{"product_id":"into-great-silence-isbn-9780807014462","title":"Into Great Silence","description":"\u003cb\u003eScience entwines with matters of the human heart as a whale researcher chronicles the lives of an endangered family of orcas\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Ever since Eva Saulitis began her whale research in Alaska in the 1980s, she has been drawn deeply into the lives of a single extended family of endangered orcas struggling to survive in Prince  William Sound. Over the course of a decades-long career spent observing and studying these whales, and eventually coming to know them as individuals, she has, sadly, witnessed the devastation wrought by the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989—after which not a single calf has been born to the group. With the intellectual rigor of a scientist and the heart of a poet, Saulitis gives voice to these vital yet vanishing survivors and the place they are so loyal to. Both an elegy for one orca family and a celebration of the entire species, \u003ci\u003eInto Great Silence\u003c\/i\u003e is a moving portrait of the interconnectedness of humans with animals and place—and of the responsibility we have to protect them.A NOTE ABOUT NAMES\u003cbr\u003e PROLOGUE:  THE LAST ONE\u003cbr\u003e                                                                                     \u003cbr\u003e PART 1:  PLACE OF FIRST PERMISSION\u003cbr\u003e   1. BY      BEAVER, BY BEAR \u003cbr\u003e   2. LUCKY      STAR \u003cbr\u003e   3. WHALE      CAMP \u003cbr\u003e   4. FIRST      ENCOUNTER \u003cbr\u003e   5. CUT      LOOSE \u003cbr\u003e   6. INTO      THE LABYRINTH \u003cbr\u003e   7. MEMORIZE      THESE THINGS \u003cbr\u003e   8. THE      SURVIVAL VALUE OF EXUBERANCE \u003cbr\u003e   9. BOYS      IN BLUEBERRY SEASON \u003cbr\u003e 10. NO PASSAGE OUT\u003cbr\u003e 11. VEGANS AND CARNIVORES\u003cbr\u003e                                                       \u003cbr\u003e PART 2:  SEASON OF DEAD WATER\u003cbr\u003e  1. REFUGIA \u003cbr\u003e   2. WHEN      IT HAPPENS \u003cbr\u003e   3. WHERE      THE WHALES ARE \u003cbr\u003e   4.  PART OF THE DARKNESS \u003cbr\u003e   5. INTO      THE ICE, INTO THE OIL \u003cbr\u003e   6. GROUNDINGS \u003cbr\u003e   7. BEAST      AND BEAUTY \u003cbr\u003e   8. SCIENTIFIC      MAGIC \u003cbr\u003e   9. THE      WHALE CALLED EYAK \u003cbr\u003e 10.  ON BEGIN HUSHED AND SILENT\u003cbr\u003e11. TALLYING ICEBERGS\u003cbr\u003e 12. WILD HORSES, GREEN SKIES\u003cbr\u003e 13. MERCIFULLY  UNTRANSLATABLE                                                                                                                                \u003cbr\u003e PART 3:  SURVIVORS\u003cbr\u003e   1. A      HUMAN SILENCE \u003cbr\u003e   2. IN      NAMED AND UNNAMED COVES \u003cbr\u003e   3. THE      SMALLEST ISLAND \u003cbr\u003e   4. IT      BARELY MAKES A SOUND \u003cbr\u003e   5. BREATHING      IN NEVER-NIGHT \u003cbr\u003e   6. TRANSIENTS      OUTSIDE THE BOX \u003cbr\u003e   7. UNCOMMON      LANGUAGE \u003cbr\u003e 8. THE POETRY OF PREDATION\u003cbr\u003e 9. NINE  SILENCES                                                                                                                                                                     \u003cbr\u003e PART 4:  INTO GREAT SILENCE\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e 1.      HUNGER\u003cbr\u003e 2.      MORE THAN WE UNDERSTAND\u003cbr\u003e 3.      WHAT THE NUMBERS SAY\u003cbr\u003e 4.      WHAT THE SILENCE SAYS\u003cbr\u003e 5.      SPACES BETWEEN FACTS\u003cbr\u003e 6.      SILENCE AS SURVIVAL\u003cbr\u003e 7.      THE STORY INSIDE THE FLESH\u003cbr\u003e 8.      SNIPPETS AND TRANSPARENCIES\u003cbr\u003e 9.      THE OTHER WORLD\u003cbr\u003e 10. WHERE THE SEALS ARE\u003cbr\u003e 11. BOOK OF CHANGES\u003cbr\u003e 12. LAMENT FOR EYAK\u003cbr\u003e 13. IN A LANGUAGE LOST TO US, EYAK IS SINGING\u003cbr\u003e 14. THE SPIRIT LINE\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e ACKNOWLEDGMENTS\"Beginning in the halcyon years before the Exxon Valdez oil spill and continuing to this day, Saulitis has tracked individually known orcas to the brink of their population’s extinction. \u003ci\u003eInto Great Silence\u003c\/i\u003e is at once a love song to a wild place, an elegy, an inquiry into purpose and change, and a call to bring all our senses and ways of knowing to understanding and protecting our fragile world.\"\u003cbr\u003e—Pushcart Prize-winning author Nancy Lord\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A vivid, moving depiction of a way of life tragically becoming increasingly endangered.