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Suzanne’s away for a few days, so this is just Mike.

Days of activity and concern. On the past long weekend, the parking lot at the marina in Gold River and a few hundred metres of the road were filled with parked trucks and empty boat trailers. In my frame of mind this was all a danger to Luna, but that isn’t altogether fair. I talked to many fishermen as they put their boats into the water, and also at the various resort marinas on the Sound, and many are disturbed that others among them would threaten Luna.

However, that group remains large and vocal. One marina owner estimated that half the fishermen have told him that Luna should be killed. The DFO people I’ve talked to think this is all people shooting off mouths but not weapons, and I agree – almost. It’s that small percentage of people who might do something that concerns me. The sheer numbers of people who essentially condone the murder of Luna means that someone who’s just over the edge may feel that he has peer support. That’s the chilling part.

I drove to Nanaimo early Tuesday morning and passed on these concerns to DFO. I spent almost three hours there in what diplomats would call “frank and extensive talks,” which were pretty much frank and extensive on my part and cautious but friendly and apparently receptive on DFO’s part.

I was out on the water for all of Sunday and most of Monday. The First Nation's stewardship boat had mechanical problems at the time, so I wanted to be sure and be out there to at least watch. It was that experience that later fuelled the journey to Nanaimo.

Sunday was a day of light rain mixed with downpours. It was a misty, mysterious, beautifully stormy day, but for our young friend it was mostly grey, with one patch of sunlight.

Luna was in among the docks at a Nootka Sound resort marina when I got there. He was messing around with pipes under the docks, and while people watched he came up with a shell-encrusted chunk of plastic pipe, which Cam, the marina’s owner, looked at in a wry but not happy way, probably a bit the way someone would look if their dog brought back the drive train from their car.

Cam is an ally of Luna’s. He’s one of the people who has known about Luna the longest, since the very early days in 2001, and he has never wavered in his affection for Luna. He gets worried about Luna – and about his marina – when he sees him breaking things, but Cam is completely opposed to any harsh action.

Cam watched all this whale play with bemused affectionate frustration. Me, too. Cam had asked the people who had not left to go fishing to avoid going on the dock close to Luna, so most of them were bunched under an awning on the main docks. They remained there even under extreme photographic provocation when Shrek, Cam’s family’s dog, followed Luna along the dock. Luna noticed him and popped up. They almost touched noses. Unlike some other dogs who have had encounters like this, Shrek didn’t bark or look at all troubled. He just looked over the edge of the dock, got a noseful of whale, and strolled off again. Under the awning, cameras flickered.

There is something going on in microcosm here, I think. Under that awning were probably fifteen or twenty people. They were in awe of Luna, and were charmed by his encounter with Shrek, not just because it was novel, but I think because it was so gentle. Luna’s actions are extremely careful when he is dealing directly with another living mammal -- dog or human -- he appears aware, perceptive, engaged, engaging. Lisa Larsson describes for all orcas what appears to happen: “They look through your otherness at you,” she says.

Under the awning, the people got some of that from Luna’s meeting with Shrek. Many of that group were fishermen and some were fishermen's spouses. I am positive that not one person among them will condone violence against Luna after that chance moment.

The microcosm I am talking about is the way this event relates to the general world of people and whales. People tend to look for individuals; it’s something about the way we are hardwired. We look at chaos and in it we see story and individuals. But some scientists, I think, feel that the individual member of a species that gets attention and money, like Luna, wastes funds that could be better spent on research on the larger group of species, and in one sense they’re right: you can’t learn a lot about group dynamics and survival from Luna, who is off the graph of normal orca life. We believe is a lot that science can learn from Luna, but it must be desperately frustrating to see hundreds of thousands spent on Luna when you have to fight for a $10,000 dollar grant to study a fundamental issue like diet in the group.

But what the individual does to the public awareness of the species can be priceless. These single lives are ambassadors from the species that get through the chinks in our armour into the vulnerable places in our hearts. People can be immune to calls for action to save desperately endangered species, but tell them about an individual in trouble and they’ll wake up to everyone’s plight.

Look at all of us who frequent these pages. Whatever happens to Luna, we will never feel the same way about orcas again. Something about this one life, with all his craziness and idiosyncrasies, has reached us permanently. As always, when you see the plight of an individual, you understand: This matters. Then you extend your concern to embrace the whole.

I did something that was difficult and troubling but ultimately seemed right that Sunday in the rain. On the docks, I watched with the other people for quite a while while Luna damaged pipes, then Luna went back to shoving boats around, making their owners nervous and sometimes angry. When he headed for a small boat with about five people standing up in it, I had seen enough of this. I got in Blackfish, motored over there, and distracted him. I grabbed a couple of fenders that I’d been using for a keel in Blackfish (it’s an old boat with one or two small, um, problems, like a leaky keel). I dropped them in the water. Luna came over. The two fenders were tied together, and he balanced them on his nose by the tie in the middle and followed me out of the marina.

The small DFO ship Atlin Post was a little way offshore. I led Luna to the ship. The Atlin Post crew was recently instructed to disengage Luna when possible from marina entanglements, so it was their responsibility now to pay attention to him. About the time I got there, Luna came up and gently took the rope of the fenders in his teeth and took them away to play with for a while. (I got one back later.)

This did not end here. The Atlin Post had to continue on its fisheries enforcement rounds, and after an hour or so Luna was back in the resort marina, tearing at underwater pipes again. Cam was troubled by this, and by the fact that by now this had been going on for hours, which supports the people who are angry with him and are looking for an excuse to take the law into their own hands. So I decided to lead Luna out again.

