In Leaving Resurrection, Saulitis, a marine biologist for more than twenty years, openly questions science as a privileged method for discovering meaning. What is the best way to know the natural world and its creatures and how to do right by them? Is it through experience passed down by a thousand years of knowledge about killer whales, seals, and sea lions found in the stories of Native Alaskan elders? Is it through hundreds of hours spent on research boats-watching killer whales, identifying their idiosyncratic dorsal fins, dropping the hydrophone over the side to record their voices, collecting tissue samples with dart guns? Or is the real knowledge in the numbers-the data Saulitis culls from her observations, enters into spreadsheets, and churns through her computer?

There are stories of killer whales helping humans by driving seals onto the ice. There are stories of killer whales calling to people who are about to die. Science teaches us that these are myths. But what if they aren't? A whale approaches Saulitis's boat, a pulsing bloody seal in its jaws; the whale turns an eye toward her. What are you saying? she asks the whale. The whale might answer, This is who I am. Couldn't killer whales and humans have once shared a language understood one another? Scientific method creates a shape, Saulitis writes, a net of words. Data, facts-these increase our knowledge, she admits, but the step to wisdom is less certain.

In addition to exploring the important intersections between art and science, Saulitis documents her decades-long relationship with Alaska's Prince William Sound, its animals, and its people, including her numerous scientific comrades. Her essays are full of short portraits of the kinds of tough, quirky, and sophisticated characters you'd expect to find in Alaska, but whom Saulitis brings into sharp focus through her generous sensibility. It makes sense, given Saulitis's broad imagination about how meaning gets made, that she weaves many intimate personal narratives into the central subject of this collection-the tale of whale research. It's refreshing to read a book that doesn't pretend that one's personal life can be extricated from one's profession. In this way, and in many others, the book challenges us to question our assumptions and expectations regarding our relationships to the natural world.

LEAVING RESURRECTION is the chronicle of one woman's capacity to know in many ways at once, to hold contradictory truths in mind. She faces doubts about science which generate an epistemological vertigo when it seems that science can't teach us to stay true to [our] place in the local ecology the way traditional native stories can. She fathoms the depths of place-mainly southcentral Alaska's Prince William Sound, though other locales in Alaska and the lower 48 appear in the book. The book records this artist/scientist's challenge to transmute scientific knowledge and human uncertainty into wisdom. Through the rigor of her work as a biologist and essayist, Saulitis engenders truths which register in both the mind and the gut.

The collection opens with a stunning short essay based on Saulitis's task of removing the stomach from a beached killer whale on a Prince William Sound beach. At one point, Saulitis literally slips into the cavity she's opened in the orca. Standing shin-deep in blood and body fluid, she is quite immersed in her work and the world. The essay is a fitting place to begin, scuttling any notions that the work of science is somehow abstract or removed from the physical world.

More than the land and seascapes of Alaska and its animals fall under the purview of these essays-Saulitis is concerned, too, with memory and dream, imagination and observation, history and the present, the nature of story and ecology, family and ancestry. And she devotes a great deal of the book to the people who have done much to enliven the place she has made her own-her friend and assistant, Mary Lou Freeman; the old man, Bill, who carries his burden of sorrow out onto a frozen wilderness lake with her; Dora and George, caretakers of a remote Prince William Sound oyster farm; her childhood family and teachers; her eventual husband and step-children. By making plain the intimacy between people and place, Saulitis imbues her work with a sense of community that makes her introspective forays into isolation or the mind seem anything but solipsistic.

The orcas of Prince William Sound remain the book's touchstone, though. Her authentic struggle with the dictates and limits of science and her heartfelt attention to place limns a dynamic between science and art that behaves something like an ecosystem itself. Like the balance struck between orca and sea lion, science and art are fundamentally different yet interactive, constituent parts of our world views. Saulitis reminds us why science is important while realizing that our task as citizens of local and global ecologies is to actively and consciously strive to unite conscience with knowledge and to guard against those who would refuse any commingling of the creative and analytical modes, which share, after all, the impulse to ask questions about the world and ourselves.

Observing and asking questions as scientist and artist engenders a useful yearning: The eye that searches for wolves, for spouts, for freedom, is desire's eye and soon what it has seen becomes necessary to the body as a lung, writes Saulitis. In the end, looking for wolves, looking for killer whales, is more than an act of scrutiny or listening-it's an act of patience, of devotion. It's a long story of waiting. It's a story of desire…. You hear the voice of your own longing, a trail, if you follow it, that leads your eye further into a landscape populated as much with absence as with presences.

