Big Miracle by Tom Rose Page B

deadline. When the night editor of the Anchorage Daily News saw Gallagher’s story come across the wire, he decided to run it as a small item below the fold on the front page of Thursday morning’s edition. Six days after the whales were first discovered, a small story about them made page one—and with no pictures!
    Lucky whales.
    Gallagher wrote: “A trio of whales trapped by ice in the Arctic Ocean used two openings for life-saving air Wednesday as biologists sought help to free the animals. The three California gray whales apparently were swimming from the Beaufort Sea to their winter grounds off Mexico when they got caught in the ice east of Point Barrow a week ago, said Geoff Carroll, a biologist from the North Slope Borough. He said the whales’ movement kept open two holes in the ice, but those openings shrank as temperatures plunged and new ice formed. By Wednesday, when Barrow’s minus thirteen degrees set a record low for the date, the holes were 450 feet offshore.”
    The chain reaction had begun. The next link in that chain was a television reporter at KTUU-TV, the NBC affiliate in Anchorage, named Todd Pottinger. Pottinger saw the front-page story in Thursday morning’s Anchorage Daily News as he got ready for work. Each day, work started with a morning assignment meeting that would determine which stories everyone was to cover in anticipation of that evening’s newscast. At the age of twenty-six, Pottinger had already been in the television news business long enough to know that whales always meant news. The minute he saw the story, he was sold. People loved whales. Whether they were beached, mating, or just swimming by, whales were always worth a segment—sometimes more—on the Anchorage evening news. The news director needed no convincing. Whales were sure, safe. It was Pottinger’s story to run with.
    Pottinger flipped through his Rolodex for Oran Caudle’s phone number. Alaska was much too big for one local news agency to cover alone. Newspapers, wire services, and television stations relied on freelance stringers across the state to report on the areas they couldn’t cover themselves. For TV stations looking for footage of any kind from Alaska’s North Slope, Oran Caudle was that man. He operated that region’s only modern television facility.
    When Oran got to work that Thursday morning, a hand-scribbled message stating that Todd Pottinger from Anchorage had called was prominently placed on top of his desk. Oran was confused. He knew the whales would connect, but could Pottinger be calling about them already? How would he know about them? Oran himself had only just seen them the day before. No matter. Whenever anyone from Anchorage called, it was good news for Oran Caudle. It meant he had a chance to interact with someone in the state’s media capital, not to mention the opportunity to connect the North Slope Borough with the rest of the state. He watched Todd read the Anchorage news every night on TV up in Barrow and was proud to know him. The two were friendly and had worked together in the past. Part of Oran’s job was to assist outside television stations covering Barrow. While he was supposed to make sure that whatever coverage he helped outsiders collect would be favorable to the NSB, there was no real way to do that. Journalists were journalists; they report what they want. This wasn’t just a theory for Oran; he had been burned enough to know this to be the bitter truth. Barrow was too far for same-day delivery of the Anchorage Daily News, meaning he didn’t know yet that his whales were page-one news in the state’s most important city. Still, the instant he saw the message, he knew Pottinger had to have heard about the whales somehow.
    One of Oran’s biggest frustrations running Barrow’s TV studio and production facility was that whenever he thought he had a big story, he had to go begging for his