IN OCTOBER 1984, I followed an orca matriarch known as Scimitar into the network of waterways between Kingcome and Knight Inlets, known as the Broughton Archipelago or Musgamagw Dzawada’enuxw territory. It was a cool rainy day. My husband, Robin Morton, a local documentary filmmaker whom I’d met during my second summer of research in British Columbia, steered our inflatable, while our three-year-old son played under the makeshift canopy over the bow and I kept my eyes on the whales. For now we lived on a boat which we chartered out to others to make a living, but we were also hunting for a place to use as a home base. We wanted whales, a few neighbour children for our son to grow up with and, with luck, mail service.
I watched the whales as they split into two groups at the western entrance to Fife Sound. Scimitar, the matriarch and a grandmother, took one group to the north side, as her daughter and grandchildren veered off to hug the southern shore. The sons went up the middle, leaving the more productive shorelines, where salmon tended to school, for the females and young ones.
The blows of the whales reached up to meet the low-lying clouds and the dark green water, the colour of an ocean rich with plankton, mirrored the steep green hillsides. I held the chart under the canopy, out of the rain, and inched my finger along our route; there were so many islands I was afraid we would be lost if I lost my place on the chart. There were water and whales everywhere and, while I was unaware of it at the time, a river of life flowing under the boat carrying my small family. Chum salmon, also known as dog salmon because they grow large curved canine teeth during spawning, were returning to the seven rivers of this archipelago, carrying the energy of the sunlight that hits the open waters of the Pacific Ocean. Sunlight allows plankton to bloom, small fish and shrimp-like organisms eat the plankton, salmon eat these little creatures and when their clock rings time to spawn, the fish head for the coast, carrying this energy up the rivers to their spawning grounds.
We followed the whales as they foraged the length of Fife Sound and then entered what looked like a gigantic amphitheatre, ringed by mountains that rose all around us. My chart showed this was the crossroads for the four major waterways—Kingcome Inlet, Tribune Channel, Cramer Pass and Fife Sound—that were the spokes of the wheel of this archipelago. The whales called to each other with the distinctive F1 call they used to synchronize their movements. The three strands of the family drew together and headed straight for Tribune Channel, which circles Gilford Island—the marine access used by migrating salmon to reach the Ahta, the Kakweiken and the other rivers of Knight Inlet. I would learn in later years that the A-clan pods of the northern resident orca, which Scimitar belonged to, often used Tribune Channel as a place to sleep. Orca keep swimming as they sleep and Tribune is apparently a good place to do this with its deep quiet waters.
It was turning to evening and Robin and I needed to find a campsite before dark, which wasn’t easy. There weren’t many spots flat enough to erect a tent that also had the right kind of bay to anchor the boat. As I scanned the shoreline through binoculars I saw a plume of smoke coming from what looked like a floating house. The chart said this place was called Echo Bay. We turned towards it and picked up speed.
A young woman was splitting kindling for her evening fire on the deck of the floating house. At our approach two little girls shyly moved to stand behind her. When we slowed and pulled alongside, my son emerged from his den in the bow and the older girl didn’t waste a second before asking him, “Do you play cards?” I don’t think my little boy knew what cards were, but he was more than ready to get out of the boat and bravely replied yes, and then the woman invited all of us into her warm house.
That was my introduction to Echo Bay, which became our home. I have since apologized in every Big House in the Indigenous communities in and around Echo Bay for not asking their permission to study the whales in their territories. I did not understand until decades later that these waters and the surrounding lands were governed by nations of people who had never given up this responsibility and right. Looking back I find it stunning how much I didn’t know, couldn’t see or ignored, when the whales first dropped me off here. The evidence of First Nations history and presence was everywhere. The dark green islets were ringed in white clamshell beaches, the debris from villages thousands of years old that depended on clams as a food source.
Over the years my perception of this piece of wilderness has changed dramatically. The risk of getting lost vanished as I explored the shoreline of every bay, channel and sound, and walked nearly every beach. Some days I hurried to a river mouth to arrive at the beginning of the flood tide, turned off my engine and drifted silently for hours as my boat rode the rising tide into the river. I became flotsam, just another floating log. Fish, bears, seals and birds paid no attention to me and so I could learn from them. I followed wolves as they trotted the rocky shorelines of small islands, entered the water without breaking their gait, swam to the next island and then the next. There were days where the whales’ voices called out of the speakers in my boat as loons and wolves called in the air, a symphony of predators.
It was easy to move to Echo Bay. We simply tied our 1939, sixty-five-foot wood boat, Blue Fjord to the government dock. We left periodically to make money from charters, and at times Robin went alone to make industrial marine films. The community suited us well. It was off-grid, with no phones, no ferry or roads other than logging roads, but it did have a post office that received mail three times a week by seaplane. At the time, about two hundred people, including workers in the nearby logging camps, lived in Echo Bay. There were several families with young children and we became friends. At the head of the bay a one-room school taught grades one to seven, the children arriving in the morning by boat. The sound of our ship’s generator annoyed the local Echo Bay Resort owners, Nancy and Bob Richter, so they invited us to tie up and plug into their power for free if we would keep an eye on the place when they went away. That was the kind of place it was.