Following Saulitis's voice as she breaks new trail through a growing corpus of Alaskan literature enlivens the places she writes about even as the journey reminds us that much is still unnamed in the literature of the north. And even as the blanks on the map fill with ink like a rock slowly growing lichen, the work of navigating the interiors of our own selves is often a process inextricable from the places where we find ourselves.

How does one deal with the paradox of being a scientist when observing wonders of nature that just beg to be described in emotional, colorful terms not generally associated with science? How do you observe dispassionately, withhold judgment, when the soul inside is crying out at the injustice and sadness of things? Where does the brain let go and allow the heart to drive the boat?

Saulitis begins her journey in 1986, as she flies over Prince William Sound in a DeHavilland Beaver en route to her first post-college employment as a biologist at a fish hatchery. She has returned to the Sound every summer since, wintering first in Fairbanks and now in Homer - through masters and Ph.D. studies, after a divorce, during the Exxon Valdez fiasco - studying killer whales and their behaviors.

Saulitis's essays recount her explorations, her research, her adventures and misadventures. For a girl who grew up in rural western New York, the whole Alaska environment is new and ever-changing. With no history of outdoor activity such as camping or hiking, she finds herself living in tents or on boats, roughing it on islands known to be bear habitat; her books begins with the butchering of a whale carcass on Montague Island. She writes of the people she encounters - Molly Lou Freeman, poet and biology field assistant; Dora and George, caretakers of an oyster farm on McPherson Island; elders from surrounding villages; and fellow scientists.

Being a whale biologist means knowing not just biology, but also understanding oceanography, weather patterns, climate conditions, local fish and birds and other species; it requires being independent and self-sufficient. Saulitis learns to read the Sound in all its incarnations - calm, agitated, and really angry. She learns the best places to search for killer whales is to listen to people around her - the Native elders who seem an integral part of Nature, the cruise ship operators who troll the Sound with tourists looking for whale adventures, fisherfolk who know the denizens of the deep intimately from years of working in and around water-dwelling animals, and the whales themselves which, after 20 years, become as familiar and loved as family.

And as befits a scientific artist -or is she an artistic scientist?- the essays aren't just personal reflections and musings. There is a fascinating mix of biology, history, cultural anthropology, and bemused observations of personalities. There is also an awareness of her own foibles that makes those musings seem appropriate and spot-on. Through her words the reader sees the science of Prince William Sound as a dance of disciplines, each skirting in and around the other, with none tromping on the feet of the others, and all imparting a grace and cohesiveness that make them interdependent and inseparable. It's stimulating and calming at the same time.

My favorite essay was One-Hundred-Hour Maintenance, in which Saulitis recounts the evolution of her skills as a boat mechanic. Since she lives and works on the boat, the Whale 2, in an area many hours removed from civilization and mechanical assistance, Saulitis must learn how to keep her boat going, how to know when something is wrong, and how to repair it if it does. It's the typical fish-out-of-water scenario, played for laughs by numerous authors in the past. But Eva doesn't play it for laughs, as the consequences of not being competent could be deadly, as many a fisherman and crew have found. But neither does she play it with gloom and doom. Her prose is smart, crisp, and matter-of-fact, and the reader learns along with Saulitis how to diagnose what's wrong when the boat gets stuck in reverse.

What makes this particular essay so fascinating is the juxtaposition with Saulitis's T'ai Chi lessons. Throughout the essay, as she becomes more and more frustrated with mechanical failings, she reaches back into her head and mentally performs her T'ai Chi movements, allowing her to grab onto a calm center and blow out her fears and anger as she does her oxygen-depleted breaths. In addition to the T'ai Chi, Saulitis turns to music to help her cope. As a long-time oboe player, she recalls musical passages and practices that keep her grounded and allow her to overcome the external and concentrate on the internal.

Saulitis lives inside her head. She crafts her words in her mind and shares them with the reader as a gift. Her imagery is amazing. She writes of a hematite sea, and describes glaciers as ice tongues, another kind of memory. Poetry in prose form.

Many of her essays touch on loneliness, even when in a crowd. I found myself wondering if the loneliness is related to being in her own head so much. The moment was an anchor line holding us against a strong tide. This is what we're like when no one's watching, I thought suddenly, and then someone was watching and the spell was broken.

In the end, this is about stories and the way humans use them. We use them to make sense of the world, she tells us. Not all stories are true. Not all lead to wisdom. But we can lean from them. They can teach us something about ourselves, about where we go wrong.

