In a place where the earth moves slow and meticulously, the heaviness of my breath and the quick pace of my feet seem all too intrusive. As much as I try to steady my breathing and move with grace, I find that my feet get caught up in the rocks and stumps that thrust out from the soil. I fix my pace and tell myself to breathe, to listen. I know from my yoga practice how much more I gain when I learn to quiet my mind and breathe.

For all too long running has been anything but a spiritual practice. I’ve used it simply as a tool to improve the structure of my body. It has almost always been a way for me to compete with my former self, who I was the day before. How many calories can I burn today? How many more miles can I go? And through these thoughts, I learned to love the act of running. I’ve always enjoyed that inner competition.

But not today. Today there was no need for keeping track of time, miles, or calories. Today I found myself in the presence of Grandma Cedar. She is the oldest and wisest soul on this island. I stopped upon sight of her and stood in amazement. As I sat at her roots, she said to me “Granddaughter, let your breath be still. Listen. What do you hear?” I closed my eyes and touched her bark. All of a sudden my ears began to flood with sounds. Not the sounds that I’m used to though. There were no traces of highways or cyclists. There was only the forest. As I listened closer, I could hear Grandma Cedar growing just as she has for the past 1000 years.

As I closed my eyes tighter, I could here her gently whispering to me, “Here, you are perfect. This moment and all of the moments after are perfect. Steady your breath and clear your mind. You have much to learn, my granddaughter.”

In the blink of an eye, the summer is over. My four weeks on Hanson Island has come to an end. I’ll be in Seattle for the next two weeks, before Brittney and I will load up food, clothes, and pets for one more drive to Alert Bay and begin settling in for our winter on the island. Orca Lab left me with one last incredible moment though. A magical night that I will never forget.

My last few days at Orca Lab were spent at the tiny out camp on Cracoft Point, referred to simply as, “CP.” The camp is nothing more than a tiny little platform two paces by nine paces built at the very top of the rocky intertidal. A few stairs lead to the shelter. A room of roughly the same size and width as the platform. Crammed into it though is a bunk, desk, kitchen, and more electrical gear than radio shack. CP has housed underwater cameras, remote cameras, hand held cameras, and hydrophones. The reason, like in real estate, is location. An underwater cliff looms just off the platform, a good push and you’d be in 100 feet of water, surrounded by a vibrant kelp bed. As the orcas go by they often pass just meters off this kelp, sometimes just 20 yards from where you stand. I can’t think of anywhere else on earth where you can be so close to orcas without harassing them.

You can sleep in the shelter. But on rainless nights, there is nowhere better than the platform. Wrapped in my sleeping bag with it pulled over my head to keep offending mosquitoes and mice out of my hair, I was rocked to sleep by the sound of the waves crashing into the rocks ten feet below me. My slumber didn’t last long. As the tide rose the humpback moved closer and closer to CP. The vibration of his breathing reverberating off the rocks. I give up trying to sleep and lay there, listening to this behemoth. It was impossible to know how close he was in the darkness. There’s a rush of water, the briefest moment of silence, and than a tremendous concussion as the whales breach brought it back to the oceans surface. I leap to my feet just in time to see the conclusion of the splash, white water glowing in the darkness.

Leaning forward I strain my eyes, trying to make out the whale, searching for a black shape on black water on a cloudy night. For ten minutes the whale moves back and forth in front of me, just out of my range of vision. Initially I’m almost sad this isn’t happening in the daylight when I could stand, camera in hand, capturing every surfacing, preserving it forever. But in the middle of the night there was no pressure to photograph. There was nothing to do but sit in the stillness with my ears as my only guide.

The edge of the kelp bed is barely visible, perhaps thirty feet from where I sat, the water level just a couple feet below me as the tide finally begin to ebb. So it was nearly at eye level when this aquatic night owl roared past the surface, mouth agape just beyond the kelp, a jet black shadow passing left to right. For forty tons, he’s incredibly quiet. There’s a rush of water that sounds like rapids, and the splash at the end of the lunge, and that was all. It took maybe three seconds before the water swallowed him back up, covering his tracks, as if there had never been anything there but water and kelp. Heart pounding, adrenaline flying, eyes wide open, I wait breathlessly for the next plot twist.

The humpback breaches again, just out of sight, and the show’s over. For two hours he continues to move, back and forth off the platform feeding. I’ve been kept awake by roommates, music, the cat, and a rattling furnace. But this was the first time a whale refused to let me sleep and I’d never been so happy to be sleep deprived.

In the inky blackness of night, a northern resident pod of orcas moves into Blackfish Sound and toward the lab, heading toward Johnstone Strait and the rubbing beaches. With no hope of identifying them visually, I lean against the railing of the lab, ears turned toward Burnt Point and Blackfish sound, listening for the sound of their blows, that echo like shotgun blasts for miles in the dead of night. There’s a whoop from behind me, muffled by the glass of the lab. I turn and in the dim light of the desk lamp, see Paul’s wife Helena, arms raised, a grin across her face. “R calls!” She hollers at us.

