Solitary Confinement

Contributed by Matt Baldwin on 15/10/11

The big female they call Cree swims in slow, aimless laps around the perimeter of the tank, occasionally surfacing to expel the depleted breath in her lungs and take in another. Then she dives again, following the oblong perimeter of the concrete and plexiglass walls. There is nowhere else to go.

She is completely alone. The Others are in another tank, their voices silenced by the unnatural barrier of the concrete.

‘Cree’ is not her name, is not a sound she attached possession to. It is merely the sound the little ones use when the wanted her to dive or to breach. When she does so they reward her with fish. Cold fish, dead fish, but still fish, and so she responds to it.

Her own name is a series of click-whistles she has not heard from another orca for twenty seasons. Though she does not understand the passing of time she knows it, same as she knew when the salmon would be returning to the far northern coves or the tuna could be found in the warmer seas down the south coast. Twenty seasons have passed since she and her pod had chased schools of fish into the shallows and gobbled them up from the rocky shoals.

Twenty seasons since she had taught her first calf the game of tipping an ice floe out from beneath a fat lazy seal and watching it scramble, indignant and angry, back up onto the ice. She can barely remember the sound of that calf’s voice now, the image of it – a male? – only a dim outline in her mind.

She has mated three times with some of the Others since the little ones captured her in their strange metal whale and brought her here, birthing two females, but neither of those calves survived through their first season.

Diving, she turns over in a corkscrew and calls out the sonic pattern of her own name. It bounces back to her, landing on her ears the way the calls from her pod-family used to. Only alone would Cree do this, never with the Others. The walls of their tanks are too small, and to send out a call is to initiate an echoing cacophony of excited orca sounds, each of them becoming more and more riled by the incomprehensible sonar din. When together she and the Others rely on only the simplest clicks and whistles of calf-speech, even though they are all from different pods and the unique sounds of each are unfamiliar. The verbal cues and hand signals the little ones have trained into them are the only universally-shared understanding among Cree and the Others.

That, and aggression. Once before she has been in the solitary tank, having rammed Toro, the youngest of the male Others, when he had bitten her pectoral fins and tried to force a mating with her. Her blow opened up a wound behind his jaw, and the little ones had taken him away for many passings of the sun and moon. Then as now she spent much of that time alone, the little ones coming during the day to retrain her in the signals she understand to mean “stop.”

Cree does not much like the Others, but she misses them when apart. They are not her pod, but they are better than nothing.

Reaching the bottom, she pivots upwards and pushes hard for the surface with her flukes, but the holding tank is not as deep as the performance pool, and she only succeeds in breaching halfway into the night air before sagging back into the water. She repeats the action once more, and then again, hoping to spy sight of the Others bobbing in he half-sleep of orcas in the other holding pool, but there is nothing to see, and after the third attempt she gives up.

She understands why she is alone now, after a fashion: she killed one of the little ones. She had not meant to, had in fact sometimes deeply enjoyed the melon rubs and tongue scratchings that they rewarded her with. She even enjoyed some of the performances, breaching full into the air from the depths of the main pool with a little one mounted on her snout. But lately her nocturnal half-sleep is filled with half remembered images and soundscapes of her life in the wild, the regulated playtime growing less enjoyable.

Worse, Toro has again been growing sexually aggressive towards her and the female Others, blasting their organs with the sonar calls of the dominant male. The little ones do not realize, and do nothing.

She had not wanted to perform that day, had not wanted to share the pool with the aggressive Toro, had not wanted to obey the commands of the little ones, and finally she had simply had enough. The orca does not have time, but it has memory, and Cree remembers lashing out in her pique at the first thing her mouth could find, something full of hard bones, and shaking it as she would a shark. When she finally let go one of the little ones floated in the water without moving and her mouth was full of the nasty taste of mammal blood.

That was three days ago, and the little ones have kept her separate from the Others ever since. Worse, none of them will get into the water to play with her. They interact with her from the safety of the raised walkways, retraining her in the hand signals she already knows as “stop” and “release.”

She does not know when they will return her to the others. Or if they will at all.

She takes another breath and dives again, singing to herself some more as she descends, taking comfort in the sound as it washes over her. When she reached the bottom Cree turns her left pectoral downward and banks horizontally, following the curve of the plexiglass viewing window into another lap around the pool.

There is nowhere else to go.