Killing Keiko

by Mark A. Simmons

  The two could not have been less alike. Brad, smaller of stature and cerebral, had a more academic poise compared to that of Jeff’s rugged spirit. A focused seriousness permeated the immediate vicinity as he tinkered around Keiko or within the scattered mess of the Bassar storage building, which served as a makeshift lab. In the few and short interactions I shared with Brad, it seemed apparent that he did not take well to my particular brand of humor. He was often unresponsive to my descriptions of the tag as “the Volkswagen” or asking why we didn’t just put a bright orange flag on Keiko, “Ya know, like the ones on a tricycle?” Lacking much in common, I often chided him with a dry humor in place of intellectual exchange. Brad didn’t care much for the affronts posed at the expense of his baby. I couldn’t blame him. At the end of it all he had worked tirelessly, determined to perfect the sat-tag housing.

  The concern was not about the device slowing Keiko; it was all about reducing the migration of the tag. We knew it would eventually work its way off of Keiko no matter how well-designed, but the shape and location of the tag on his dorsal fin had everything to do with how long it would last. When swimming, water relentlessly pushing the tag backward meant that over time and distances, the tag and the pins would ever so gradually cut a path out the backside of his dorsal fin, leaving a swath of tissue damage in their wake.

  The tag itself would sandwich the lower backside of Keiko’s dorsal fin. The two sides of the tag would be joined by surgical-grade titanium pins approximately a centimeter in diameter. Given the size of the tracking device there would need to be three pins and therefore three holes drilled through Keiko’s dorsal. Even at the trailing edge, so massive in size was his fin that the more anterior holes would pass through almost three inches of tissue. To start, we planned to remove the tag whenever Keiko was inside the bay thus preserving the integrity of the tissue at the place of attachment. In time, if Keiko stayed at sea, we hoped the design and stout connection would hold in place for more than a year, far longer than other similar tags of the time had achieved.

  Tracking Keiko’s whereabouts after a potential release was of paramount importance in evaluating whether he was thriving or not thriving. Emphasizing the importance, the ability to adequately track Keiko was also a clear requirement of the release permit. Without the tag in place, we would have no permit and no chance of getting Keiko away from the blasting. Just the same, the prospect of drilling through his massive dorsal fin with a handyman drill, and attaching a device the size of a small laptop was a procedure ill-suited for the faint of heart.

  Weeks prior, we worked to familiarize Keiko with the unusual sensations of a battery-powered Dewalt drill, the very instrument that would be utilized to bore through the cartilage-like tissue in his dorsal fin. In these approximations, we held the body of the drill against his fin at the tag location allowing Keiko to experience the minute vibrations transmitted by operating the drill. We steadily increased the amount of time he was exposed to the odd sensation, reinforcing him for maintaining a calm disposition. As expected, the rehearsals were nothing for Keiko. By this time he had become apathetic toward the variety of strange contraptions his human counterparts often placed on his body. However, his relaxed acceptance of the drill practice did nothing to bolster our confidence. The actual drilling through his dorsal would be a far cry different than any simulation we could invent. Knowing this, we expected a struggle. In preparation for that struggle, we intended to forcibly restrain the 10,000-pound animal within the confining space of the small medical pen.

  How does one restrain a nearly five-ton killer whale? Truthfully, it cannot be done, especially if the subject of the restraint is wholly unwilling. Rather, the idea is to provide the illusion of restraint, the “feeling” of being so thoroughly ensnared that escape is seemingly unattainable. Create helplessness. To do this, we would separate Keiko to the medical pool, eliminating any outward path of escape. We would then slowly position a killer whalesized net lining the medical pool by snaking the net down one side along the bottom and up the other.

  Advancing the plan, and while holding Keiko to one side of the medical pool, we would carefully draw up the net until finally it cocooned his massive body, supporting him from underneath and snugly wrapping his sides, as if a giant killer whale taco. The sensation of the net around his body, namely his head, flukes and pectoral fins (his steerage and drive shaft), should metamorphose the whale to a condition of apathy. In this position, Keiko would relax, the precarious and involuntary restraint further insured by the training staff taking every step available to encourage and prolong a calm disposition. In order to carry out our plan, we had all the muscle we could recruit present on the pen that morning, including the indefatigable Smari Harðarson. Unaware and apart from human machinations, Keiko had other ideas.

