I saw bubble net feeding for the first time this year from the bow of the Orca Song, my hands holding a hydrophone over the railing, my ears filtering out the distant squeaks of orca to listen for that blast from the trumpeter. The surface of the water was still and silent, winged clouds of kittiwakes mirroring the schools of fish below. Everyone on board waited, oblivious of the underwater dance taking place somewhere beneath our feet. We had seen six whales go down, their flukes lifting, but we had no idea where they would pop up and only a faint idea of what they were doing in the world beneath us. Kittiwakes cast their eyes wide, roaming. Then a cry, and our eyes all turned in line with the birds that dropped as one from the sky, as at the center of all of these lines of sight six whales burst from the surface of the water. I saw the mountain peaks of their pointed jawlines, like a new island born that moment from the sea. I saw the grooves in their throats, extended, rippling. And I saw them sink down again, into the world that only they knew.
The next day we came back. The whales were still there. I stood in the wheelhouse with Captain Sarah as the whales dove at a distance, six tall blows, six wide flukes. A juvenile surfaced in the distance, still too young and awkward to join the grown-up table. We searched in all directions, not knowing where the whales would surface, our breaths collectively held. Then, a jagged lunge, wide and silent, close to the boat by the whale’s own choice. For a second there was that thick moment, without weight and without time, when the whales hovered at the peak of their lunge. I watched the jagged line of mouths agape. I saw the way water fell from their baleen. I noticed barnacles folded into one whales ventral pleats. And I held onto that moment, folded it into my own memory, naming that as image I would keep of these animals throughout the summer: Powerful. Vast. Alien.
“That’s Crazy Tail,” Captain Sarah said excitedly, pointing to a whale with a lopped-off right fluke. “He’s the one that came from Southeast Alaska and taught the rest to bubble feed.” And the world I glimpsed widened by that small space.