The R pod, rarely seen even in the summer, were on there way. There presence as unique as the noises they make which features several unique calls shared with none of the other northern residents. The celebration is short lived though. Over the next several minutes, as more and more calls move from orca to hydrophone to headphone, even Helena, who has listened to the residents for 30 years, is less convinced of what she’s hearing. The orcas turn before they reach the lab, the chance to listen and count the number of blows and add another piece to the puzzle is lost. We’d have to wait for morning to solve the mystery.

By 7 a.m we knew it was not the R’s that we had hoped for, but the I15s that had riled up Helena and all of the assistants in the early morning hours. The I15s were notorious for, “imitating” a pair of R calls and had been duping eavesdropping scientists for years. The following evening the I15s moved serenely by the lab at their slow, tranquil pace they were known for. Instead of just passing through they halted, almost directly in front of the lab and stayed for almost an hour. Spyhopping and surfacing, as if they were apologizing for the dirty trick they’d played on us the night before.

Two days later, we awoke to the real thing. The R4 pod entered Johnstone Strait and stayed for two days before departing to the west, attending to whatever business they have in the Queen Charlotte Strait and beyond. The I15s imitated the Rs calls, two days later the Rs arrived. Convenient coincidence or something at a much deeper level? Four decades into research and we still haven’t the foggiest idea.

There’s a fundamental problem with trying to understand what these orcas may be “saying” to each other. Each pod has roughly 12 calls in their repertoire and are used over a variety of behaviors. Some are used exclusively during social interactions, others primarily during resting, but their language is fluid and it is clear that the same call can have different meaning depending on the context that it was used. It leaves us with an almost impossible task. To watch an animal that spends only five percent of its life where we can visually observe it, and try to guess what’s going on beneath the waves as they call to one another. Paul believes the next step is to find out who in the pod is talking. Is it the matriarch doing most of the talking, calling the shots? Or are her sons, daughters, and grandchildren part of an open democratic forum? One thing is certain, there decisions are not random. They don’t just happen to chose to go past the lab, or leave the strait, or go for a rub. Those big developed brains are doing something, calculating, and analyzing their environment.

And so here we sit, forty years after Paul, Michael Bigg, and other orca pioneers started. We have discovered their tightly wound social bonds, the order and structure of their society, we know what they eat, and the sounds we make. But we may have pushed our research of these animals to the breaking point while we wait for technology to catch up. How can we determine who in the pod is talking? What are they doing

underwater when their calls are emitted? There are things such as the critter cam, a small camera that attaches via suction cup to the animal which would allow us to, “see” what the orca sees. It’s an obtrusive and ethically questionable idea. And in their murky, underwater world, how helpful would it be to try to see what an acoustically driven animal sees. What we need is a device, that could be somehow attached, unobtrusively to the animal that could record when the individual calls, its position in the water column and there location. If we could start to associate not necessarily their behavior, but their location in their three dimensional world, perhaps we could begin to take the next step in knowing exactly what the hell is going on down there. We are a visually driven species studying an equally intelligent acoustically driven species living in a medium completely alien to us. This could take awhile.

One of the most common spells people fall under when viewing wildlife is anthropomorphizing the animals that they are watching. It is hard not to place human emotions, actions, and tendencies upon them. It helps us relate and and better understand the world among us. I’m as guilty as anyone, comparing bubble netting humpback whales to, “a bunch of buddies fishing together.” But in the scientific world, anthropomorphism can cloud your judgment, creates bias, and foul up even the most well thought out study. But when it comes to dolphins, orcas in particular, it’s hard not to make an exception to the rule.

Orca whales have the second largest brain on earth, behind only the sperm whale, a creature nearly twice its size. While we like to think of humans as the most intelligent race on earth, the orca’s brain contains a part even more well developed than our own. Orca have an extra fold of tissue between the limbic system and neocortex which humans do not posses. While research is still in the beginning stages, scientists like Dr. Lori Marino believe the additional lobe has something to do with processing emotions, thinking, and a heightened sense of self. The idea is fascinating, an animal that may be capable of recognizing itself from others, and may be processing the world in a way, while different than primates, could easily be equivalent or above us.

Which brings us to a question we may never be able to fully answer. If orcas have such a heightened sense of self, are emotionally and socially as advanced as us, isn’t it possible that they could, like us, have rituals and traditions? A whale equivalent of Christmas and the last day of school? In the northern resident community of orcas that make there way in front of Hanson Island every day, there is a behavior that is seen only in this population of 250 whales.

