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Her son, Bertie, had left Alaska after graduating from Whitman College in Washington. He and his wife moved to California. Growing up in Alaska, Bertie hadn’t ever followed a sports team, but once out of college he had fallen in love with baseball. After each Dodgers game, Bertie would almost always call his mother and they would go over the game. 

Bertie had given up asking his mom to move to Monterey to be near his family—her grandson, Reggie, was just now turning four and entering preschool—and the best hospitals around Palo Alto. Delphine decided to stay in the same old hotel where she and John had so often stayed. After Delphine was diagnosed with cancer, she preferred to be away from Sitka. Sitka had only fifteen miles of main road. John had died on the only road from downtown to their house. There was no avoiding it. So she buried herself in her work at the Baranof Hotel, in Seattle.

Before setting up her computer notebook, Delphine flopped back on her bed and closed her eyes. In her transfer memo, she had been trying to spell out a research program for studying sperm whale behavior in the future, when she would be gone.

Delphine then worked for an hour and a half on what was essentially a materials wish list. She had done most of her research out of small boats based in the port of Sitka, close to the continental shelf. Sperm whales in southeastern Alaska, almost always males, had been observed near the black cod fishing grounds adjacent to the shelf. This drop-off to the deep ocean was where fishermen liked to place their longline gear, which was sometimes a mile long and laced with hundreds of baited hooks. The fishermen would lay their lines and let them “soak” on the bottom twenty-four hours before heaving the lines onto their boats and pulling their hooks, some with fish and some without. The boat would jog in and out of gear to hold position while pulling the line. It’s been assumed that this underwater noise was what cued the sperm whales back to that location, where they would often hang out on the surface and consume the black cod. The big animals sometimes let the thick groundline run over their gums as they plucked the oily fish directly into their mouths. The fishermen found straightened-out hooks and shredded fish bodies. The bottom jaw of dead sperm whales often showed the marks of these black cod lines.

Here was a tremendous opportunity to actually observe these animals feeding. Delphine wanted more cameras and camouflaged waterproof housings. She wanted to perfect the camouflage, both sonically and visually. These large-toothed whales—while not appearing very sensitive to the fishing boats and their propellers scything through the surface waters, or even to being struck with sampling darts made to take skin and blubber samples—did seem sensitive to the presence of cameras in the water. Was it because of some sound being emitted by the cameras, or was it the return signal from the whales clicking on them? Delphine didn’t know.

Unlike sperm whales, orcas and humpback whales are commonly seen from shore. Perhaps this is the reason their figures are so prominent in the cultures of coastal people. The more dynamic orca whale takes the largest place in the lore of Tlingit and Haida people. Orca whales are magnets for storytelling. In storytelling, they take on personalities, perhaps because of their prominent eyes when they surface. Sperm whales seem to be famous in Western lore almost solely because of one New England writer who went to sea in 1839 and wrote about it in his most famous novel. Melville’s insight stems from the sperm whale’s size and mystery, so much so that their size and mystery became a metaphor for our relationship with God, or perhaps awe itself. The rest of our awareness of sperm whales came to us from the industrial killing of them.

More cameras, more underwater microphones and more ways to hide them, more ships looking for the big-headed beasts were the things Delphine wanted. Knowledge of God was someone else’s problem.

After two hours, Delphine noticed that she had three missed calls from Tom Foster, a private investigator friend of hers and John’s in Seattle. He didn’t leave a message but after the third missed call, he sent her a text.

Hey, Del. You still in that fleabag across from the hospital? Don’t forget we have a call tomorrow. Got something you might help me out with.

She flipped through her calendar on her phone and there it was. “TF TF” on tomorrow’s date. TF was “telephone from” and TF was Tom Foster.

In northern waters during the summer, the ocean often has a blue-green cast. From below the surface, during daylight hours, an object has a silver shimmer. Even at three hundred feet there is enough light for a human to see the black cod habitat. Even more clear would be the daiphanous squid shimmering through the sea. At this depth, other bioluminescent creatures distort the water with their movement. Here now are the male sperm whales, which are three to four times larger than the females. At first glance, the males appear to have gigantic heads or maybe huge noses. Sperm whales dive deep and almost directly down to the hunting depth of their prey. Imagine submarines sinking in a tight cluster. They seem to simply know where their food is, either by extraordinary sensory ability or by memory or cultural transmission. Delphine had considered all possibilities but was certain of nothing. She adds to her list more cameras, more ways to observe whales and their prey, hydrophones,

sonobuoys, intel from military ocean resources.