Whale Dancer

By John Westling

Christine Sixkiller is a young First Nations Haida woman accompanying her father and uncle on a boat trip to tow a harvested whale back to her community. At sixteen, Christine is learning how to pilot her father’s fishing boat and learn how to navigate.
Well experienced, she makes several mistakes, including overlooked tidal changes, placing all aboard in danger of running aground or sinking. Overcome with fear and a lack of knowledge causes her to panic. Her father is unrelenting, insisting that she figure out how to avoid a catastrophe on her own.
Through it all, Christine is developing into a genuinely independent young woman, conscious of women’s changing role in the world. Nothing is beyond her reach, and she intends to ensure that she takes her rightful place in the world of successful First Nations women.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Westling
• Release date: Aug 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9798711356455

John Westling

About the AuthorA former surfer, with a Master’s Degree in Industrial Technology, John spent his creative years as an engineer, college electronic engineering instructor, and Luthier manufacturing musical instruments for musicians worldwide. John is now pursuing a writing career and has published several books including Counter Clockwise, and Wire Wrap. Now well into his next book, a fictional novel, writing appears to be John’s fourth career.

Book preview

Whale Dancer

A Christine Sixkiller Short Story

Copyright © 2020 by John Westling

All rights reserved

This is a work of fiction. This book may not be

reproduced in whole or in part, by any means, without permission from the author

Contact: https://jwsixes.wixsite.com/website

ISBN: 9798711356455

Chapter 1

Look, Father, two Orca.

I see them, Chris. Looks like a mother and baby.

The young Haida girl, seated in the cabin of her father’s sixty-five-foot commercial fishing boat, the Indigo, watches intently as the mother Orca maneuvers the baby between the starboard side of the vessel and herself.

See how she puts the baby next to the boat? her father asks.

I’ve never seen them do that, Chris responds curiously.

There must be a great white shark nearby. She’s protecting the baby. I recognize the mother now. It’s Xenia, from the pod that lives near this end of Johnstone Strait.

Even more curious now, Christine folds her long legs underneath her in the seat to make her taller and get a better view. She’s already five-foot-four, just shy of being able to see out the window without a boost.

Her father continues. Keep an eye out for the shark. We can’t let it get near the baby.

The depth alarm, part of the electronic chart plotter system, comes to life, issuing a non-stop beep, beep, beep warning that the boat is in shallow water. Shallower than the ten-foot alarm setting.

I think it just went under the boat, heading for the stern! Chris exclaims in an excited tone, noting that the great white set off the alarm by going under the boat’s hull, possibly to attack the killer whale baby.

"Push the Acknowledge button on the plotter, Chris. Charles, any sign of the shark yet?"

Charles Sixkiller, brother of Captain Dawson Sixkiller, sits atop the pile of seine net stacked on the back deck. The Indigo is towing a fourteen-meter-long gray whale, harvested two days before by a traditional Haida canoe hunting party, much to the dismay of Greenpeace and Save The Whales activists, who are adamantly against any killing of whales. This hunt was no exception. Several activist’s boats tried to thwart the chase of the whale.

The whale, encircled with lines connected to six inflated