Into Great Silence: A Memoir of Discovery and Loss Among Vanishing Orcas by Eva Saulitis

Author:Eva Saulitis [Saulitis, Eva]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Nature, Animals, Environmentalists & Naturalists, Ecology, Marine Life
ISBN: 9780807014356
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chenega attacks an adult Dall’s porpoise in lower Knight Island Passage, summer 1990. (Eva Saulitis)

Part 3. Survivors

26. A Human Silence

On April 17, 1990, Cordova bush pilot Steve Ranney, flying over Beartrap Bay in northeastern Prince William Sound, saw from his plane the body of an orca floating upside-down. Beartrap Bay was largely ice-covered, with just a bit of open water at its shallow head. There the carcass drifted and eventually beached. Craig and a colleague flew to Beartrap to perform a necropsy. By then the carcass was rotting. They found nothing in the stomach, but looking back on that day, Craig can’t be sure they’d examined every cranny. As we’d discover over the coming years, an orca’s stomach is a mass of pouches. Claws, whiskers, flippers, and skin collect deep inside, and are easy to miss. One thing was clear: the whale hadn’t eaten anything recently. It was a female, twenty-two feet long. From the double nick on her dorsal fin, Craig recognized her as Berg, twenty-one years old, in her prime. He saw no bullet wounds, no obvious cause of death. Aromatic hydrocarbons, crude oil’s most lethal components, don’t accumulate in blubber, like PCBs and DDTs; they damage tissues like lungs, stomach, and liver. No funding had been allocated for the expensive necropsies and toxicology to quantify those effects.

The math of Berg’s loss equaled more than one. The loss represented an unknown quantity: the number of potential calves over her lifetime. And for each female calf she might have borne, the loss of all her potential offspring. Craig wondered if Berg might have been trapped by ice and shallow water. I wondered why she’d been alone. I remembered my encounters with Icy and Berg the previous summer, the ease with which they’d navigated ice floes to hunt seals. What did it mean for her to die that way? Cause of death: undetermined.

12 May 1990

The border between water and air dissolves as we enter a fogbank. Heading south toward Whale Camp on Lucky Star, towing Whale 1, here and there an island peak suddenly appears, reminder that 5000 feet above us, the sky is perfectly clear. Only one otter and one sea lion so far. Sounds intensify—gull shrieks, porpoise blows. When I spotted cormorants, I thought “survivors.” Every living thing I see is a survivor, having come through the spill and then the stress of winter after. But there’s much I can’t see: all the oil that remains, buried under gravel, sunk to the sea floor; all the weakened animals; all the animals that didn’t make it. I think of David’s friend’s dream, of the spirit animals hovering above Knight Island. What other orcas besides Berg are in that number, we don’t know. Nor who the survivors will be. Sun pierces a thin spot in the fog, glints on water. The water shades from dove gray to gray-blue-white and back to dove. The fog closes the thin spot, the air cools. The dampness penetrates my jacket, fingers under my hat brim, slips under my collar, wraps a tendril around my neck.

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