Susan Stringer

Susan Stringer, the office manager at Davie's Whaling Station, is Leon Anawak’s colleague in Tofino’s whale-watching community. Practical, sociable, and attentive to the work around her, she helps sustain the station’s everyday operations and responds to the first signs that familiar encounters with whales may no longer be ordinary. Her death in an orca attack turns that working relationship into a lasting source of grief and guilt for Anawak.

Identity and Background

Stringer works behind the counter at Davie's Whaling Station, a small, crowded business on the Tofino waterfront. She took the office-manager job to finance her studies, as Anawak had taken work at the station for the same reason. By the time the story finds them there, their paths have diverged: Stringer manages the office, while Anawak has completed a doctorate and built a scientific reputation, yet still works at the station. Their shared workplace gives their relationship a practical foundation in the daily business of welcoming visitors, organizing tours, and making a living from the coast.

The station’s prospects are not always secure. When a spell of poor tourism leaves passengers disappointed, Stringer remarks that if business does not improve, everyone may be out of work, and jokes about replacing whale-watching with squirrel-watching. The humor is a response to an immediate economic worry, not indifference to the work. She is managing the station’s materials and keeping its routine going even as the day’s tour has failed to provide the excitement visitors expect.

Work and Everyday Relationships

Stringer’s work extends beyond the ticket office. During a whale sighting, she uses the radio to pass details to other boats waiting nearby. The vessels have switched off their engines, and the operators are committed to responsible whale-watching; Stringer’s communication is part of that shared effort to observe the animals without turning the encounter into a disturbance. Her role links the station’s office work with the practical coordination required on the water.

She also shows interest in Anawak’s research and workload. She raises the question of whether he has spoken with Rod Palm about feedback from the telemetric tracking, and later invites him to join the others at Schooners. Anawak declines because he is setting up a trial with belugas. Stringer responds that he works too hard. The exchange gives their collegial bond an ordinary warmth: she notices what occupies him, tries to draw him into social life, and can tease him about his commitment without diminishing his scientific work.

That familiarity matters when the whale encounters begin to feel uncertain. Anawak asks Stringer privately how the animals seem to her. She considers the question and says they seem as they always have, then turns it back to him. He presses her on whether she thinks they look normal. Her answer does not confirm his suspicion, but the exchange establishes her as someone whose observations he values. She is neither an outside spectator nor a scientific authority supplying a definitive interpretation; she is a colleague whose experience on the water offers a second perspective as the situation changes.

Warning Signs and the Orca Attack

Stringer’s radio work becomes more urgent when the Blue Shark reports trouble. She calls Anawak and tells him that something is wrong, prompting his foreboding question about whether the trouble concerns the whales. The report brings him back into the unfolding emergency, while showing Stringer acting as a link between the boats and the people who can respond.

During the attack, Stringer is among those in the water after a Zodiac overturns. Jack Greywolf steers toward the people still at risk, and Anawak helps pull a wheezing man aboard. When Anawak reaches for Stringer, she insists that another woman be helped first. After the other woman is brought to safety, Stringer tries to climb aboard, slips back into the water, and is left exposed as the orcas close in. Anawak catches her hand and holds on to her jacket, but he cannot keep her from being pulled away. The rescue attempt fails, and Stringer dies.

The sequence makes her final actions consistent with the alertness and practical concern shown elsewhere. Even in immediate danger, she directs attention toward someone else first. The attack also breaks the assumptions on which the work has depended: the animals Anawak studies and the boats that bring people close to them are no longer safely separable into predictable roles of observer and observed.

Death and Its Aftermath

Stringer’s death continues to shape Anawak after the attack. He is overcome by guilt when he thinks of her and returns to the question of whether anything he or anyone else could have done might have saved her. He has tried to tell himself that no one could have freed her from the orca, but that explanation does not end his uncertainty. His grief is bound to his professional identity: he has written about intelligence in marine mammals, yet could not understand what the whale was doing well enough to prevent the loss.

The practical consequences of her absence are also explicit. Anawak needs an assistant, and Alicia Delaware’s help becomes valuable in part because Stringer is dead. The replacement does not erase the loss; instead, the change in the working arrangement makes the vacancy she leaves tangible. Stringer had been both a coworker in the station’s everyday operations and a trusted companion in the field.

Narrative Significance

Stringer’s role is compact but consequential. The novel first presents her through the ordinary pressures of a coastal workplace: tourism, office duties, conversation, and Anawak’s overfull schedule. It then places her knowledge and communications within the whale-watching network as reports of unusual behavior accumulate. Her death abruptly converts those routines into a personal catastrophe, and Anawak’s subsequent guilt carries the event into his later attempts to understand animal intelligence.

Her story also sharpens the difference between observing marine mammals and knowing what they will do. Stringer participates in responsible whale-watching and shares the experience that allows her to say the animals seem normal; neither attentiveness nor professional familiarity protects her when the encounter turns violent. Through the contrast between those measured routines and the failed rescue, her death marks the human cost of a crisis that is still only partly understood.