Eva Saulitis - Into Great Silence: A Memoir of Discovery and Loss among Vanishing Orcas

into great silence

A MEMOIR OF DISCOVERY AND LOSS AMONG VANISHING ORCAS

Eva Saulitis

Beacon Press, Boston

For Eyak, for the last ones, and for Wilderness

Time held me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Dylan Thomas

Allison Gaylord /Nuna Technologies 2012

Contents

Chugach Transient Family Tree

A Note about Names

Some names in this book have been changed to protect vulnerable habitats and human histories.

While the book is true to the data I collected, and conveys all that is known scientifically of the Chugach transients, it is principally a memoir, a work of contemplation, not science or reportage. It abides by naturalist William Beebes call for softening facts with quiet meditation, leavening science with thoughts of the sheer joy of existence, and in this case, the sheer pain of loss as well. My use of names reflects that intention. In the scientific literature, the Chugach transients are called the AT1 transient population. My friend David Grimes pointed out that I might read their scientific moniker metaphysically as At One, and yet I decided that for the purposes of this book, the whales needed a familiar name, a family name. They belong to a specific place once called Chugach Sound. They are linked to specific indigenous culturesthe Chugachmiut and the Eyakthrough oral tradition. Hence, the Chugach transients. Hence, Eyak, a central whale in the narrative. Individual Chugach transients in our identification catalog, and in scientific papers, go by alphanumeric names (for example, Eyak is AT1; Chenega is AT9). As is common in long-term field studies, those names have, over the years, been supplanted by familiar names, and the latter are the ones I use here.

Finally, I use the common name orca, at the risk of annoying my scientific colleagues, who prefer killer whale. They argue that orca sugarcoats the predatory nature of the animal, invoking the captive hand-fed version, performing tricks in tanks for crowds. I see their point, but decided that the essence of the Chugach transients, which are no more, no less killers than any other carnivore, is better reflected by orca, derived from the name of a Roman god of the underworld.

Prologue: The Last One

Like the others the last one fell into its shadow.
It fell into its shadow on the water.
They took it away its shadow stayed on the water.

W.S. Merwin, from The Last One

Before I knew there was such thing as species, much less one that was endangered, I understood extinction. When I was nine years old, I understood extinction not with my mind, but with my heart. Aptly, I received this instruction not at school, but after, on The Last of the Curlews , an ABC Afterschool Special episode based on a novel by Fred Bodsworth. I dont remember the films plot. Only that at some point, there was one pair of curlews left. I vaguely remember a father and son who debated whether or not to shoot a curlew. I recall with clarity the last one, the last Eskimo curlew on earth, circling and calling above the tundra. In the birds own memory, I imagined a sky darkened and drummed to life by bodies, wings and the tr tr tr -ing of flight song, an era when it migrated between the Canadian Arctic and Patagonia with millions of other Eskimo curlews. I can still summon my ache for that last curlew; almost forty years later, it throbs in my chest.

When I was twenty-three, I saw my first orca, a lone female. That day, I had no inkling that I would study her kin for my entire adult life, that she was already one of the last ones. Fresh out of college, Id taken a job at a fish hatchery in Prince William Sound, Alaska. One blustery winter day, out for a skiff ride, I spotted a black fin amid gray waves. A few minutes later, a whoosh near the skiff startled me. I turned to see a wind-flattened blow, the fin rising, the arch of a flank emerging and sliding back under the water. Then she disappeared, as if the rough sea had swallowed her. I looked everywhere, but she was gone.

Twenty-five years later, Im still searching for that whale, for whats left of her family. For me, watching The Last of the Curlews was what Susan Cerulean calls an origin moment. That day, when I realized human beings could eliminate a kind of bird from the earth, my assumptions about the world overturned.

A lifetime of origin moments leads to this one. Its September 2011. I sit on our research boat, Natoa , scanning a familiar shoreline for orca blows. The tide is low. A raft of sea otters rests near Squire Point. For many seasons, I followed small groups of orcas called Chugach transients past this point as they hunted for harbor seals. Sometimes harbor seals hauled out on Squire Point to rest, or hunkered in the shallows alongside the rock to hide from passing orcas. Though I see no seals sprawled on the rock today, I know orcas might appear at any moment. They are like that, unpredictable in their appearances and disappearances.

And so are stories we tell about them. Take today. As we idle along the point, Craig, my partner in research and in life, recalls that thirty-five years ago, with a cadre of volunteer observers on the bluff top on Squire Island, he watched Chugach transients swim along this shoreline. A young field assistant, eye pressed to the lens of a spotting scope, shouted: Look, the orcas are playing with a porpoise! That evening, after hiking back down from the bluff to their tents on a beach we still call Whale Camp, they found the severed lungs, heart, and head of a porpoise calf washed up on shore. I tried to preserve the skull, but the porpoise was so young, the bones just fell apart, Craig says. With Craig, Ive studied orcas for twenty-five years, nearly half my life, and Ive never heard that story before. What I know, after all this time, about the whale called orca, arlluk , aglu , blackfish, killer whaleis a lot like that.

Now our boat rounds the bend of Squire Island, and Whale Camp beach slides into view. Many times, Chugach transients swam past Whale Camp when I lived there. Often they startled my field assistant and me from our tasks. Some still pass this way. But it wont always be so. I force myself to write these words: the Chugach transients are going extinct. They are leaving the earth under my watch. There will, perhaps in my lifetime, be a last one. I type the words, and that old hurt I felt for the Eskimo curlew throbs. How do I accept the reality of the word extinction? Forty years later, do I understand with my heart, much less my head, what it means?

Last summer, from an unexpected angle, I got closer to understanding the concept when I edged up tono, was shoved towardthe possibility of my own extinction. From a sickbed, my laptop open on my lap, cell phone on the coverlet beside me, I followed the movements of Chenega, one of the last Chugach transient matriarchs, on a computer screen. I stared as a digitized map of Prince William Sound drew itself, then displayed the points and lines of her nighttime travels. There. Off Point Helen. I clicked on the biggest dot, the most recent satellite hit: 4:30 a.m., heading south. The dots told me only that much, not whether she traveled alone. She had been with her companions, Iktua and Mike, when Craig had tagged her the night before.

A sea breeze blew in, and I looked up, past a couch and a coffee table piled with get-well cards, to the open window. There my eyes met not the Pacific, but the Atlantic; not Prince William Sound, but Cape Cod Bay, where wind clawed white marks on the indigo. For the first summer in twenty-four years, I was not on Prince William Sound studying orcas. I clicked on the link to the Iridium satellite phone website, typed a message to Craig and our friend Cy, who was filling in for me on the boat: Gmorning. AT9 off pt helen 0430 heading s, xo E .