\"\u003cbr\u003e—Kirkus Reviews \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“There's great tenderness in this book, and great pathos--sometimes one wonders if it's worth the pain to pay attention amidst the gathering storm, but this powerful account shows us that it's precisely by keeping track of the world around us that we stay human.” \u003cbr\u003e—Bill McKibben, author of \u003ci\u003eEaarth: Making  a Life on a Tough New Planet\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Through Saulitis's growing understanding of biology, and through her heart, we soon find ourselves immersed in the fate of the third culture -- Prince William Sound's  intensely social, long-lived, black-and-white whales with brains considerably larger than ours. Fascinating suddenly becomes too cramped a word for either orcas or this book of self-discovery.”\u003cbr\u003e—Douglas Chadwick, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Grandest of Lives: Eye to Eye with Whales\u003c\/i\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[A] sensitively written  memoir...Readers who enjoyed Alexandra Morton’s \u003ci\u003eListening to Whales: What the Orcas Have Taught Us \u003c\/i\u003ewill be fascinated by Saulitis’ account of her often remove, cold, and wet life as a field biologist and her respect for the whales and the people who lived around her.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Saulitis’ stunning and sorrowful “book of contemplation” elucidates the discipline, tedium, danger,and bliss of whale studies; the solace she finds in art; and her intense relationships with her fellow orcaexperts. Candid, transfixing, and cautionary, Saulitis celebrates and mourns for a wondrous and imperiled species.\"\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The book is a must read—at once a visceral reminder of the fragility of our ancient planet, a requiem for its rapidly diminishing nature and a call to arms.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eAmerican Scientist\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cb\u003eEva Saulitis\u003c\/b\u003e has studied whales in Prince William Sound, the Kenai Fjords, and Alaska’s Aleutian Islands for the past twenty-four years. In addition to her scientific publications, her essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in numerous national journals, including \u003ci\u003eOrion, Crazyhorse\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003ePrairie Schooner\u003c\/i\u003e. The author of the essay collection \u003ci\u003eLeaving Resurrection\u003c\/i\u003e and the poetry collection \u003ci\u003eMany Ways to Say It\u003c\/i\u003e, she teaches at Kenai Peninsula College, in the low-residency MFA program at the University of Alaska, and at the Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference. She lives in Homer, Alaska.From the Prologue\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eLike the others the last one fell into its shadow.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It fell into its shadow on the water.\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eThey took it away its shadow stayed on the water.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e —W.S. Merwin, from “The Last One”\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Before I knew there was such thing as a species, much less one that was  endangered, I understood extinction.  When I was nine years old, I  understood extinction not with my mind, but with my heart.  Aptly, I  received this instruction not at school, but after, on an ABC After  School Special called \u003ci\u003eThe Last of the Curlews\u003c\/i\u003e, based on a novel  by Fred Bodsworth.   I don’t remember the film’s plot.  Only that at  some point, there was one pair of curlews left.  I vaguely remember a  father and son who debated whether or not to shoot a curlew.  I recall  with clarity the last one, the last Eskimo curlew on earth, circling and  calling above the tundra.  In the bird’s own memory, I imagined a sky  darkened and drummed to life by bodies, wings and the \u003ci\u003etr tr tr\u003c\/i\u003e-ing  of flight-song, an era when it migrated between the Canadian Arctic and  Patagonia with millions of other Eskimo curlews. I can still summon my  ache for that last curlew; almost 40 years later, it throbs in my chest.  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen I was 23, I saw my first orca, a lone female.  That day, I  had no inkling that I would study her kin for my entire adult life,  that she was already one of the last ones.  Fresh out of college, I’d  taken a job at a fish hatchery in Prince William Sound, Alaska.  One  blustery winter day, out for a skiff ride, I spotted a black fin amid  gray waves.  