People hunger for knowledge, she concludes. But knowledge without a story to tell, without advocacy for the living world, is cold and still, like knowledge trapped inside a glacier. People wait for it, for the glacier to force the story to its face, where it becomes recognizable, where it can make us wiser.

Wisdom, is, in the end, the ultimate goal for all of us, including the scientists and the poets.

* * * *

From the boat’s cabin top, I scanned Montague Strait in light diffused by high clouds, looking for blows. I spotted a white glittering, then another. It was the kind of haze made by a leaping whale when its body collapsed onto the water.

We raced that way and found killer whales, took identification pictures of their dorsal fins and flanks, recognized them as Gulf of Alaska transients. The last time I’d seen them was four years before. They’d never been biopsied, but we knew that their calls differed from those of the local AT1 transients, so they might be from a completely separate population. That day, Craig wasn’t there to wield the dart gun, and my field assistant—my husband, John—and I had to do it ourselves.

For the next two hours, the whales led us past Danger Island, into the gulf. John, more comfortable with a rifle than I was from his years in the Alaskan bush, shot three times without success. Out of Montague Strait’s strong current, the water calmed to a swell. In my impatience, I took the gun. John pulled the boat in close to the whales, and I sighted on an old female’s scarred saddle patch. Without thinking, I pulled the trigger. The dart hit the saddle patch and bounced out. She slapped her tail and dove.

"We got a sample," I shouted, elated, when I pulled up the dart and saw blubber protruding from the tip. I gave John the gun on the next approach, and he darted another female.

We’re getting pretty far out here," he said after I wrapped the third sample in foil and stored it in the cooler. "I think we should go back." I glanced toward the sound. We were at least four miles from shore now, and the whales were heading steadily south in the direction of Hawaii. As we drifted, we watched them disappear.

An hour later, anchored up at Foxfarm Bay, just inside Cape Elrington, intent on processing samples and thrilled at our success, I didn’t notice John watching me.

"I’ve never seen you that way before," he said.

What way?" I asked, looking up.

You were so angry and impatient, even rude at times, and then, suddenly, when you got what you wanted, you were ecstatic. A real Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde thing. It was scary.

I stared across the bay, where a sea otter lazily rolled and dove and brought up some kind of shellfish. Inside me, a nauseous feeling rose.

* * * *

I haven’t darted many killer whales since. It’s Craig who wields the gun. And there are whales we’ve never been able to dart, mostly sea lion hunters with torn fins. They sometimes approach our boat, curious, staring at us with inscrutable eyes. Once, a female grazed her body along the skiff’s side, her mouth open, showing rows of perfect teeth. "What are you saying?" I called after her as she swam away.

Years ago, another whale drifted under the bow where I stood, looking down. She held a harbor seal in her jaws. Blood from the seal’s body throbbed.

Science trains me to be detached in moments like those, but sometimes I’m angry or panicked in the field, when I can’t get what I want, what I must have. When I face the fact that I have no control over what’s invisible, what binds me so viscerally to my desires, what decides when the whales will find me.

* * * *

After several days without whales in Resurrection Bay, Craig and I overhear a radio conversation between tour boats. Killer whales are traveling along the rocky shoreline of Fox Island, fifteen miles from where we’re floating, our hydrophone down. They’re heading for the cape, out of the bay and out to sea. The skippers think they’re transients—the ones they call "the bad boys"—two large AT1 males that hunt harbor seals in ice floes off the Aialik Glacier.

We drop our books and scramble to start the engine, call a skipper, get a location and direction of travel, and roar across the bay, coaxing as much speed as we can out of the Whale 2. When we spot the whales, we know right away they’re not the local "bad boys." Their fins are too broad and tall. As I slide the boat in parallel to the whales so we can take pictures, I scan photos of transient dorsal fins in the killer whale catalog.

"Who do you think they are?" Craig asks, clicking off frames. "They’re awfully tolerant for Gulf of Alaska transients."

The whales travel slowly, breathing for eight breaths, then diving for ten minutes. They follow a regular compass heading east, directly past Cape Resurrection, toward the sound. I stare at two blurry photos, then back up at the whales.

They are Gulf of Alaska transients. They’re the AT30s." The pictures are poor, taken during a single encounter seven years ago in bad weather.

We spend the next hour trying to get biopsy samples. Tour boats come to watch them, so we don’t dart. Darts miss. Once, a dart pops out of a whale but doesn’t take a sample. Another time, we’re too far away when they surface. Other times, they change direction slightly when they dive. I plead to them, to Craig’s amusement, as I position the boat. "Whales, please let us take these tiny samples. We’ll never have to do this again. It’s for your own good!