  Separating Keiko to the medical pool and lining the pool with our trapping net went without a hitch. We immediately put Smari and Greg in the water in full dive gear. They would keep the bottom of the net from billowing which otherwise gave Keiko an easy out. The rest of us topside were charged with seining the net inch by inch until we had it, and Keiko, fully retracted. So it went. Keiko was held in a lineup position, parallel to the west side of the med pool along the surface. Robin, Jeff, Brian, Blair, Tom and I began crawling the net inward, heaving the sizable mesh and draping its excess onto the deck at our feet. As his med pool halved in size, Keiko, long familiar with nets, began a slow familiar dance with his old friend. He was not alarmed. He did not panic. He merely took a preparative breath, then submerging, slinked straight to the bottom. In doing so he was supremely calm, almost nonchalant.

  On deck, those of us manhandling the net could feel we were on the losing end of a tug-of-war taking place somewhere in the turbid depths of the medical pool. Imagining what might be transpiring on the bottom, we were reluctant to put our backs into the struggle. After all, we had two divers in the water. However, releasing the net would only make a potential problem turn into a real emergency. Any slack afforded could just as easily give cause to a mess of whale and divers entangled in a tightly wound and unforgiving ball of tensioned havoc. In those scant few moments, the devastation that would result if Keiko decided to thrash and spin within the trapping mesh played like a nightmare unfolding in our minds. It seemed we were walking on the very edges of our worst fears. At any moment the pall of uncertainty would emerge into a catastrophic upwelling of white water, divers, net and whale.

  Somehow fortune favored us that morning. More accurately, Keiko’s experience in avoiding nets paid unexpected dividends for our group of wary stakeholders. By now, the opposite topline of the encircling net had divided the medical pool in half; the worthless excesses lumped at our feet on the west side of the deck. Shortly after the mysterious goings-on at the bottom of the medical pool, Keiko emerged at the surface on the east side, clearly free of our ingenious compass.

  “What the heck?” I blurted.

  “Can anyone see Smari?” Robin called out. Greg had come to the surface just moments before, obviously the wiser.

  “Greg, where’s Smari? Jeff repeated Robin’s concern.

  “I can’t see anything down there. It’s so stirred up,” Greg replied.

  As his words still hung in the air, Smari popped his head from the surface on the south end of the medical pool, like Keiko, outside of the net. He looked both frustrated and astonished.

  “He got out,” Smari said, as if he were the first to know.

  “How did he …?” I was stumped. The entrapping net was overly large, easily covering the extents of the medical pool. We had carefully maneuvered the net completely enclosing the entire pool, no corner left unanswered. I couldn’t imagine how Keiko got through.

  “Smari, you and Greg go ahead and get out,” Robin urgently instructed.

  We stood poolside, for the moment leaving the impotent catch net loosely waving in the light chop.

  “Let’s just get the net out before someone gets hurt. This isn’t going
to work. He’s too net-smart,” Jeff said.

  At that, we pulled the useless net clear of the medical pool, piling it in a balled-up line along the west deck. Keiko floated on the far side making no attempt to solicit our attention. It felt almost as if he had gone to his corner, awaiting round two. Smari came over the bridge and approached the brain trust leaning forward as he walked. He was still wearing his full dive gear.

  “Holy crap, man!” he said, his Icelandic pronunciation making “man” sound overly innocent. Gesturing out a very small circle with his hand, he continued. “He found a tiny gap at the edge and pushed the net and lifted it up. I tried to keep him back. I was pushing on his nose and trying to keep the net down, but, man, he just came through.”

  Smari was competitive. He didn’t like being the guy that let the whale get away. The outlines of his dive mask on his face and reddened eyes lent to his frustrated appearance. “I can’t believe he could get his body through that tiny hole,” he said, as much sheepish as exasperated.

