One day Parfit filmed Luna playing with a small aluminum outboard boat at the dock, placing his rostrum next to the hull at the boat’s rear, near the little motor, and imitating it loudly, using his blowhole like a pair of lips: “Brrrrrr-r-r-r-rrrr!” Funny thing: it really did sound just like an outboard boat engine.
There was a brief moment in 2003 when an opportunity arose to reunite Luna with his home pod. Ken Balcomb of the Center for Whale Research showed up with a boat that was capable of making the long journey around to the San Juan Islands, equipped with sound-making gear that could entice Luna by playing L pod calls, with a plan to get him back to the Salish Sea and his home pod. However, the plan entailed more human contact with Luna, and so the chief bureaucrats at the DFO vetoed the idea. Balcomb was warned he would be arrested if he attempted any contact with Luna, and so the plan was shelved.
In the meantime, the First Nations people of Nootka Sound—the Mowachaht/Muchalaht tribe—became deeply involved. The year before Luna had appeared, a tribal chief named Albert Maquinna had passed away, and Maquinna had told friends and relatives beforehand that he planned to return to the tribe as a kakawin, a killer whale. Orcas are not particularly common inside the Sound, so Luna’s appearance was taken as a certain sign that the chief had lived up to his word. The tribe by treaty right had some say in the matter. They approved of the plan to reunite Luna with his home pod and made clear that they would fight to prevent the whale from ever being placed in captivity.
Public pressure was mounting and after years of trying to simply manage Luna, the DFO in the fall of 2003 announced plans to undertake a major operation to reunite Luna with his home pod, with funding help from American sources. The plan was to capture him in an enclosure, lift him onto a truck in a sling, and drive him to the San Juan Islands so that he could be placed in a sea pen there and eventually placed with his L pod family members. After years of foot-dragging, the action was welcome, but then DFO announced that it would wait until the next summer to actually enact the plan, overruling the advice of their own scientists to repatriate Luna as soon as possible. Then word leaked out that DFO also was negotiating with marine-park officials to place him in captivity if the reunion with L pod didn’t take, a situation laden with incentives for the captors to declare Luna unable to return to his family, since captive killer whales are worth millions of dollars. On top of that, DFO began shutting out the various interests involved, including the Mowachaht tribesmen with whom they simply refused to negotiate. The respected researchers at Paul Spong’s OrcaLab were likewise told they would not be permitted to participate, even though they were the resident orca experts on Vancouver Island and had worked with DFO for years, including a previous successful reunion of a lost Northern Resident calf with its mother. Suspicion festered like a bad algae bloom. As the day planned for the capture approached, matters worsened. There was a report that officials at the Vancouver Aquarium, who were overseeing the capture, were warning local medical authorities to prepare for tear-gas injuries. They had closed off the airspace over the sea pen they were setting up near Gold River to prevent media from reporting too closely on the capture.
So on June 14, 2005, the day that the DFO had designated as the day to draw Luna into their sea pen, a crowd gathered onshore in Gold River alongside the TV news crews and observing biologists, and more importantly, a flotilla of traditional tribal cedar canoes gathered in the water outside the sea pen. It was a sort of protest, but all the tribal members did was sing songs to the whale, bidding it farewell. However, it proved to be a fateful distraction. As expected, the captors were able to persuade Luna to visit the pen, but only for brief periods. He was far more interested in the people in the canoes singing to him, and so he quickly exited the pen and went out to join them and play with them. Occasionally he would wander back to the pen, but never long enough for them to enclose him. After hours of the cat-and-mouse game between the tribal protesters and the would-be captors, they closed down.
So it went for eight more days. Luna would visit the sea pen, but he was never deeply interested in it. The singing humans, who showed up every day in their canoes, held much more attraction for him. At one point, the captors appeared to have Luna secure inside the pen, but he dodged under the small boat they were using to herd him at the last second, then surfaced on its other side, pushed the boat into the pen, and then swam away. Finally the DFO gave up, acknowledging they had been outmaneuvered by the tribal members whom they had so needlessly disrespected. They then reverted to their old policy of simply trying to manage Luna’s behavior and hoping his family would come past Nootka Sound. A tribal biologist took up the job of providing Luna with human company away from other boats, and the orca’s life settled into its old pattern of disquieting solitude intermingled with human interactions.
In all, Luna spent five years in Nootka Sound. He was clearly well fed throughout, meaning that when it came to finding food whatever he had lost as a pod member, he was able to compensate by hunting opportunistically (there was evidence he ate all kinds of salmon, unlike his family, which is known to hunt Chinook salmon almost exclusively). During that time, it became clear that for his social needs he had replaced his orca family with the variety of humans he encountered. In the process, he opened a window into the world of killer whales for all the humans who came into contact with him to peer through. For those who were fortunate enough to get that glimpse, it was life-changing.
Michael Parfit and Suzanne Chisholm, who were both married and professional journalistic partners, had come to Nootka Sound on a short-term assignment of a few weeks for Smithsonian magazine and wound up staying there for three years and making a documentary film about Luna. They, like so many other people in the Sound who had encounters with Luna (including the DFO officer who had originally been in charge of him), became emotional captives of the whale almost from the very first day that they met him.
