granted a new start.