A few minutes later, a \u003ci\u003ewhoosh\u003c\/i\u003e near the skiff  startled me.  I turned to see a wind-flattened blow, the fin rising, the  arch of a flank emerging and sliding back under the water.  Then she  disappeared, as if the rough sea had swallowed her.  I looked  everywhere, but she was gone.  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Twenty-five years later, I’m still searching for that whale, for what’s left of her family.  For me, watching the \u003ci\u003eLast of the Curlews\u003c\/i\u003e was what Susan Cerulean calls an “origin moment.”  That day, when I  realized human beings could eliminate a kind of bird from the earth, my  assumptions about the world overturned. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e A lifetime of origin moments leads to this one.  It’s September, 2011.  I sit on our research boat, \u003ci\u003eNatoa\u003c\/i\u003e,  scanning a familiar shoreline for orca blows.  The tide is low.  A raft  of sea otters rests near Squire Point.  For many seasons, I followed  small groups of orcas called Chugach transients past this point as they  hunted for harbor seals.  Sometimes, harbor seals hauled out on Squire  Point to rest, or hunkered in the shallows alongside the rock to hide  from passing orcas.  Though I see no seals sprawled on the rock today, I  know orcas might appear at any moment.  They are like that,  unpredictable in their appearances and disappearances.  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e And so  are stories we tell about them.  Take today.  As we idle along the  point, Craig, my partner in research and in life, recalls that 35 years  ago, with a cadre of volunteer observers on the bluff top on Squire  Island, he watched Chugach transients swim along this shoreline.  A  young field assistant, eye pressed to the lens of a spotting scope,  shouted:  “Look, the orcas are playing with a porpoise!”  That evening,  after hiking back down from the bluff to their tents on a beach we still  call Whale Camp, they found the severed lungs, heart and head of a  porpoise calf washed up on shore.  “I tried to preserve the skull, but  the porpoise was so young, the bones just fell apart,” Craig says.  With  Craig, I’ve studied orcas for 25 years, nearly half my life, and I’ve  never heard that story before.  What I know, after all this time, about  the whale called orca, \u003ci\u003earlluk\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eaglu\u003c\/i\u003e, blackfish, killer whale – is a lot like that. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Now our boat rounds the bend of Squire Island, and Whale Camp beach  slides into view.  Many times, Chugach transients swam past Whale Camp  when I lived there.  Often they startled my field assistant and me from  our tasks.  Some still pass this way.  But it won’t always be so.  I  force myself to write the words:  The Chugach transients are going  extinct.  They are leaving the earth under my watch.  There will,  perhaps in my lifetime, be a last one.  I type the words, and that old  hurt I felt for the Eskimo curlew throbs.  How do I accept the reality  of that word – extinction?  Forty years later, do I understand with my  heart, much less my head, what it means?\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Last summer, from an  unexpected angle, I got closer to understanding the concept when I edged  up to – no, was shoved toward – the possibility of my own extinction.   From a sick-bed, my laptop open on my lap, cell phone on the coverlet  beside me, I followed the movements of Chenega, one of the last Chugach  transient matriarchs, on a computer screen.  I stared as a digitized map  of Prince William Sound drew itself, then displayed the points and  lines of her night-time travels.  There.  Off Point Helen.  I clicked on  the biggest dot, the most recent satellite hit.  4:30 am, heading  south.  The dots told me only that much.  Not if she traveled alone.   She’d been with her companions, Iktua and Mike, when Craig had tagged  her the night before.  \u003cbr\u003e A sea-breeze drug my eyes across the carpet,  the couch, the coffee table piled with get-well cards to a window.   There, my eyes met not the Pacific, but the Atlantic; not Prince William  Sound, but Cape Cod Bay, where wind left white claw marks on the indigo  surface.  For the first time in 24 years, I was not in Prince William  Sound studying orcas in summer.  I clicked on the link to the Iridium  website, typed a satellite text-message to Craig and our friend Cy, who  was filling in for me on the boat. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI shut the computer, pushed  it to the side of the bed, sank down against the pillows, closed my  eyes.  