Just to the east of the lab on Vancouver Island is a series of beaches. Unlike the rocky steep coastline that dominates the intertidal here, the beaches are a gradual slope composed of tiny, thumb sized pebbles. On almost every pass by these beaches, the orcas stop, and rub themselves on the smooth tiny stones. Speculation runs rampant for why and when the northern residents started rubbing (it has gone on for at least 50 years). Some suggested they were sloughing off parasites, most just shrug there shoulders and assume they must like it. A creature, an entire population doing something just for the joy of it. Like it was a sport, a holiday, a tradition. Precious few people could tell you why we give presents at Christmas, have turkey at Thanksgiving, or hot dogs on the fourth of July. We just do. What if the northern residents were just like us. There ancestors did it, their mothers do it, so they follow suit as well.

For years the rubbing beaches have been walled off from humans, an ecological reserve giving the orcas a glorious respite from the boat noise in their favorite place in the strait. But there’s no rule about placing cameras there. And for the first time, Paul Spong and Orca Lab have set up two cameras over one of the rubbing beaches. When the sun shines down on them it looks like a tropical paradise. The shallows reflecting turquoise out from the shore line, the harsh rocks and steep edges at the points turn the strait back into its normal substrate. It’s like a private beach for orcas, with there own ecological wardens, chasing trespassers away. I had given up the hope of ever seeing them rub. Accepting that it would have to be something to read about, and listen to the sound of raking pebbles as they pass over the hydrophone.

But now there’s footage, probably a few hours already of orcas, gliding serenely into view slowly and gracefully pumping powerful flukes, blowing bubbles to become negatively buoyant, and sliding smoothly across the pebbles, in ten feet of water, a stones through from shore. Sometimes they stay for an hour, other times the family will pass through just once, but it’s all captured on film. Following every move of this tradition generations old, even if it’s just for a brief moment. We are peering through the key hole, getting the faintest glimpse at the private, personal lives of an animal, just as intelligent as us.

Photo Credit: Stefan Jacobs

It feels like I’ve just closed my eyes when the hatch to the loft opens. “David, there’s calls,” Lily whispers. Not my problem, I’m not on until 3 am and I just fell asleep, it was just 10:30. I grope for my phone; 3:03. You have got to be kidding. I clamber down the ladder in the pitch black, probing with my toes before I commit to each step, trying to forget about the quarter sized spider that had been prowling the ladder before I drifted off to sleep. I reach the floor and open the door to the lab, like everything else here, it’s adorned with a huge painting of an orca whale against a blue “ocean” back drop. It’s pitch black outside, two small lamps on the desk illuminate the log book and the DAT tape recorder. Lily slips by, her 12-3 shift over and I slip on the headphones.

The lab has six hydrophones in the water, strategically placed around Hanson Island and to the east into Johnstone Strait. If an orca whispers within 20 miles, we know about it. Which is wonderful most of the time, right now I’d rather they just go away until the sun rises. For a few minutes there’s silence. No boat noise, no orcas. I press the headphones tight against my ears as the sound of water gurgling passes by the hydrophones. You listen to all six of them at once, manipulating the sound board so that ones without calls only come in the left or right headphone. Right now the hydrophone, “Critical Point,” is in the center. This particular area is to the east of Hanson Island in Johnstone Strait. Depending on they’re direction, they could be out of range in 20 minutes, or in range of the Cracroft Point hydrophone for hours.

A whisper of a noise fills both headphones, it’s them. Who and how many I don’t know, but I have three hours to figure it out. The first call is followed by a louder second one, the orcas’ voices echoing off the steep canyon walls of the strait. They’re answered by a different, beautiful call even closer to the mic. This call I know. Every pod has calls unique to it, this one belongs to a pod of 6, known as the A42s. Every orca in the population has an alphanumeric name (I76, A23, B15 etc) coded based on its pod. But we’ve given them common names as well (Current, Stormy, Eve, and Springer) as if we’re talking about our friends. The more distant calls answer, growing louder, excited, another unique call sounds like some sort of demented underwater donkey (HEE-HAW!).

And just like that the mystery is solved. Two pods, the A42s and I15s, are somewhere in Johnstone Strait, chatting back and forth, their conversation private save for one bleary eyed guy, staring out into absolute blackness five miles away. The fatigue slowly ebbs away and I fall into the rhythm of these two families. They’ve been traveling together, back and forth for the past three days, passing the lab occasionally. Now in the dead of night, their world is as quiet as I’ve heard it since I arrived. The whale watching boats are moored at the docks. The tugs, cruise ships, and fishing boats gloriously absent. It’s just them and me. For the next hour and a half they float on the flooding tide, slowly moving south.

In front of me, Blackney Pass slowly materializes, the sun slowly rising through the thick bank of clouds. The water is flat calm, the mountains and hills across the pass on Parsons, Harbledown, and Compton Island reflect and shimmer in the water in front of me. At 5:55 the door to the lab opens, my relief has arrived. “Are they calling,” Anaj asks, looking at my raccoon eyes. I nod and stifle a yawn. “Have you been here since three?”

“Yea, they’ve been quiet for about 15 minutes now,” I answer, suddenly I’m exhausted again.

“Oh no! I’m so sorry,” she answers, a look of pity on her face.

“It’s fine,” I reassure her, “it was perfect.”