  “Ohmygosh, dude, you’re nuts! You can’t beat a whale.” I found the prospect humorous, but only because we were safely clear of the potential mess. Smari’s one-on-one battle with Keiko only evidenced his inexperience. We were very lucky. Once gone that far, it was fruitless to attempt to forestall Keiko’s escape, and the effort to do so was gracefully excused by the all-too forgiving whale. Any other animal, and we might be cutting a dead body from the net right then, human, whale or both.

  “Why don’t we just ask him to hold voluntarily?” Jeff proposed. “He’s been pretty good with letting us work on him in the past.”

  As always, with a tone of optimism, Jeff offered the path of least resistance. Admittedly, Robin and I had been proponents of netting Keiko for the procedure, but then again, Keiko was no ordinary whale. His passive acceptance of what would piss off an otherwise normal whale lent to our initial misdirection.

  “It’s about the only option we have. There’s no way we’re going to get him in the net after that. He beat us, and he knows it,” I replied. “He pulled that move like a pro.”

  So it was, we would simply ask Keiko to line up at the surface, hold him in position and allow the doc to do what he needed. A short while later, having allowed the atmosphere to settle, I stepped up to the medical pool and asked Keiko over. All seemed well enough. We lined him up alongside the HDPE pipe of the west medical pool. Here, Tom and Tracy took position at Keiko’s head. They would keep his focus and periodically reinforce him for staying in position. Brian and I moved down to his dorsal. The massive girth of his body required that we pull him inward, anchoring his midsection as close to the pool edge as possible. This enabled Lanny to reach Keiko’s dorsal fin from poolside. Hunched over, our knees pressing into the Chemgrate decking, Brian took the leading edge and I the trailing edge of Keiko’s dorsal. Lanny squeezed between us, sitting comfortably on the deck with his boots resting on the HDPE pipe.

  First, he injected Keiko’s fin with a numbing agent, likely carbocaine. This took some time. Injecting solution into the very dense tough tissue required no small amount of hand strength. The grip required to keep Keiko’s dorsal fin where we needed it was already cramping both my hands. Lanny applied the local anesthetic on the two sides in a scattered pattern surrounding the three areas to be drilled. Normally, five or more minutes is needed to allow the numbing agent to fully take effect. By the time Lanny finished the last of his shots, already ten minutes had passed since the first. He asked for the template and the drill and went straight to work.

  Earlier Jeff had gotten in the water, propping himself on the outside of Keiko, in line with Lanny, the dorsal fin between them. He supported himself on Keiko’s back, his left arm hooked onto the front edge of the whale’s dorsal fin. Submerged to his chest, the air in his splash suit was forced to the top like a half-empty and rolled-up tube of toothpaste. He looked uncomfortable and not a little ridiculous. Jeff would help keep the template in place and guide Lanny on navigating the drill’s alignment straight through the dorsal. It was important that the hole match on both sides.

  Robin stood just behind Lanny preparing the drill, which was equipped with an expensive diamond-edge bit, though nothing different than what can be purchased at The Home Depot. After sterilizing the bit Robin handed the drill to Lanny. The infamous doctor did not hesitate. His approach was shocking … I had taken more precaution when building a deck on my house the previous summer. The razor-sharp bit dove right through the outer skin layer with no noticeable effect on Keiko, who sat almost motionless. As Lanny got into the heavier cartilage, the progress slowed, but there was no grinding sound, nothing grotesque about it. It appeared and sounded like drilling through wet balsa wood. Within seconds Lanny had completely perforated two and a half inches of Keiko’s dorsal. The first hole was the more forward of the three attachment points. But Lanny had missed the mark. The path of the drilled hole did not exit in line with the intended target on the other side. He was off by more than a centimeter. By then the tiny vessels within the connective tissue had begun to bleed. Crimson red flowed steadily from the gaping hole, down Keiko’s dorsal and into the water. Diluted and spreading within the water column, the watery red cloud appeared as if it were a cheap special effect in a third-rate horror film.

