Book Excerpt from Orca

The crew wasn’t looking forward to this. It was the chilly morning of October 26, October 1973, and a southeastern swell had been rolling into Pedder Bay for hours. But Sealand’s twenty-man team was more worried about the task of restraining Taku. The bull killer whale was enormous—at least twenty-two feet long—and although he seemed friendly, no one knew how he would react. Most of the men smoked nervously as they watched the black dorsal fin circle the pen. As the water calmed, Bill Cameron exited the galley of the Western Spray, and lowered himself onto one of the logs bordering the pen. Bob Wright had hired the Pender Harbour fisherman to help handle the whales. Although a large man, Cameron had a gentle way about him. “You just have to treat them like herring,” he instructed. “You can’t spook them.” At his order, the men aboard three small skiffs ...