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popular eating and drinking spot in Sandy Point. The owner, Les Adderly, was a black Bahamian lobster fisherman whose daughter cooked and served conch fritters on the deck overlooking the channel. Les was happy to clear the bait out of one of his oversized freezer chests to make room for the dolphin. They could leave it there as long as they needed to, he told them. They placed the dolphin in the chest and closed the lid tight.
    When they got back to the house, the Earthlings were full of questions that Balcomb and Claridge couldn’t answer. They didn’t know how many animals had stranded, how many had been pushed back out to sea, or how many of those had found their way back to the safety of the underwater canyon. And they had no idea why so many whales had stranded across so many islands. All they knew was that they had witnessed the largest multispecies whale stranding ever recorded.

    3
    Taking Heads
    DAY 2: MARCH 16, 2000, DAWN
    Sandy Point, Abaco Island, the Bahamas
    The sound of the small plane droned in Balcomb’s head like an alarm that wouldn’t shut off. Finally, it jerked him awake.
    His arms and legs ached. He stank. He needed a shower. And a younger body. He needed a strong cup of coffee that he knew he didn’t have time to brew because he had to get up in that plane before the sun rose above the horizon.
    Yesterday had been a sprint to rescue the whales from the beach. Any other whales that had stranded would be dead and rotting by now. Today would be a race to collect whatever fresh specimens he could find before the sun and the sharks had their way with them. If he didn’t get their heads on ice by midday, their brains would be cooked to jelly—useless as forensic evidence.
    Balcomb knew it was going to be another mad day, following a long night of preparation. After they’ d finished logging all the stranding reports that had come in, he and Claridge had stayed up past midnight poring over a nautical chart of Great Bahama Canyon. They marked the locations of all the reported strandings across 150 miles of shoreline: five along the west coast of Abaco Island, six on the south shore of Grand Bahama, and three along the smaller cays in between. Then they circled the X-marks of the eight whales that they and others had pushed back into the channel. They figured that some of the rescued whales might come back ashore in the night, and that others might have stranded unseen on remote beaches.
    Balcomb broke down their search and retrieval area into a grid of ten-by-ten-mile squares. Their plan was for Claridge, Ellifrit, and the Earthlings to survey the Abaco coastline in their inflatable research boat while Balcomb searched the shores of the small Out Islands from the air. Balcomb’s last call of the night had been to a pilot friend, Bill Anspach, who agreed to pick him up at dawn.
    After nudging Claridge awake and getting only a groan of farewell, Balcomb forced himself out of bed. He lumbered past a cluster of Earthlings who had crashed on the living room sofas and gathered up the camera gear, binoculars, and notepad he’ d piled by the door the night before. Anspach and his plane were waiting on the dirt strip, just a stone’s throw from the house.
    As soon as the single-engine plane lifted off and veered toward the sunrise, Balcomb felt the anguish of the past 24 hours drop away. He loved flying, particularly that first rush of pulling away from earthbound gravity, when everything receded into miniature below. For a moment, at least, the pall of stranded whales gave way to the excitement of the scavenger hunt. Balcomb was a lifelong beachcomber and whalebone hunter, and he couldn’t suppress his excitement at the treasure trove of specimens that lay in wait.
    Balcomb never savored the Bahamas more than from the cockpit of a small plane. Flying just a few hundred feet above Providence Channel, it was easy to see what made the Bahamas such a magnet for scuba divers and marine biologists. The