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The islands draw closer with each flex of my arms, widening their span and soon filling my gaze with green, gentling my ears with the liquid lapping of water against rocks. I sense vaguely that I am being watched. So I scan the rocky shore and the dense wall of forest above the high- tide line on each island, but can see no one. Only when a flash of white snags the corner of my eye do I notice the eagle perched high on a dead trunk jutting out from the coast of the more northerly island. Its lustrous head is cocked slightly - a single eye following the glints on my paddle blades. And perhaps the gleam off my glasses, as well, for when I turn my face toward it the bird launches with a few flaps of its huge wings, banks, and soars off through the passage between the two islands. I adjust my direction and follow it, gliding beneath the needled woods on either side.
After a time I emerge from the channel; the echo of my paddle strokes off the double wall of trees widens out and dissipates, giving way to a muffled sound drifting up from the south, a faint but dissonant clamor that rises and falls in intensity. Curious, I swerve the kayak to the left and begin paddling down the west coast of the southernmost island. When I round a spit of land, the noise gets louder, a low-pitched, polyphonic rumble that I cannot place at all. It fades to silence as I stroke across a broad bay, and then rises to my ears as I glide around another peninsula, although more intermittent now, and as I listen to this dark music I realize that it’s an entirely organic cacophony, a crowd of rambunctious grunting tones vying with one another. As I cross the next bay it fades again. Only when the kayak slips around the next point and I see the long, rocky spit on the far side of the following cove – its jagged terraces and angled rocks bedecked with a jumble of sleek, brown humps – do I recognize that I’m entering the neighborhood of a large sea lion colony.
Oddly, the brown bodies opposite are mostly quiet as I come into view; a few grunts reach my ears as they negotiate places on the rocks. I can’t make out any pups, and so this cannot be one of the rookeries where sea lions gather to breed and give birth, but must be one of their communal haul-out sites. A very popular haul-out site. I count over eighty adult sea lions as I paddle slowly across the cove, and know there must be many others hidden from view. But it’s their immense bulk that startles me as I gaze through my binoculars. These are northern, or Steller, sea lions, far larger than their southern cousins; later I learn that the bulls can weigh up to 2,500 pounds, and reach over eleven feet in length.
I see some of them staring in my direction as I paddle. When I’m halfway across the cove, one such bull on a slab of a rock near the water raises himself up on his flippers, dips his head a couple of times, and begins roaring in a deep, guttural voice that resounds in the hollow of the kayak and reverberates in the cave of my skull. Soon two other large bulls lying on a ledge above the first raise their torsos and begin hollering as well, and within a few minutes it seems every sea lion on that rocky outcrop is sounding its barbaric yawp over the waves. The raucous din is unnerving and an upwelling of fear rises from the base of my spine. I lay down my paddle, and in an effort to quell the oncoming panic I do the only thing that I can think of, the single savvy act that might ease the tension in this encounter. I begin to sing.
This was a response to animal threat that I discovered some years earlier when, cross-country skiing along a snow-covered stream in the northern Rockies, I emerged from the woods into a small, frozen marshland – and abruptly found myself three ski-lengths away from a mother moose. She’d been feeding with her child among the low willows. The moose looked up as startled as I; she was facing me head-on, her nostrils flaring, her front legs taut, leaning forward. Her eyes were locked on my body, one ear listening toward me while the other was rotated backward, monitoring the movements of her calf. My senses were on high alert, yet somehow I wasn’t frightened or even worried; I took a deep breath and then found myself offering a single, sustained mellifluous note, a musical call in the middle part of my range, holding its pitch and its volume for as long as I could muster. As my voice died away, I already sensed the other’s muscles relaxing. Drawing another breath, I sang out the same note again, relaxing my own body and pouring as much ease as I was able into the tone. Within a moment the moose leaned her head back down and casually began nibbling the willow tips. I sounded that liquid tone one last time, finally pushing off with my poles and slipping on past.
The simple appropriateness of what I’d done slowly made itself evident to my thinking mind as I glided through the woods. For the timbre of a human voice singing a single sustained note carries an abundance of information for those whose ears are tuned to such clues - information about the internal state of various organs in the singer’s body, and the relative tension or ease in that person, the level of aggression or peaceful intent.