Every day I headed out to look for whales, sometimes with Robin, sometimes just with our son. Before I learned their habits, it was very hard to find them. I asked every tugboat owner, fisherman, log salvager and crew boat that I encountered if they would call me if they saw whales. Some did, some didn’t. People were suspicious about us initially. There were rumours that we were picking up drugs from offshore vessels. The RCMP vessel stopped us often, and I always asked if they had seen whales.
While the community was very small, it was extremely social. Potluck dinners happened weekly. The finest seafood—crab, clams, salmon, cod, halibut, prawns—was normal fare. Central to the community was the Proctor family, Billy and Yvonne, their daughters, and grandchildren: three generations born and raised in the archipelago. They hosted the big events like Easter and Halloween. They knew everything about how to survive in Echo Bay and were generous with their knowledge.
Near the end of our second year in the community, my husband drowned while filming whales. Whales make bubbles as a threat gesture. So, thinking he could get closer to them if he didn’t use scuba gear, which produces bubbles, Robin used a rebreather. Rebreathers recirculate exhaled air, scrubbing out the carbon dioxide and adding oxygen. Any rebreather malfunction is dangerous because our bodies have no alarm system to warn us of rising carbon dioxide levels in our blood.
I was in the boat spotting whales for Robin with our son. Robin dove as Eve, a matriarch of the A5 pod, approached him. Then Eve surfaced, speeding away in the opposite direction. Something wasn’t right. Robin had told me many times not to ruin his shot by bringing the boat in too soon. I waited for some long moments, then I tied myself to the boat, dove in and got him. But it was too late.
Enormous loss changes your chemistry. When the emotional floor collapsed under me, a whole other layer was revealed. This kind of sadness was never part of me before. I am sure I would have been lost without my son. Eventually I climbed out of the hole and rebuilt the floor. I likely appeared to be the same, but I was different; I guess I better understood the terms of my existence. Things can and do vanish forever.
After Robin died, I sold the Blue Fjord and my son and I moved into a small cabin behind the resort. I still had the Zodiac to get around in. I lived off the money from the sale of the boat, wrote articles about whales and sold whale photographs. It was helpful that the animal I was studying was so loved by people that I could help support us with whale stories and photos. In 1989, though, I needed to take a job as deckhand on Billy Proctor’s thirty-eight-foot fish boat, Twilight Rock, to earn enough that we could stay in Echo Bay. The fishing season was only eight weeks long, so that left most of the year for whale research.
Billy’s boat was a “combination boat,” a troller and gillnetter. It was a little controversial for him to hire a female deckhand, especially one who had to bring along her eight-year-old. The first day out, I knew I’d made a big mistake. I felt terribly queasy and dizzy. I couldn’t eat or drink coffee. I never got seasick on the waterways of the archipelago, but as the small boat started creaking in the open ocean swells, burping wafts of diesel fumes from the fuel tank vents, all I wanted to do was get back to land.
We headed for the Yankee Bank east of the Scott Islands off the northern tip of Vancouver Island. At night Billy didn’t anchor—we just drifted out there. I found that terrifying at first, though the skipper seemed relaxed; his snores shook the boat. They were accompanied by giggles from my son, who had never heard anything quite like Captain Proctor snoring. That entire first ten-day trip I was plotting how to find Billy another deckhand as soon as we went back to port to deliver our catch. Then he handed me my first cheque. Without that money, I would have had to leave the archipelago. My son and I fished with him for three summers.
I bought an old floathouse, painted it periwinkle blue, and joined the rest of the community floating around Echo Bay. I learned to run a chainsaw to cut firewood, to preserve salmon for the winter months, to feed us on the abundant rock cod, clams and sea cucumbers. I rowed my son to the one-room school every morning, and my daughter, too, born fourteen years after he was.
I loved living on the sea. The house rested on two logs, called skids, and the skids sat on a flat bundle of about fifteen big logs tightly lashed together—the float. Otters spent time under the house, grunting and crunching on their catch; my cat caught fish and brought them into the kitchen. There was one frightening day when the wind hit from a direction I was not prepared for and the ropes running to the anchors on land began to break. The house swung away from shore, straining the remaining lines to the breaking point. I knew that in moments we would be drifting down the channel. I started up my boat, tied the bow securely to the float and put her into gear. As I accelerated, the house reversed direction and nudged up against its “stiff legs”—more logs that ran from the float up the beach to a big rock or tree in order to keep the house near the shore, but off the beach. I left the boat in gear, climbed back out onto the float and lashed my house securely to a stiff leg. Wilderness living with children was all about anticipating what might go wrong and dealing with it before disaster struck.
