Vancouver Island, Anawak’s home and research base is both Leon Anawak’s point of belonging and the novel’s first sustained human landscape for its marine crisis. Around Tofino and Clayoquot Sound, whale watching is a livelihood and a familiar way of meeting the ocean; as attacks and disappearances spread, the same waters become dangerous and difficult to interpret. The island’s role is therefore not merely scenic: it gives Anawak a practical connection to marine life, grounds the early investigation in a local community, and provides a measure of what the crisis has changed.

Setting and Coastal Life

The island’s west-coast landscape is described through beaches, marshes, rivers, deserted coves, and old pine and cedar forests. Tofino, where Davie's Whaling Station stands among timber buildings, is presented as a town whose local identity is bound to the surrounding coast. The station itself has a red roof, sheltered terrace, front lawn, and a distinctive seven-metre cedar whale-fluke totem. Its combination of workplace, tourist business, and recognizable landmark makes the whale a part of everyday public life before the animals’ behavior turns that relationship into a source of alarm.

Whale watching draws visitors to coastal towns including Tofino, Ucluelet, and Victoria. Twice a year, large herds of whales pass through British Columbia’s waters on their way toward Mexico, where they give birth beyond the reach of orcas, their most dangerous predators. This seasonal movement gives the island’s tourism a rhythm set by animal migration. The visitors come to see whales, but their presence also depends on the whales’ routes and behavior—an early indication that human activity on the coast is shaped by processes people do not control.

Leon Anawak’s own dwelling reflects his attachment to this working coast. After leaving the station, he lives aboard a dilapidated twelve-metre sailing boat owned by Davie, paying a nominal rent because Davie has not paid to have the boat repaired. Anawak also has a tiny apartment in Vancouver, but uses it only when business takes him there. The contrast presents the island not simply as a workplace but as the place where his daily life is most firmly situated: his home is a boat in the harbour, close to the water he studies.

From Whale-Watching to Crisis

The return of Jack Greywolf and his Seaguards disrupts the ordinary business of the whale-watching station. When Leon Anawak is called back to Vancouver Island, Greywolf and the Seaguards have already left after taking two boatloads of tourists, many of them disgruntled at having been filmed and watched as though they were animals. Tom Shoemaker has tried to calm the customers, in some cases by giving them free tickets. The disruption is deliberate: Greywolf has caused an upset, and Anawak is angry at the consequences. In a town dependent on encounters with wildlife, the scene makes the conflict over how animals are treated immediate and local.

The threat soon reaches beyond business and visitor complaints. While Anawak is back on the island, two men disregard the rules and go to sea in a canoe. A pack of orcas capsizes them in less than ten minutes. One man’s remains later wash ashore; the other is not found. The incident shows the human cost of entering waters where the usual expectations of safe passage no longer hold, and it sharpens the difference between observing wildlife from a tour boat and confronting animals whose behavior has become dangerous.

At Clayoquot Sound, however, the evidence does not support treating every orca encounter as identical. During a later crossing in the Devilfish, the water is calm, and only two sightings have occurred in the Sound since the trouble began. Both involved resident orcas, which showed no aggression. Anawak’s working theory is that the change in behavior is specific to migratory whales. The quiet scene does not resolve the danger; it makes careful distinctions between animal groups part of the investigation. The Sound becomes a place where apparent normality can coexist with uncertainty, and where observation matters more than a blanket explanation.

Indigenous Knowledge and the Meaning of Place

The novel also places the island’s coastal setting within the histories and knowledge of Indigenous peoples of western British Columbia. The Nootka, who call themselves the Nuu-chah-nulth, are identified as the People Along the Mountains and as one of the principal peoples of the region’s Pacific coast. The narrative notes the complexity of the relationships among the area’s tribes, bands, and language groups, and presents the Nootka as a source of knowledge about the island’s western coast. That knowledge is not treated as a single, easily generalized body of custom: regional dialects and traditions differ, and an outsider may fail to understand them.

A conversation about the teaching that everything is one gives the island setting an ecological dimension. In the explanation offered there, a change to a river affects humans, animals, and the sea; when one thing changes, others change with it. The principle resonates with the novel’s unfolding crisis, in which disturbances in marine life cannot be contained within a single species or locality. The setting’s value lies partly in the way it joins close observation of particular waters to a broader understanding of interdependence.

The book also recalls how the Indian Act of 1885 helped break the transmission of Indigenous oral traditions by encouraging people to leave their homelands and send children to residential schools for assimilation. Although reparations have been made, the lost culture cannot simply be restored, and fewer people know the old lore. These reflections complicate the island’s attractive image as an untouched wilderness: its forests and coast are also lived-in places shaped by displacement, political decisions, and interrupted cultural memory.

A Local Home in a Wider Ocean

Leon Anawak’s connection to the island is set against his later journey into the Arctic. He has spent most of his life on Vancouver Island and devoted himself to marine biology, yet the novel contrasts its western Canadian climate, seemingly suited to human life, with an Arctic landscape that resists human possession. That contrast makes the island a point of reference rather than a guarantee of control. Anawak’s expertise grows out of a long familiarity with the Pacific coast, but the book repeatedly directs attention toward environments and forms of life that exceed what people can easily observe or understand.

The novel’s wider ocean imagery reinforces that limit. Continental shelves extend from land beneath relatively shallow water before descending toward the ocean floor, which is described as more mysterious to science than outer space. At sea, the horizon can disappear into water and cloud, leaving even experienced sailors without clear visual markers. Such passages are not specific to the island, but they enlarge the context in which its coast is read: the familiar harbour sits beside an immense, only partially known world.

By returning the marine crisis to a place where whales are watched for a living, the narrative makes global ecological change visible in daily routines, local livelihoods, and the danger faced by people who go out in small boats. Vancouver Island remains Leon Anawak’s home and research base, but familiarity does not mean mastery. Its central significance is the tension between intimate knowledge of a coast and the larger oceanic forces that unsettle every assumption built upon it.