This was even more troubling than the first time. He was very reluctant to go. The marina was just too enticing. The people there were now going about their business without paying him a lot of attention, but there were many boats going in and out, people cleaning fish, hoses running, dogs around, all kinds of social activity. For a long time, Luna couldn’t be torn away.

Finally, he came along, but this was not a happy thing. For a year and a half, Suzanne and I haven’t being trying to engage Luna, and have avoided going near him in our boat, believing that interaction is wrong for Luna, but now here I was doing it. Suzanne and I have have been arguing lately, as readers here know, that he now should have deliberate interaction on a consistent basis in order to keep him and people safe and help get him geographically oriented toward a reunion, yet this was very uncomfortable. This was not a part of an established system; it was just another stopgap thing to stop a bit of trouble, so it resembled all the past events of a similar nature, which have provided Luna with a pattern of inconsistent attention that resembles good-cop, bad-cop procedures that are designed to keep subjects off-balance, not to reassure them or to prepare them for the outside world.

Finally, Luna came on out of the marina. Then, around the corner came the Atlin Post. Later I told both Cam and the guys on the Atlin Post that I was very uncomfortable with what had happened and did not want to do it again. But I knew then, and remember again as I write this, that my experience was far from unique. The stewardship people – Chantelle, Rachel and the others -- experienced exactly the same stuff in previous years when they had to lead Luna away from encounters. My experience sounded just like things they wrote in their journals. In some of our interviews members of the public have expressed envy that the stewards had the right to engage Luna and have fun with him while others didn't. Now I am more aware than before that the interaction they had with Luna in the course of their work involved such conflicting emotions and ideals that it was not fun at all.

This is what has been happening here since the beginning, and I now believe it is symptomatic of one thing: None of us have yet got it right in our relationships to our friend Luna. We know there is something better that we have to give, but we don’t know how to give it.

What Suzanne and I have proposed is a way to try something different, something that we think is both more protective and more consistent and friendly to him than what's happened before, but though we're convinced that this system should be tried, we are not overconfident that it is the absolute answer. The truth for all of us in our lives with Luna is that as humans, we have not yet learned how to look back through his otherness at him.

Now, the one bit of sunshine:

I reached the Atlin Post. The DFO enforcement guy on board looked over the side and said “Why don’t we both try to lead him back to the bay?” He meant the place where Luna tends to hang out. He thought it might work better with two boats, because Luna had not stayed with the Atlin Post earlier in the day.

So we started off, slowly at first. We weren’t dragging anything, we were just going. Luna followed. I formed up with the ship, about thirty feet to port. Luna moved back and forth between us, giving me a little shove, then scooting over to hang in the propwash of the ship. We watched from our two boats, and he stuck close. The Atlin Post gradually increased its speed. Luna stayed. He ducked over to me, gave a nudge, then went back to the big red ship.

The speed increased. Eight knots. Ten knots. Twelve. Now the bow wave was big, the wake a roller. I held the Blackfish just ahead of the first line of wake about amidships on the Atlin Post. Luna was still there, even with me. I could see him in the wave.

I will never forget that. I had left my camera in its case throughout all this. It seemed inappropriate to take advantage of the uncomfortable leadout interaction to get footage, and it remained there in the case now. Yet I remember that view of Luna as well as any high definition image. Better, in fact; forever.

He held himself in the wave just ahead of the place where the two vessels' wakes mingled in a rough and tumble of turbulence, so he was in the slick curve of water, surfing its energy. His whole body was visible, patches of light and dark, moving very precisely to take advantage of the power of the wave. His body, seen through the flow of lines of shine on the water, looked perfectly adapted to the wave's shape, almost as if the water flowed through Luna, not around him.

Because all this was happening in the standing wave right beside me, it was like looking at something preserved in a curving block of crystal, except the essence of what was held in this curious stillness was the vital energy of life itself, not just a symbol, but captured whole, as it happened.

The Atlin Post, Luna and I rushed away from threat into safety, and reached the bay together. The Atlin Post stopped. Luna stayed with the ship, and got bits of red paint on his skin from rubbing its hull.

I found out the next day that the Atlin Post had anchored in the bay overnight, and that Luna had stayed in the area, and came back to touch base with the ship in the morning (Monday) before both the ship and Luna headed out on their rounds again. I saw him myself that morning, foraging, then lost track of him for the rest of the day. I don’t think he went back to the marina.

Tuesday I drove to Nanaimo to talk to DFO, because I believe Luna needs help now. Not next month. Now. DFO listened, and gave me a little hope. I came back to Gold River to find that the First Nation's Kakawin Guardian boat is back on the water, and the observation post is manned. DFO enforcement officers from the Gold River office have told both the First Nation guardians and me that we can't do the kind of interventions in problem situations that I did on Sunday, but I'm hoping that fisheries enforcement boats and the Atlin Post crew will get the job done when necessary. But whoever does it, those interventions, though they stop problems, are not enough by themselves. I hope we can all work out something better, very soon.

Among the images I have of that time beside the Atlin Post there is another image, in my imagination, of a similar moment in the future. In that image, a friendly boat, accompanied by canoes, leads Luna again, and all that vitality that he is rides out beyond today’s confines and dangers, into the reach of his family, where finally he will not have to look through otherness to feel at home.