We travelled home from social events at night in my speedboat. Sometimes dolphins rode the bow wave, creating a light show in the brilliant phosphorescent zooplankton. As a single mom, I had no room for carelessness. I only ran my chainsaw when the weather was calm enough for me to be airlifted to town in a medevac if need be; I inspected the ropes and chains that held my house in place regularly. I loved heading out in the early mornings to look for whales, a child curled asleep with our dog in the bow as I sipped coffee. I often went on “wanders” where I had no destination. I let instinct pick my routes. When I found a lovely point, I often wondered what I would see if I sat there for ten years.
I never ventured deep into the forests. I still won’t; I think people who do so are terrifically brave. I am so cautious on the water friends dubbed me “chicken of the sea.” But there was no 911 to call—in fact there were no phones. In 1992, when I bought a twenty-two-foot cabin cruiser with a ninety-horsepower outboard, I considered naming her the Light and Variable as that is the weather I like to venture out in. In the end I decided to call my boat Blackfish Sound—since blackfish is the local name for orca, I studied their sounds and nearby Blackfish Sound is one of my favourite bodies of water because it supports so much life.
I lived all summer in my boat with the children. I got up around 4 a.m. with the sun and roamed the water until midday. By then my little crew was awake, fed and restless. They got to pick where we would tie up: nearby Telegraph Cove, Mitchell Bay or Hansen Island where there were other children. As they ran off with their friends, my boat became my office. I spent the afternoons entering the data I was collecting into databases, working on scientific papers and writing.
The whales were wonderful teachers, but I came away from every encounter with more questions than answers. I took some of those questions to Echo Bay’s fishermen, who are also salmon predators, like the orca, but who speak a language I can more or less understand. They helped me understand why whales did certain things.
“Why do you think male orca travel up Kingcome Inlet in spring with six inches of dorsal fin out of the water?” I asked. They looked like sharks cruising along. I had no idea why they behaved this way and only in the spring in Kingcome Inlet.
“Oh that’s an easy one,” said Chris Bennett, the owner and operator of a fishing lodge he’d built out of salvaged logs. “They are hunting for spring salmon that travel just below the six-foot layer of glacier meltwater.”
It seemed so obvious once I knew.
I learned that in the winter months, the archipelago served as the exclusive fish forage territory for the northern resident orca clan known as the A5s, Corky’s family. A deeply scarred female, Eve (A9), was the matriarch. Instead of hunting the large migrating schools of salmon in the big channels where they hunted during the summer months, in winter Eve took her family to specific kelp forests among the tiny islets of the archipelago. There the whales put on sudden bursts of speed, carving up the surface in plumes of spray, clearly chasing something, but what? I asked Billy Proctor about this. He said, “I’ll pick you up tomorrow at the start of the ebb tide and I’ll show you.”
It was always fun going out in Billy’s speedboat. He liked to scare people, swerving suddenly, for instance, to take his boat through a tiny gap between two boulders. There were always chunks of fibreglass missing out of the bow of his boats where he’d clearly hit things, hard. Born and raised in the archipelago, Billy was in his fifties when I met him—a living encyclopedia. Part of the reason Robin and I settled in Echo Bay in the first place was his answer to our question, “Do you see whales in the winter?”
“Oh Christ, ya, they like to head up the inlets before a storm. We called ’em blackfish, though, didn’t start saying orca until the hippies starting coming around here.”
Billy loved a good story. “Was crossing to town a few years back, when I saw a float drifting free, no boat pulling it. I went over to see what it was and Christ if it wasn’t a guy naked, hair to his ass, playing a flute. Said he was calling the orca.”
I hadn’t told Billy where I’d seen the whales hunting, but that morning he headed straight for one of the whales’ most popular winter destinations. When we got there, Billy picked up a spool of thirty-pound test fishing line with an octopus-looking lure called a skunk hootchie attached to the end and threw the line out.
Soon he landed a beautiful, fat, bright coppery spring salmon. He called it a “winter spring,” by which he meant a chinook or spring salmon he caught in the winter months. Since these fish were not preparing to spawn, their high-calorie diet made them exceptionally good eating, which I discovered later that night when suddenly I couldn’t eat another bite because the flesh was so rich. This is why the orca hunted winter springs in the kelp forests: they were loaded with the fat the whales depended on to keep warm.
Everyone thought I would leave this place after Robin died, but when my father called to say that he was coming to take me and my son home with him to New England, I told him I was home. Robin Morton was like a hurricane who’d swept me off my feet, derailed my plans for graduate school and dropped me exactly where I belonged. I should have completed my degree, but if I had, I would have arrived in Echo Bay too late. I would have missed an essential lesson: I would not have seen, smelled and tasted the abundance of this place. It would have been impossible for me to fully imagine the enormity of life that thrived here and thus to understand what was being lost. Had I not experienced this first-hand, the importance of this ecosystem would not have got inside me and I would not have fought so hard to keep it alive.