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"All right, big breath in now, that's a good girl," the young doctor said in his mannerly way. He had big teeth and clean fingernails.

In her three years of undergoing treatment, Delphine had never ceased to be amazed at how condescending young doctors could be. She was sixty-eight years old and almost every visit bespoke some sense of superiority, as if underneath it all, these circumstances were her fault. The nurses were almost always kind, but the young doctors made her feel guilty, leaving her mind to reel after each appointment.

Delphine had been a gatherer of data. She loved photographing animals out on the ocean, taking notes and making observations. She loved pushing her yellow skiff along the wake of a diving whale to photograph the flukes of the big animals. She had so much more work to do, more photographs to take, more data to go through, more students to foster toward their own research. She couldn't stand ruminating about her own illness.

"You have some more congestion, dear. Have you told Dr. Walters?"

"I will be sure to mention it to Dr. Walters, darling," she said in her most kind, sarcastic voice.

Delphine didn't offer up any other sort of answer because she didn't really believe the young man was listening. That and she couldn't stand the assumption that she was his "dear." Clearly, he wanted to transfer his concern to his boss so he would not be expected to do anything substantial. Most young doctors never really want to stick their tidy heads up out of the foxhole. He checked the nursing notes about when and how much medication she had been given. He could always push blame downhill onto the nurses. He wished the grumpy old woman no ill will, but these were difficult times and the hospital administrators needed her spot on the schedule.

Delphine stopped studying the young doctor. More than a thousand miles away in the North Pacific, a group of male sperm whales lay at the surface breathing, expelling carbon dioxide and taking in oxygen, watching the ocean below them, hoping to take more black cod off a fisherman's longline. Sitting on the rolled-out paper of the examination table, Delphine swam with them.

She had little respect for people who thought that sperm whales were the smartest creatures on earth—and yes, there were many who thought that sperm whales were spiritually enhanced animals. "How could we possibly know the specifics of their vast superiority," she had asked her students, "before we even know the basics of how they live, feed and navigate on this planet?"

Delphine had her gnawing doubts about human beings' capability to judge the huge mammal's intellectual supremacy. Here was a whale that made the entire basin of the Pacific Ocean its home. Males wandered the upper northern latitudes while females and calves stayed in equatorial waters. They clearly had a social dynamic. Yet humans knew less about sperm whales than they did about most other charismatic megafauna. Humpback whales were endlessly studied and photographed, and killer whales were considered demigods for their language, distinct DNA types and complex social dynamics. What made these animals almost magical to human beings, who were both humbled by the whales and tainted with the guilt of their own ignorance?

What fascinated her about marine mammals was their mystery. This was the purpose of her transfer memos to her students and colleagues: to convey what we don't know and couldn't know, and, perhaps most importantly, what wasn't worth trying to figure out. What she loved about her life was the sensation that discovery is an unending relay race of research.

It bothered her a great deal that most young students wanted to know more than anything—what is it really like to be a sperm whale, a mountain gorilla or a wolf? Many of them did not enjoy the hard work of trying to understand the creatures that held sway over them.

Delphine blamed the books that were so widely published for this lack of motivation: science fiction, nature mysticism, tales of the downfall of big dumb men. Students often wanted to know not just what sperm whales were thinking but what they were trying to say to us. They wanted to know what some thinkers call an animal's umwelt, their worldview. But sperm whales are so sensationally distant from our own experience. We hardly know what they do, the specifics of their sociality, mating, feeding or even the mortal danger they are in because of changing climate. They have been largely unobserved, obscured by their distance out to sea but also by the great depths of their world. To spend time worrying about sperm whales' umwelt is akin to planning a conversation with a space alien before you know that one actually exists.

Most idealistic young students who wanted a picture of a sperm whale's umwelt had an almost visceral disdain for understanding human beings. Being treated by modern American medicine did little to change Delphine's mind about humanity's ability to empathize. The entire institution seemed to be absorbed with its own self-perpetuated hierarchy of prestige. "I did such a good job with your surgery," the young female surgeon said right before admitting that Delphine's condition, unfortunately, was only going to get worse and worse. "It's lucky that your kind of cancer is relatively slow. You should have more life left to live than expected, even though the surgery wasn't effective."