Deem me a mother’s boy, if you like. After all, it’s what I am. But I strongly recommend that you keep all traces of contempt from your voice. I’m 25ft long, I have a mouth like a guillotine, I’m smarter than anything else that lives in the sea and I’m a born killer.
Monday
Call me killer whale, call me orca, it’s all one to me. Call me the first because you respect my ferocity; call me the second because you respect my intelligence and the rich culture I was born into. Never be so foolish as to think that humans are the only animals with culture.
Tuesday
It was beautiful, the way we did our fishing today. We’re residents, our home is the Pacific off the shores of Canada and Alaska, and we specialise on chinook salmon. The way we worked together – it was perfectly coordinated, thanks to our brilliant comms. It’s not easy but, well, sometimes we make it look easy.
Wednesday
I’ve lived with my mother for the past 35 years and I’ll go on doing so until one of us is dead. We’re that close. I live in the same group – call it a matriline – as a half-sister and various cousins. We represent four generations. We associate with similar set-ups, linked by ties of blood and culture, and that’s a pod. Our pod.
I’ve lived with my mother for 35 years and I’ll go on doing so until one of us dies
Thursday
I swam and I fished and I hung out with my mother all day. Nothing funny about that. I have a strong and healthy appetite and there could be half a dozen youngsters to call me father if we ever met. It’s just that the females from my own pod – still less from my own matriline – are simply not sexy. Not to me, anyway. Give me a sleek stranger: from beyond the pod, but from inside the clan, the wider version of ourselves.
Friday
But not those transients. We came across a few of these today, but we just ignored them. They’re orcas, but not as we know it. They hunt mammals: mostly dolphins and whales. Call me picky, but that’s disgusting. We have nothing to do with them. Nor with those offshore orcas and their taste for sharks. That’s not really food, is it? No, we residents have the best diet – the only acceptable diet – and the best way of talking. We communicate in our own dialect and if you can’t understand us, you’re not one of us. And if you’re not one of us you canget stuffed.
Saturday
Those other orcas, those not-like-us orcas, they live in some bizarre ways. There are some that live by hooshing seals off ice floes, others that specialise in penguins, others on minke whales, still others on squid. I suppose it wouldn’t do if we were all made the same – but really, give me a nice day with the salmon running, my pod-mates all around, my mother by my side: what more could any red-blooded orca want? Barring the occasional sleek stranger.
As told to Simon Barnes
Photograph by Getty Images
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