Before I rose to my reality, the fact that the day before, in a  Boston hospital, an IV had pumped a toxic chemical into a vein on top of  my left hand, the fact that I was being treated for breast cancer, and  downstairs, what awaited me was a regimen of anti-nausea meds swallowed  with a few baby spoons of applesauce, before I faced that I was not  there, in Prince William Sound, not even near, that it was humid and hot  every day where I was and not rainy and cool, before any of that, I  placed myself in Knight Island Passage at dusk, off Squire Point, in the  rain, on \u003ci\u003eNatoa\u003c\/i\u003e with Craig and Cy, and I tried to recreate the  encounter Craig had described on the sat-phone the night before. How  Chenega had been hunting with Iktua and Mike all afternoon, impossible  to approach as transients so often are.  How Craig and Cy had given up.   It was late.  The shelter of Sanctuary Bay beckoned.  They were wet and  cold and frustrated.  How they’d turned east, Craig taking the wheel  inside the boat cabin, Cy enjoying a few minutes of solitude on the  bridge, watching the hidden entrance to Sanctuary Bay reveal itself.   How she’d appeared beside the boat.  How she’d swum alongside the bow,  lunging out of the water to keep up the pace.  How Cy had stamped his  foot on the cabin roof to signal Craig.  How Craig had poked his head  out, heard Cy shout,  “It’s Chenega, right here, I think she wants you  to tag her now.”  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHow Craig had tagged, easily, with one shot,  one of the last seven Chugach transients.  That was why, from thousands  of miles and a continent away, I could call her up each morning and see  where she was.  That’s how I could track an animal that exemplified  fidelity to place, fidelity against all odds, in sickness and in health,  in peace and calamity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I’d been told by healers to visualize my  immune system preying on cancer cells.  I’d been told visualization  could lessen chemotherapy’s side-effects and speed up healing.  So I  visualized.  The animals, the place.  I visualized kayaking into  Sanctuary Bay, where Chenega, Mike and Iktua milled, waiting.  I drifted  into their midst and placed my hand on Chenega’s fin, placed my hand on  the cold, rubbery skin, knowing hot, oxygen-rich blood flowed inside,  and I imagined her red and white blood cells traveling up my arm,  infusing my own blood with power.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe next time Craig called, he  told me he’d photographed all of the remaining seven Chugach  transients:  Chenega, Iktua, Egagutak, Mike, Marie, Ewan, Paddy. \u003cbr\u003e All that hot, humid summer, I sat at a desk each day I was able, or I  sat with the laptop propped open on my lap in bed, and I wrote their  stories.  In doing so I understood, not just with my head, not just with  my heart, but with my body, that certain places on this earth have  healing power, and that the place where the Chugach transients live is  one.  I came to believe that the place and the whales played a part in  rescuing me.  Not in some mystical sense, but simply by existing, with  or without me.  They saved me, though I can’t save them.   \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003eNow a year has passed.  I’m back in Prince William Sound, back on \u003ci\u003eNatoa\u003c\/i\u003e,  short-haired, body altered, a strange, new post-chemo ringing in my  ears, one I hear only when it’s quiet.  But as always in August, my  fingertips are blueberry-stained.  As always, resident orcas appear in  the passages to feed on silver salmon.  As always, salmon spawn and die  by the millions in streams.  Craig douses bucketfuls of saltwater over  four silver salmon he’s caught off Whale Camp beach.  As always, we  search the shorelines for Chugach transients.  Now the tide’s risen and  swallowed all but one of the Squire Point rocks.  Now a pelagic  cormorant and three glaucous-winged gulls cluster on that shrinking,  kelp-skirted surface.  A front’s pulled a gray blanket over the Sound.  I  scan with binoculars the choppy water in front of familiar landmarks –  Pleiades, Icy Bay, Iktua Passage, Brandt Island, Labyrinth – for a black  fin that might, at any moment, appear amid those waves.   \u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Beacon Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304996950245,"sku":"NP9780807014462","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780807014462.jpg?v=1767730125","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/into-great-silence-isbn-9780807014462","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}