I jump to my feet, the sudden movement shifting something inside me. The wooden dock in front of me is littered now with green flecks.
“I don’t know where she is, Dad. Maybe she’s gone!” My words come spitting out, sarcastic and cruel, hitting him as I turn and walk away. “Maybe she left with Mom.”
CHAPTER 4
Orca Day 3
Okay everybody, listen up.”
Third period, just before lunch, our science teacher Mr. O’Connor works to keep the class settled for another twenty minutes.
“Orcinus orca.” He writes on the blackboard as the room quiets. “The scientific name for killer whales. Phylum of Chordata, Class Mammalia.” More writing. “Order Cetacea. Suborder Odontoceti, and the Family … is Delphinidae.”
He pauses to let his writing catch up to his voice. Except for me, everyone is busy writing the classification order in their notebooks.
“Killer whales are the largest members of Delphinidae, a group that also includes porpoises and dolphins. And they remain the TOP predators in the ocean.” He underlines “TOP” three times. “They have only one enemy … humans.”
A low murmur runs through the room.
“Remember people, just like dolphins and porpoises, whales live in the ocean, but they are not fish! They’re mammals, and like all mammals they have lungs not gills. And what do we do with our lungs?” Mr. O’Connor raises his hands like a conductor. “C’mon, all together now—”
“Breathe!” a few scattered voices call out.
“Breathe what?”
“BREATHE AIR!” everyone shouts together.
“Okay, good. Now, the last reported sighting of orcas in Dyes Inlet was about forty years ago, in the late 1950s. I was just a wee tyke then, toddling along,” he adds in a silly voice.
The class laughs. Everybody likes Mr. O’Connor. He’s funny and loud and somehow manages to jam two years’ worth of work into 7/8 Science. If you keep up, there’s a good chance you can test out of freshman bio in high school.
“So IF the average life expectancy of killer whales in the wild is thirty to fifty years, AND only a few out there are thirty-five or older.…” He gestures to the windows that face out toward the inlet, “… what can we infer about our nineteen visitors?”
The class is quiet. Fifteen seconds. Mr. O’Connor coughs. Thirty.
“C’mon! Who’s our math whiz?”
“Maybe …” Lena offers, “some of them have never been here before?”
“Precisely!” Mr. O’Connor jabs at the air like a marathon winner, the chalk still in his hand. “Everybody put your fins together for Lena!” The class claps halfheartedly, some kids rolling their eyes at Mr. O’Connor. I glance over at Lena and she gives me a thumbs-up.
“These are very likely unknown waters to the majority of these whales. So as long as they remain—and how long that will be is anyone’s guess—we have an extraordinary opportunity to learn about them. Kind of like having a new kid move across the bridge.”
He means the Warren Avenue Bridge, the main link that connects the east and west sections of Port Washington. Around here everything depends on which side of the bridge you live on—how much money you have, who your friends are, what you’ll do when you grow up. There’s only one thing we all share—Dyes Inlet.
“Now,” Mr. O’Connor spins around to face the class, “who can tell me what the basic social unit of whales is called?”
“A school!” someone calls out.
Mr. O’Connor smiles but shakes his head.
“A herd?”
It’s Harris, a hard-to-ignore kid from one of the trailer parks on the west side of the bridge. The class laughs. He catches my eye and grins but I look away. Harris has the thickest black hair I’ve ever seen, besides mine. He’s so tall he has to twist his legs every which way to get them to fit in under the desks. And he’s old—almost fourteen.
“Herd is close, but no cigar,” Mr. O’Connor says, flicking an imaginary cigar in front of his mouth.
More animal groups are called out. Then it gets too silly and Mr. O’Connor starts to lose patience. Why isn’t anybody answering? I drum my fingers on my desk. I can’t be the only one who knows this.
“Do any of you actually live here in the Pacific Northwest?” He waits, tapping his chalk on the desk. “Please! Someone?”
Finally I raise my hand. Mr. O’Connor points his invisible cigar at me.
“A pod.”
“A pod. Thank you, Marisa.” He stretches out his hand to me and makes a small bow. “Orca groups are called pods. They’re extremely complex social structures. One pod can comprise the extended family unit of as many as four generations traveling together.” He gestures toward the inlet again. “Our visitors here are part of the Southern Resident killer whales in the San Juan Islands that have three pods: J, K, and L.”
At the mention of L Pod, a jumble of memories flashes through my mind, and the room feels suddenly as hot as a summer day.
“What’s with the letters, Mr. O?” Harris calls out. A few people snicker.
“Actually, it’s a good question,” Mr. O’Connor replies. “It’s a taxonomic system developed by whale researchers up in British Columbia. They started with ‘A’ and worked their way through the alphabet as they studied the pods to the south.”
“Cool!” Harris says. “Kinda like Triple-A baseball.”
“Each whale is given an alphanumeric code. The letter represents the pod affiliation, and the number is each individual identified within that pod. The smallest social unit within a pod is the ‘matrilineal group.’ Can someone please enlighten us as to the meaning of matrilineal?”
I’m only half listening, remembering instead a super hot Fourth of July that Mom and I spent up on San Juan Island … it seems so long ago now. I was probably eight years old and every memory I have from that trip is perfect. Dad was working a month-long carpentry job on the west side of the island and staying on the jobsite, so Mom and I came up for a week to visit.
The house was on an amazing bluff that overlooked the main straits where the Southern Resident orcas travel in the summer months. Every day we’d see the whales passing back and forth—breaching, jumping, and chasing each other in circles. Some days we’d climb down the rocky slope past the old abandoned limekiln to Deadman Bay. From the beach there, the orcas’ huge fins looked even more gigantic. One morning, I was poking around in the sand looking for agates when Mom called to me from farther down the beach.
“M! Come look … I think the pod has a new baby!”
I scrambled over to where she stood on the rocks peering out at the water, Dad’s old black binoculars glued to her eyes. “Where?” I asked, already reaching out to have a look.
“There.” She passed me the binoculars and pointed. “See? Just past the big one … he’s tucked in close to his mother.”
I looked and looked until finally I saw a little black head poke up alongside the shiny black flank of the mother whale. But the little orca was black and orange, not black and white like the others! I thought the sun might be playing tricks on me.
“Why is he that funny color?” I asked.