It happened early in their stay, during the period when the DFO was working hard to keep people separate from Luna. They had gone out to see if they could find him in their little boat when he exploded out of the water beside them. Luna loved to play pranks like this, loved to surprise his human family. However, these humans hurried to shore, worried that they were not supposed to interact with the whale. He followed them there and lingered in the water next to their boat, peering up at them.
“There was such consciousness there, such deliberate intent to connect; it was just this unforgettable moment,” said Parfit later.
Eventually, the couple came to champion Luna’s need to have social contact with humans, shedding the mantle of journalistic objectivity, because it seemed the right thing to do. They were aware of orcas’ large brain capacities, and their personal experience with this one convinced them that “maybe he had empathy.”
This realization rubs against old-fashioned scientific approaches that insist on never projecting human traits onto animal subjects—anthropomorphizing them—but Parfit believed that empathy was only logical, considering the highly social nature of orcas in the wild. “That seemed like a very human thing to expect in an animal,” he later wrote in his deeply felt account of the Luna saga, The Lost Whale. “But not really. Scientific studies have shown that something like empathy is at work in several species. And when I thought about the social nature of orcas, it turned out to be obvious. If an orca has social needs, he also has to have something that at least resembles empathy.”
It was, tragically, also Luna’s eventual undoing. On March 15, 2006, he was playing with a tugboat he knew well, an ocean tug named the General Jackson, when he got pulled into the propeller and was killed almost instantly. His body sank to the bottom of Nootka Sound. Luna’s death made headlines throughout the Northwest, and there was an outpouring of grief from whale advocates around the world. Three months later, his human friends in Nootka Sound put together a memorial for the whale. Flowers were cast on the waters of the Sound, and tears joined them in a last, tender farewell.
&
nbsp; Michael Parfit summed up the thoughts of many of the people who had been touched by the whale. “What the experience with Luna gave us is a sense of the fellowship of the wild that we’re part of—that sense that we’re in this together with these beings who are out there longing and suffering and expecting joy and going through something that is not so different from us, and yet is, in amazingly mysterious ways that we can only approach in an empathetic way, but not a way we can actually pin down,” he told a radio interviewer.
“We’re looking at these [animals’] lives and we describe them as being inferior to us, when in fact their lives are so rich and complex and their awareness of living is so present,” he added. “In a very small sense, what Luna was saying is [people] are not paying attention to what he was asking for. We need to learn how to respect these other members of the fellowship and try to learn what they need.”
• • •
One June morning I went for a paddle on the west side of San Juan Island, again not expecting to encounter any whales. It was early, before many boats were out, and it was a classic paddle; the water was quiet and glasslike, and there was a grey fog shrouding the water and the shoreline. Gnarly, red-amber madronas spread their strawberry limbs into the air along the rocky shore, like ancient sentinels reaching up to pluck a cluster of green from the mist. The only sound was the gentle lapping of the waves on the granite cliff wall, the slurping in the kelp beds.
I spotted the pod of whales approaching from a distance. The initial group that went by me was about a half-mile out in the channel, and they appeared to be in transit mode, chugging along rhythmically at about 15 knots, rising and falling in a predictably rapid pace. Nonetheless, I tucked into a cove along the rocky shore, amid a cluster of bull kelp, throwing one of the fronds across the deck of the kayak as an anchor, and rolled out my hydrophone, hoping I could listen in as they passed by. I had learned long before that the sheer cliff that drops away below the surface of the water along this stretch of the island makes for some interesting acoustics.
The first group wasn’t making much in the way of sounds, and I dropped my headphones around my neck, waiting to see what else might be out there. Bald eagles are plentiful along here, as are harbor seals. Occasionally you will see river otters and minks as well, and there were probably going to be more whales. You will almost never see a lone orca in these waters, and even threesomes are unusually small groups. These are very social animals. Their home is wherever their fellow whales are.
“Kooosh!” Once again, I heard the whales before I saw them, but this time they were close; a group of four whales, in next to shore, hunting, was coming just around the bend from where I was tucked away. There were two males, a female, and a calf.
The female, I would ascertain later, was a 17-year-old J-pod orca named Polaris (her official number is J-28). She’s readily identifiable by the notch (probably from a boat propeller) in her dorsal fin, and the calf was her first baby, a female numbered J46. At that time, the calf was only a year old, but that also meant the baby was now old enough to be given a name. Mortality rates are high among resident orca calves, for a number of reasons, so the scientists who study them don’t give them names until they survive their first year. They had named this little one Star.
The calf J46, aka Star (left), nuzzles with her mother, J28, aka Polaris.
It was an apt name. Like many calves, she was playful and curious. She kept heading in the direction of my kayak, and her mother kept intervening, distracting her to other, more appropriate interests, such as salmon.
They appeared, in fact, to be hunting; Polaris was lingering near the surface, seemingly intent on her prey, and then she made a quick turn and disappeared beneath the surface. Star followed, and all was quiet for a moment, except for the two large males who lurked on the perimeter, like playground guards patrolling. Then Polaris and her baby burst together out of the water, rolling and rubbing. The mother appeared to have a salmon in her mouth, and as they rubbed closely in the water, she appeared to be sharing it with her calf. Then they both submerged again.
