The Whale’s Gift

By James Dorsey - I heard the Orca long before seeing them. On the flat waters of the Johnstone Strait sound skims along like a stone. You can hear a blow miles away. In late August salmon are in town and have set the upper echelons of the food chain in motion. Orca eat Salmon, and the Inside Passage is a twenty four-hour cafe. For those interested in whales, this is the place to be.

Some call them Blackfish, or Killer. Old salts still refer to them as Grampus, a name me attributable to their white chins. Orcinus Orca is a highly social mammal who cares for young and old, staying together in the same pod for life. They are playful, highly vocal and rarely aggressive for a ten-ton carnivore.

Until the early eighties they were routinely shot at by fishermen or captured to serve life sentences in theme parks. Fortunately the powers that be finally realized them to be a highly evolved species and today they are protected. In captivity they might live twenty years. Here in the wild, they can reach eighty.

I had been paddling for four days and had seen them far off each day. They are known to approach kayaks, and had done so to me in the past, but it had been years since one was really close.

On my first kayak trip I had been no more than a mile from this very spot, on my first day out, when a pod of three transients came at me like a black and white freight train. They must have been doing twenty knots when I first spotted them about a mile away, and in the time it took to pull out a camera, they were almost in my face. The two females broke towards shore and avoided me entirely, but the bull came straight on. His dorsal looked about ten feet tall that morning, and when he surfaced in front of my boat, his mouth was wide open and all I saw were tongue and teeth. I squeezed the shutter and got a shot of him, but have no memory of doing so. Taking the photo was an instinctual reaction. That first encounter was so frightening, it all comes back to me in small flashes.

Yet it was that very encounter that brought me back. I was so intrigued by this monster that could easily have killed me, yet only gave me a curious once over, that I have spent the past several years seeking out similar encounters. The more I learned about Orca, the more I had to know.

I have found these whales to be at least as intelligent as dogs if not more so. They have a highly developed language, care for their young and old, mourn their dead and coordinate their hunts in a manner that implies a rather complex thought process.

Orca live in a structured society. The Alpha female rules the pod and the Alpha bull protects it. They leave the pod to mate, but return when finished and spend their entire life together. These mammals are very high on the food chain, and not because of brute force. They think! And that makes them fascinating.

I have never heard or read of an attack on man or kayak, even though transients have been known to come on shore to take a mammal for a meal. Aside from the initial shock of that first encounter, I have never felt threatened or endangered at all in their presence. I have shared their domain for several years now and feel at ease amongst them. That is why I have returned once again, hoping for yet another close encounter.

Four days in a kayak is a long time when you are over six feet tall. I was stretching out a cramp in my leg and taking a drink of water when I heard the familiar “Whoosh.” A large black dorsal was coming right at me from three o’clock, about five hundred yards out.

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