In the winter of 2007, Trites, deRoos, and deRoos’s dad went in search of the buried whale. Armed only with the hand-drawn map and aided by a digger (whose operator turned out to be the son of the man who had buried the whale twenty years earlier), they intended to do a preliminary dig and assess the situation. Expecting clean white bones, they were surprised when they hit whale and found it still as blue as blue can be. Apparently, the whale had changed little in the somewhat cold and sterile environment of the island’s red clay dirt.

whale watching
from “A Whale-Hunt in the Varanger Fjord,” Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts, 1886

During the last quarter of an hour we have seen some forty whales; but none has come within range. The gun has no certainty much beyond thirty yards, so that the whale must be nearly under the ship’s bow when firing. As we stand looking at this magnificent spectacle, the water close round the ship suddenly becomes light green in colour and somewhat calm. Then a deep heavy thunder; the ship trembles from stem to stern; a great column of dampness is shot into the air, drenching us all, a dull snort, and an enormous blue whale rises out of the sea a few yards on our starboard side. Now the captain will fire, we think, involuntarily holding on to the wire rigging; but Foyn stands by his gun without making the least movement, and the next second the whale again descends into its watery home.“I went back to the motel that night, and I remember having a panic attack about what I had gotten myself into,” Trites explains. “But the next morning when Pierre-Yves and his group came out, relishing the chance to examine the whale and practically running to the pit with knives in their teeth, I realized that with that kind of enthusiasm this wasn’t something that just I, Mike, and his dad would have to do alone.”

In May 2008, in the presence of two excavators, some makeshift shelters, and a full crew of helpers, efforts to liberate the carcass and its prized skeleton began in earnest. In total, it would take ten days to dig out the entire beast, deflesh the specimen, and rebury the flesh, a messy and pungent process greatly aided by Daoust’s anatomical know-how, and by two volunteers dedicated to continually sharpening the carving knives.

It was during this process that a possible cause of the whale’s death was determined. The left side of its skull was severely damaged, indicating a likely vessel strike — a hit and run on the high seas.

Back in the warehouse, deRoos is regaling the six-year-olds with tales about the blue whale, how it is a truly massive creature that weighs more than any dinosaur that roamed the earth, how a baby could crawl through its arteries, how it makes the loudest sound of any creature in the world, and how its population was once nearly destroyed before it became a fully protected species in 1966. The kids look suitably awestruck.

This is the response everyone hopes to see when the job is finished. “The whale is a focal point to talk about the loss of biodiversity and the importance of conservation. It will stir emotions in people,” Trites tells me. “We talk about the museum, with all of its specimens, being like a library of life. And the blue whale is going to be our librarian.”