The Story of a Lonely Orca
She was once a wild animal, a predator; part of a family, a pod, a clan. She was magnificent.
On August 8, 1970, when she was 4 years old, she was captured in Penn Cove off Whidbey Island in Washington State. That day, 90 wild orcas were corralled; five drowned, and seven of the young were captured and sold to marine parks in Texas, Florida, France, Japan, Australia, and England. She outlived them all by decades.
The capture was sensational and brutish: a round-up, a speed boat, a spotting plane, explosives, tangled nets, drowned calves, and screaming orca mothers. Divers in wetsuits used ropes, lassos, nets, and nooses to separate the ones who would be sold. Trapped, the young orca lifted her white chin and smooth black head out of the water and looked about her like a child lost in a crowd. They lashed thick straps around her torso and pushed her body into a canvas sling that hung down into the water from a boat crane. Six men in flared blue jeans with leather belts and sweat bands, three with bare chests, squatted low on the floating dock with arms extended and heaved against the weight of the orca on a yellow nylon rope.
On the other side of the net, an orca mother watched her calf being taken. She