We call out names for them, Chubby Rain and Heavy Rain. Despite our blundering, our absurd behavior, the whales let us approach closely again and again, and finally we have some samples.

Floating off Killer Bay, we watch them disappear. "Don’t you wish you knew where they were going?" Craig asks. "Someday, with a little transmitter attached to them, we won’t have to wonder where they are.

Now I can barely make out two distant black triangles among rolling hills of water, and I think of them unwatched by anyone for eight more years. They’re swimming off the edge of the known world, like hapless ships on ancient charts. They might dive right through the sea realm, resurface in some other, a realm of the supernatural. A young Sugpiaq man from Nanwalek, a tiny village in outer Cook Inlet, told me there’s a lake near his home that’s bottomless. A killer whale jumped into that lake, he said, dove to the bottom, pushed through and emerged in another lake.

We cling to what we know. In response to Descartes’ mechanistic view of the universe, Blaise Pascal said, "The silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.

Science. It seems solid, but it’s mostly space, like a gill net I drop over the world. Two transients pass through its web, leave me holding a tiny sample, a pencil.

* * * *

A young scientist seeks mentors. I’ve had many. Bud Fay, my major professor in grad school, an expert on the walrus, showed me how a scientist could learn from and gain the respect of Native people. Hunters on St. Lawrence Island still remember him. Craig, other whale biologists, and those I know through their discoveries, their tenacity, their eyes that see and hear what others miss, are my biologist heroes. I met Mike, my last mentor, one afternoon at Chenega Village. He rode his four-wheeler down the steep ramp to the dock. In the vibrating silence after he’d shut down the engine, he sat and watched me as I pumped fuel onto the Whale 1. His look was inscrutable, no smile, his eyes shadowed under his cap. He could have been angry. Non-Natives were not always welcomed in the village. I tensed when he climbed off the four-wheeler and, hands in pockets, strolled over to the boat. "Seen any whales?" he asked, grinning.

He was all sinew, brown skin, black hair, and a small, bowlegged frame. He wore a plaid wool shirt, stiff new dungarees, and wire-framed glasses. I knew he was considered a village elder, although I couldn’t tell his age. He coughed often, into his fist, turning his head away. I introduced myself, but afterwards, he’d show up at the dock whenever I was there and greet me, "Hey, Whale 1.

He dropped bits of knowledge into our conversations, where he’d seen whales, how seals in the area were declining. I knew he hunted seals and fished for salmon but learned only from other villagers that he was one of the most respected elders in the sound and one of the last seal hunters in his village. I also learned he was dying of lung cancer. He’d gained his knowledge by roaming the sound in a boat in all seasons, watching. Since the oil spill, he’d assisted biologists on their projects—on octopus, harbor seals, subsistence traditions—and strove to involve his village in the science.

I began to look for Mike when I came to Chenega, wandering to his house, inviting myself in for a cup of tea. Somehow, I felt attached to him. Our conversations were brief. But, after time, when he saw me, he hugged me. He teased me. When I told him what I wanted to be, he shook his head. "Why do you need to do that? You don’t need to go to school to do that. You just need to live out here.

The smell of burning alder drifts up from Mike’s smokehouse. He’s gone today. He’s hunting seals.

* * * *

Molly Lou and I anchor the boat in front of camp. It’s sunny, but the wind’s come up, so we decide to take turns trying on the dry suit, snorkel, and mask and swimming through the eelgrass and kelp beds. Molly Lou helps me with the zipper.

I put on

the body armor of black rubber

the absurd flippers

the grave and awkward mask.

I hear words from Adrienne Rich’s poem in my head when I drop feet-first from the boat’s side into the sea.

there is no one

to tell me when the ocean

will begin.

After I pull the black rubber away from my neck to release air, the dry suit clings to my body like loose skin. I place my face in the water and breathe through the snorkel, wheezing rapidly at first out of fear, and the sound is loud, like the breaths of someone dying.

Eelgrass and kelp stream below me. Now my breathing sounds as if someone is breathing for me. I paddle. I make arcs through the water with my hands. Tiny sculpins wink in and out of battered fronds. As I swim along a rock outcrop, I look for seals. I glide along rocks and quiet my movements, searching the sandy bottom. My body blots out the light above me. I’m hungry. I search the whole island’s submerged perimeter.

At times like these, I get closer to the water.