When they reappeared forty seconds or so later, it was to resume the close-contact play in which they were indulging. Star was rubbing all over her mama, and the mama in turn was nudging the calf about playfully. At one point the mother nudged her rostrum out of the water in an extended spyhop, while the little one rose up alongside her, half out of the water, and peered about, creating the brief illusion that she was every bit as big as her mother.
It was a tremendous and touching display of affection. As I watched them, I recalled my then-fading experiences as a first-time father with a new baby, now grown; how she had craved the physical contact, how she had loved to crawl all over me, and how I had loved it in return. However, that kind of bonding occurs at a visceral level, and it’s universal to humans and animals alike. Polaris and Star were being profoundly human and profoundly wild as well. For me, at least in that moment, experiencing that kind of deep common ground with a creature in the wild did not make them more human. It reminded me, instead, that we are all animals, and that is not always a bad thing. Love and affection, loyalty and kindness, perseverance and mercy: these are things we know in animals, too, after all.
Familial, or at least pod, loyalty was at work that morning, too. The two males who appeared to be guarding this twosome kept lurking in the vicinity. One of them, a big 19-year-old named Mike, numbered J26, with a fully sprouted, five-foot dorsal fin, came swimming closely past my kayak, wrapping his dorsal in the kelp fronds near my boat and then swimming on, as if to remind me that I really wanted to stay tucked where I was. I took the suggestion.
Mike’s brother Keet, who was born in 1996, was the other male hanging off the shore. These whales were not part of Polaris’s direct family (Princess Angeline’s J-17 matriline), but they were part of a subpod that historically accompanied those orcas, namely, that was headed by the 39-year-old matriarch, Slick, aka J16. They probably were hunting, too; the run of Chinook salmon that spring was strong and plentiful. Keet seemed more shy and wary or perhaps just more intent on the day’s meal.
After a while, the group moved on northward, following at their own pace the fast-moving pod that had led them this way. Then they passed around the next bend in the cliffside waterline, and I could hear them no longer.
I tucked away my hydrophone and my camera and pulled out into the back-eddying current that was now beginning to swirl. It pulled me back into camp a little while later, where my wife and daughter were waiting with coffee and breakfast and welcome smiles. Fiona is too big to squirm all over my chest, head, and shoulders, as she once did, but she still gave me a warm hug that morning, and I could not help but revel in it, like Polaris and Star. Some things are universal.
Drawing by Uko Gorter
CHAPTER Four
The Ancient Ones
IT WAS NATSILANE, THE TLINGIT SAY, WHO FIRST MADE KILLER WHALES. Natsilane was an ancient tribesman who faced a problem that remains ubiquitous even today: how to fit in with the family you marry into, especially your brothers-in-law.
The problem was that Natsilane was the finest hunter in the tribe into which he had married, and everyone knew it. Originally from another village, he had joined his wife’s tribe to make her happy. However, his skills at hunting sea lions, a Tlingit meat staple, were widely renowned. He was known to be the first to leap from the canoes onto the rocks where the big brutes would haul themselves out, and he often accounted for half or more of the tribe’s haul by himself.
Unfortunately for Natsilane, his wife’s brothers had widely been considered the tribe’s best hunters before his arrival, and they did not like playing second fiddle now. They would taunt him for trying to show them up. After years of building pride, they eventually schemed of a way to rid themselves of their annoyingly skilled brother-in-law. Out hunting in their canoes one day, they let him make that great leap on his own. Then, they steered away from the rocks where Natsilane now stood, after which the
y simply paddled away, telling those in the canoe who protested that winds had made it too dangerous to rescue him. Thus abandoned in the middle of the sea, Natsilane was approached by a sea lion who told him the sea lion chief wished to speak to him. The creature took him to the realm of the sea lion people under the sea. While there, he removed his own spear from the son of the sea lion king and healed the child, whereupon he was returned magically to his village, imbued with vast supernatural powers. He kept his return quiet and swore his wife to secrecy, then set about wreaking his revenge.
Natsilane’s vengeance took the form of the carvings he made in the great trees he found near the shore where he went to work. One can readily imagine they looked rather like the great totem carvings of killer whales we see on Northwest poles today, except that when Natsilane put them in the water, they came alive and became killer whales. Or at least they tried; the first two carvings, made from spruce, failed, but the third, made of yellow cedar, became a great orca unlike any ever seen. Natsilane ordered it out to sea.
His murderous brothers-in-law were out hunting that day when they encountered the great beast, who destroyed their great canoe and then drowned the conspirators by preventing them from reaching shore. However, when the creature returned, Natsilane commanded it to refrain from such violence in the future and to act as a friend to men, assisting them where it might, and indeed, the great beast was seen from shore from time to time. It would bring freshly killed seal or halibut and leave it on the shore, and a feast would follow. In later years, more of the blackfish would appear. The legend holds that Natsilane was seen in his later years, riding pairs of the blackfish, a foot on the back of each: orca skiing, as it were.
Of Orcas and Men Page 7