Leon Anawak—Susan Stringer

Leon Anawak and Susan Stringer are colleagues whose partnership in whale research becomes inseparable from the moment Anawak cannot save her. Stringer’s death during an orca attack in Clayoquot Sound ends their work together and leaves Anawak questioning both his actions in the water and the limits of what he knows about whale intelligence.

Professional partnership and fieldwork

Anawak and Stringer work together in the field, with Stringer aboard the Blue Shark while Anawak moves by Zodiac. Their coordination is practical and immediate: Anawak keeps in radio contact with her as he approaches a disturbance, asking whether the protesters are becoming physical. Stringer reports that they are taking photographs and shouting, as they had before. The exchange places their professional partnership within the daily pressures of whale-watching work, where managing human conduct and avoiding harm to whales are both part of the task.

Their relationship is also framed by Anawak’s scientific interest in animal minds. Before the attack, he explains that whales must be understood as whales, not measured against human capacities: their specialisation gives them abilities but also limits, and intelligence does not make them human. His remarks distinguish different marine mammals and compare their ways of life with those of fish. Stringer’s later death makes that intellectual position painfully immediate. The question is no longer only how to describe a whale’s mind, but whether human understanding can make any difference when an animal attacks.

The attack and failed rescue

When Tom Shoemaker tells Anawak that Greywolf has returned, Anawak leaves the group and drives along the coast through Clayoquot Sound. He is already angry about Greywolf and the Seaguards’ earlier protest, which had left tourists upset and forced Shoemaker to calm complaints at the station. The team had decided not to make an official complaint, fearing that it would give Greywolf a public platform and allow an uproar to distort the facts. During the journey, Anawak wonders whether ignoring him had been a mistake. At the same time, he scans the water and takes care not to frighten or injure a whale.

The scene shifts abruptly from protest to rescue. The Zodiac is overturned, and orcas close in on the people in the water. Greywolf steers toward them while Anawak helps pull a wheezing man aboard. Stringer is still in the water with another woman. When Stringer tells Anawak to take the other woman first, Greywolf helps bring that woman to safety. Stringer then tries to climb aboard, slips back into the sea, and disappears beneath the surface as the whales dive behind her.

Anawak catches Stringer’s hand and grips her jacket as an orca clamps its jaws around her. Their eyes meet, but he cannot keep hold of her: she is wrenched from his grasp and vanishes underwater. The orange of her suit fades beneath the surface, followed by bubbles and reddening water. The rescue effort makes their bond visible through action rather than explanation: Stringer prioritises another survivor, and Anawak’s last act is to hold on to her as the animal pulls her away.

Grief, responsibility, and the limits of knowledge

After the attack, Anawak is trembling and dizzy, and recognizes that he may be in shock. He tries to clear the station office while knowing that, if he closes his eyes, he will see Stringer in the orca’s jaws. The memory is not a general aftermath but a specific image that recurs against his efforts to keep functioning. Around him, the consequences remain tangible: the woman Stringer helped lies semi-conscious, a man cries for the daughter who had been with him on the boat, and Alicia Delaware cares for him while a helicopter is expected to take the survivors to hospital.

Later, Anawak is repeatedly overcome by guilt at having failed to save Stringer. He tells himself that neither he nor anyone else could have freed her from the orca’s jaws, but that certainty does not settle the matter. His research and writing about marine-mammal intelligence seem inadequate beside the question of whether he could have understood the whale well enough to make it release its prey. He reminds himself that orcas are animals, however intelligent, and that prey is prey; yet he also knows that orcas do not ordinarily prey on humans. The contradiction keeps his scientific categories from becoming an answer to what happened.

The relationship’s lasting significance

Stringer’s death also changes the practical shape of Anawak’s work. His aversion to Alicia Delaware fades, and he accepts her as an assistant because he needs one after Stringer’s death. He recognises Delaware’s intelligence and analytical ability beneath her brash manner, and their work together follows the vacancy Stringer leaves behind. This transition does not replace Stringer or resolve Anawak’s grief; it shows how the investigation continues under the conditions her death has created.

The relationship is therefore presented through shared work, a final act of mutual aid, and Anawak’s inability to stop replaying the loss. Stringer remains present in the narrative not through a developed account of private life, but through the precise consequences of her absence: a colleague’s empty place in the research, a rescue that could not save her, and the questions her death forces Anawak to ask about animal intelligence and human comprehension.