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On a warm September afternoon, on San Juan Island off the northwestern coast of Washington State, I boarded J2, a sleek black-and-white whale-watching vessel. The boat was named after a locally famous orca, or killer whale, affectionately known as “Granny.” Until her disappearance in 2016, Granny was the matriarch of J-pod, one of the three resident orca groups, or pods, that live in the surrounding Salish Sea.
For what some experts think was more than a hundred years, Granny returned to these waters every summer, birthing babies and watching them grow. She taught her daughters and sons to hunt Chinook salmon, leading them to where the fish were fat and plentiful. She celebrated births and salmon feasts with other families in her clan, sometimes with as many as five generations side by side. She lived through the decades when humans captured her kin, and through the transformation of the local islands from rocky farms to wealthy urban escapes.
December 16, 2020
Cheryl Alexander has been documenting and studing a lone wolf named Takaya (the Coast Salish First Nation s peoples word for wolf) who has been living in on a small group of islands in British Columbia s Salish Sea for years. This fall, Alexander released a book,
Takaya: Lone Wolf, showcasing Takaya s journey and mysteries including her own photographs, interviews and journal entries.
Read an excerpt and see some of the photographs below:
WILD
He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild h
eart of life. He was alone and young and willful and wild hearted, alone amidst a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the sea harvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight. -Jon Krakauer