  Lanny moved the template higher and remarked the same pin location. Without a word he began drilling again. Though we all shared the same inward trepidations, no one questioned Lanny’s quickness to pierce yet another hole in Keiko’s dorsal fin. For the most part, we all expected that the veterinarian, of all people, would naturally espouse more exacting restraint than the average Joe. After completing the second hole, again missing the alignment, Lanny began boring out the same in an attempt to fix the erroneous path. At this Keiko’s patience began to dissipate. Whether he was feeling pain or just curious, it was impossible to know, but it was abundantly clear he wasn’t going to hold his position much longer. I was relieved. Lanny’s come-what-may approach to the task cast an air of astonishment and disgust among those of us watching the crass process in which he callously drilled and drilled again.

  Of his own volition, Keiko dropped his body submerging his dorsal and turned, sitting more upright in the water and directly in front of Lanny, who remained in the same sitting position at poolside. I stood and looked at Tom and Tracy, who had nothing more to offer than an impotent shrug. They had done all they could do to keep Keiko lined up, but he had reached the limit of his patience regardless. Still uncertain and more than a little perturbed at Lanny’s handling of the “surgery,” none of us was quick to offer direction. Amidst our pensive hesitations, Lanny reached back into one of Keiko’s buckets and tossed a single herring into the whale’s mouth.

  “We need to break,” I was instantly pissed. “We need to break Now!”

  “What do you want to do?” Lanny asked.

  “I don’t care, but you need to step away from the pool right now. We need to clear the area.” I stepped back, trying to draw the entourage surrounding Keiko with me.

  The entirety of the last twenty minutes coursed through me at once. I hadn’t made any attempt to stop it. I was angry with myself. I was vexed by Lanny’s cavalier approach to what should have been a precise and calculated procedure. To make matters worse, he had just reinforced Keiko after Keiko had prematurely ended the session of his own accord, an incorrect behavior to be sure. That was not the only offense. Lanny was no one that needed to be associated with primary reinforcement and further, gave no heed to the behavioral regimens and principles we had worked on for over a year. The doctor acted innocent at the gesture, but he knew exactly what he was doing. It was a passive-aggressive affront toward everything I represented.

  “He’s sitting calmly,” Lanny insisted, as if to justify the slight.

  I ignored it, looking instead at Robin, who knew I was about to explode.

  “Let’s get everybody in the research shack, away from the pool and out of sight from Keiko,” Robin interve
ned.

  As everyone moved inside, Robin and I stepped around the south end of the research shack. He knew I was aggravated and swiftly created a diversion by requesting my input on the next steps. “What do you want to do?”

  “I can’t believe that shit.” I wasn’t ready to answer yet, I just wanted to vent. “We can’t do that again, and if he touches another bucket I’m going to put it over his head.”

  “He won’t and I won’t let him,” Robin assured me, his tone was casual.

  “What about drilling willy-nilly … like he has no idea what he’s doing?”

  “Jeff and I will talk about it. I’ll suggest that Jeff finish.”

  “Well, we’ve already made a mockery of this entire situation. We need to step back up with minimal people, who know what the hell they’re doing and keep this short. Even if that means doing it five more times,” I said.

  “Let’s get inside and talk about it with Charles, Jeff and Lanny,” said Robin.

  Back inside, the mass of bodies shifted uncomfortably about the confines of the research shack, which was not intended for a group of this size. All of a sudden it was hot. Coming from outside and in full gear to a heated and overpopulated trailer made me directly aware of the bulky splash suit. I felt like a kid in six layers of snow gear that hadn’t even left the house yet. My lingering angst contributed to the discomfort in no small part. In the close quarters of the shack, Lanny started in, poking the bear.

  “Every project like this needs at least one genius and one asshole.” Lanny said smugly.

  He knew I would be easy to unravel. I welcomed the liberty. “Good, then you can be the asshole.” After the briefest pause, I finished the assignments. “I’ll be the genius.” I turned facing Lanny as I made the comment, pulling the tight rubber seal of the splash suit away from my neck in the process.