| Summary: | For two months, Sam Burich had sat at East Point, on the jagged edge of Saturna Island, staring across the Strait of Georgia and waiting for killer whales. The thirty-eight-year-old Croatian immigrant was not a whaler but a sculptor by trade, though he dabbled in fishing to make ends meet. He had come to East Point at the behest of the Vancouver Aquarium to harvest a whale, not for its blubber or meat but for its body—its form. To pass the time, he played his harmonica, carved hieroglyphs in the sandstone, and chatted with his assistant, twenty-six-year-old fisherman Josef Bauer. On this Thursday, July 16, 1964, just after 11:00 a.m., orcas came into sight. It was J pod, making its way north in pursuit of Fraser River chinook. Bauer saw them first and raced over to load their mounted harpoon gun. Then Burich took over. He knew he would have only one shot as the orcas passed. Most of them were out of range, and Burich needed to hit a whale small enough to kill. Soon he spotted his target, a youngster bobbing along playfully just ninety feet away. Burich took aim and pulled the trigger, detonating the one-and-a-half-ounce powder charge. The steel harpoon, four feet long and two inches thick, hit home. At first, Burich couldn’t believe it, but Bauer’s shouts convinced him. Struck just behind the head, the animal appeared stunned. Burich and Bauer rushed to their boat, the forty-foot Corsair II, moored in a nearby cove. As the men approached the whale, they found a surprising scene. Rather than fleeing from danger, the other orcas had surrounded their injured podmate, raising it to the surface to breathe. It was a touching sight, but Burich knew the reputation of these beasts. Worried the whales would retaliate, like those shot by Marineland’s collectors two years earlier, he and Bauer hung back. Within an hour, the pod had left, and the two men moved in for the kill. But the little orca didn’t want to die.
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