Leviathan is written by Alicia E. Goranson and read by Trunk Slamchest.
Content warning: Animal harm.
Transcript:
In the 1970s, the inlet by Whidby Island in Puget Sound was used to trap an orca pod whose members were netted and separated, calves torn screaming from their mothers. The orca were shipped across the United States to various sea parks to begin lives of servitude and rebellion. But not many know this was the second attempt at acquiring orca to mold and control.
The Leviathan project began in the early 1920s with a proposal from a young scientist who wondered why no one had tried such a thing before. The scientist’s coterie kidnapped and slew various ne’er do wells and ruffians who possessed the required blood type, drained them, and injected the blood into fresh salmon carcasses. Naturally, the orca avoided that bait like the plague. Despite a decade of experimentation with other mediums, including whale, seal, and even moose, the Leviathan project was eventually forced to be abandoned.
Thirty years later, after a second World War, a second scientist dusted off the Leviathan proposal with the understanding that the orca needed additional motivation to consume blood they innately feared. This would require the capture of an orca, costing a not insignificant amount for a crew who would provide the needed discretion. The orca they chose was W285, a transient orca not of any local pod, but who still regularly visited the area. Unfortunately, they found her to be a fierce loner, and required a full whaling vessel in the 1950s when popular opinion was turning against hunting cetaceans. It took several attempts over the years as W285 grew wily and harder to track. But that’s how it is with hunting. Eventually, someone’s luck runs out.
In the early 1960s, W285 was harpooned, netted, captured, and then brought to a facility off the coast of Aberdeen, Washington. She was locked in a reinforced concrete tank with one end open to the sea. The scientists understood she was an intelligent creature. They were counting on it. More blood-filled salmon was dropped into a small cage in her tank, onto a platform with ropes that led to the gate barring W285’s passage to the ocean. The message was clear. Eat and you go free.
Eventually, she did eat.
The Seattle coterie continued feeding her over the coming decades as Leviathan grew larger, faster, and stronger. She began to hunt them too, anywhere she could get more of their precious blood. The project, once scoffed at, became an outstanding, but unrepeatable, success.
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