new visitors.
While they waited for their prey, Sparrow trained Burich to load and fire the harpoon. The two practiced by shooting at a raft towed by the Post, but they missed their mark more often than they hit it. Finally, a pod of whales appeared. Burich raced to the harpoon, picked his victim, lined up the shot, fired, and watched as the steel spike and nylon tail whistled over the killer’s back.
The would-be model responded with a leap and a dive. Then the pod swam off, toward a part of the ocean where they wouldn’t be disturbed. When Canada’s fisheries minister, James Sinclair, arrived to survey the operation and watched the whalers practice shooting, he left the island convinced they’d never hook a whale.
On June 2, Scott’s column in the Sun described the scene: “Our intrepid leader here is Dr. Murray A. Newman. It frightens me to think what will happen to Murray if the hunt fails. I see him as an old, old geezer, roaming the oceans of the world, cursing and shaking his gnarled fist at the empty waves. The way things are going, I may be right there with him. Whale hunting gets in your blood, I tell you, especially when you don’t get any.” Newman and Scott both mused that perhaps these whales had a sixth sense that alerted them to danger.
Only one whale ventured so close to the harpoon gun that it would have been almost impossible to miss—a jet-black minke who seemed fascinated by the hunting party. But minkes weren’t killer whales—nor were they known as killers. They were, however, killer whale food. “We call her ‘Minnie,’” wrote Scott. “It’s a safe bet that no one has ever been this affectionate toward Orcinus orca.” The whalers had a pet whale.
A few days after Scott’s column was published, Sparrow had smaller fish to fry. He couldn’t afford to miss halibut season and left the Gulf Islands to head out for the Bering Sea. Burich would now be the executioner. Newman and Penfold left too, along with the rest of the aquarium staff and the media. Newman recruited one of the aquarium’s original volunteers, Joe Bauer, to work with Burich.
Bauer had been fishing since his childhood—first in Germany, which his family had made the mistake of visiting just as World War II broke out, leading to his father’s internment at Dachau because of his anti-Nazi sentiments; then at a refugee camp in Scotland, where an old Gaelic fisherman taught him how to fish for herring; and later in Canada, where he studied fishing and net-making with First Nations fishermen. “I used to fish oolichans [candlefish] and was mentored by the Musqueam, the Stó:lō, and Tsawwassen bands,” says Bauer. “They taught me a lot about respecting nature and working with nature rather than trying to dictate and control it.” He was also taught to honor elders, offering them the pick of every catch. As a result of his respect for these traditions, as an adult Bauer was formally adopted by a Nisga’a family and received full First Nations status—including fishing rights—which he never used.
As a high school student in Steveston, a fishing and canning town just outside of Vancouver, Bauer collected exotic local fish for himself, then for the small aquarium run by UBC. His personal collection was almost as impressive as the university’s; he had thirty tanks at home. “I had species UBC didn’t even know existed,” he says. UBC professor Dr. Wilbert Clemens was so impressed by the self-taught prodigy that Bauer became an aquarium fixture before there was an aquarium and was declared a lifetime member in 1956, while he was still in high school. Unable to afford university, Bauer worked as a fisherman but spent his spare time volunteering for Clemens and, later, Newman.
When the whaling expedition launched, the twenty-five-year-old Bauer was a diver and diving instructor (students included future Canadian environmental icon David Suzuki) and regularly helped the Canadian coast guard on rescue missions.
Bauer arrived on Saturna to search for other species for the aquarium and assist with the expedition, if necessary. He also brought a camera to chronicle the adventures. He knew Sparrow and Burich because they’d crossed paths as fishermen. It might be a big ocean, but it was a small community.
AFTER TEN DAYS, the coast guard crew left in response to reports of Russian whalers near the Queen Charlotte Islands (now known as Haida Gwaii), where they were believed to be venturing inside the three-mile fishing limit in their quest for whales much more valuable than killers.
Suddenly, Canada’s biggest whale news was that Russians might harpoon the B.C. economy. Lorne Hume, general manager of Western Canadian Whaling, warned that local whalers could lose up to $2 million if the Soviets weren’t stopped. They had four or five times as many boats as Hume had, as well as floating factory ships that allowed them to render whales on the water. According to Hume, “this could lead to a situation similar to that existing in Antarctica which has been so overhunted that whale biologists believe it will take 50 years for whales in that area to return to the number they were at before the Second World War.” The Department of Fisheries sent a boat to photograph the Soviets to make sure they weren’t violating international borders by killing whales that only Canadians were supposed to kill.
The circus had left Saturna. Only Burich and Bauer remained— and there were no killer whales in sight. It was as if the whales had read Scott’s stories and decided to remove Saturna from their feeding route. Killer whales were spotted on May 22, 24, 26, and 28, but no new whales came close enough to shore to shoot. For almost an entire month—between May 28 and June 25—there were no sightings at all.
To fill the time, Burich taught Bauer how to use the harpoon and how to carve. The two amused themselves by etching their own twentieth-century petroglyphs of whales and whalers into the flat stones near their camp. They also made a flag displaying a killer whale and flew it over their tent. And they built a pen in a nearby bay where they could study the body of their whale after they caught and killed it, so that Bauer could take the photos and measurements.
For weeks, Burich played his harmonica, sculpted, and scraped images into the sandstone, while Bauer watched the water for whales and other species and collected a few exotic specimens for the aquarium’s displays. They were both fishermen, so they knew how to wait or, to use the term preferred by fishermen, fish. Burich and Bauer would occasionally visit the Fletchers for company and the use of their shower.
ON JULY 15, after almost two months of waiting, Newman contacted Burich via ship-to-shore radio to call it a day. His whale hunt had become a snipe hunt. Instead of the pods of fifty-plus killers that had been recorded over the previous four years, only eight pods—a mere sixty whales—had been seen during Burich’s fifty-seven days on the island. And whale season was winding down.
Burich still wanted his whale. His sculpture would be a tourist attraction that everyone in Vancouver and visitors from around the world would see. And, perhaps more importantly, he didn’t want to let Newman down. But maybe Newman was right and the creatures could sense danger. After eight weeks, Burich agreed that it was time to abandon the quest.
That night, the Fletchers invited Burich and Bauer for a farewell dinner, and Pete broke out the homemade sake he’d been brewing. After a long night of swapping stories and sampling the potent rice wine, Burich and Bauer returned to their tent.
When they woke the morning of July 16, not only were both men hungover, they were cold. The hot summer weather had been replaced with an unseasonal chill, and the waves were choppy. For the first time since arriving, Burich and Bauer put on their coats as they prepared for their last breakfast on Saturna. It was a good time to be going.
Bauer had stopped shaving while he was on the island—he’d mentioned that he was a fan of Burich’s fisherman’s beard—but he wanted to clean up before returning home to his girlfriend. Burich, who looked like Ernest Hemingway in his bullfighting prime, decided his friend should keep the beard, grabbed Bauer’s shaving gear, and hurled it off the cliff. “You want a shave,” laughed Burich. “Go dive for it.”
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