Читать книгу Chasing at the Surface - Sharon Mentyka - Страница 12

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. “Is he okay?”

“Yes, he’s fine,” Mom said, snapping some pictures with her camera. “Isn’t that amazing? Nobody knows why the calves start out that color. The orange will fade to white as he grows. Wouldn’t it be funny if human babies were born orange?”

We both laughed, sitting together on the hot rocks, watching the baby orca nuzzle its mother. The next day, Mom and I went down to the Whale Museum in Friday Harbor, the island’s main town, to report that we’d sighted a new orca baby.

“Yours is the first sighting of a new calf this season!” the woman in the museum told us. She checked her logs. “It looks like that was L Pod out near Lime Kiln yesterday. The official name will be L91 but would you like to pick a nickname for him?” she asked, smiling.

“Would you, honey?” Mom repeated, putting her arm around my shoulder.

I took a bite of raw carrot and thought about what to name the new baby orca.

“Muncher!” I announced a minute later. Mom laughed and the museum woman carefully wrote out an adoption certificate for Muncher.

“Congratulations,” she said, handing me the sheet of paper. “Now you be sure to take good care of Muncher.”

“I will,” I promised. “Muncher can be my baby brother!”

“Well, we don’t know yet if he’s a boy or girl,” the museum woman said with a laugh.

A lost memory comes rushing back to me now: Mom’s reaction was … odd. She looked surprised and then something else, sort of sad, I guess. I remember asking her what was wrong, but she didn’t answer. Just shook her head and smiled. I’d forgotten that even happened until now.

The sound of paper and shuffling feet snaps me back to the present. I look up and Mr. O’Connor is staring right at me.

“Umm … sorry, what was the question?” I quickly try to catch up.

“Matrilineal group. What does that mean for orcas?”

The whole class sits waiting for me to answer. Mr. O’Connor tilts his head. He knows I know, but I can’t answer this one. I shake my head no, concentrating on my sneakers instead.

“All right then,” he says, annoyed at having to answer his own question. “Matrilineal groups are pods made up of two or three generations that share a close female ancestor, usually a mother and grandmother. Offspring travel and stay with their mother and her pod for life.”

My heart hurts. Hands down orcas are better at parenting than some humans. My humans, for example.

“Now … our visitors number nineteen animals, mostly females and their calves, with a handful of frisky adolescent males.”

I check the clock. Five more minutes.

“A team of experts are on their way down from Friday Harbor. Marine biologists and whale researchers. Cetologists—note that the word derives from the order name.”

Chairs scrape. A few people cough.

“They’ve asked me to round up some volunteers. Mostly the work will be hauling equipment around, helping set up traffic barriers, grunt work for the grunts.” Mr. O’Connor smiles and passes around a sign-up sheet. “But they’ve promised to include educational opportunities when they can, depending on how long the whales stay, of course.…” The bell rings and a few kids start to stand up, but Mr. O’Connor isn’t finished. “Wait … you’ll also earn community service hours and get firsthand exposure to science in action!”

There’s a flurry of activity as everyone gathers their stuff and scrambles for the door.

“Extra credit!” Mr. O’Connor shouts.

I can’t seem to move. Mom kept trying to plan our whale-watching trip for this summer, I kept saying no. Is this my second chance? I steal a glance at Lena. She’s already at the front of the signup line, her mind made up. She sees me look and waves me over. My head is pounding. I stand up and leave the room fast, before Lena can stop me.

Maybe that trip with Mom would have made a difference, but now it feels too late. And all the community services hours in the world aren’t going to bring Mom back.