Writer and marine biologist Eva Saulitis spent decades recording whale songs, but before that, she almost became a professional oboist. She was born in upstate New York to Latvian immigrants whose peasant culture — brown bread and folk tunes — shaped Saulitis’s childhood. In 1981 she went to Northwestern University in Chicago on a music scholarship. Though she loved playing the oboe, she found the conservatory program “stifling, competitive, and brutal.” One day, in a practice room overlooking Lake Michigan’s winter shore, she had a revelation: You don’t have to follow this path. Craving a career that placed her outside, Saulitis transferred to the State University of New York at Fredonia to study ecology, then to Syracuse University, where she earned a degree in wildlife biology. Her mother fretted that Saulitis was ready for a life “spent playing in the dirt.” She took a fisheries job on Alaska’s Prince William Sound, where she first saw orcas — also known as “killer whales” — swim into the bay. That August, Saulitis volunteered with fisherman, zoologist, and orca researcher Craig Matkin, who would eventually become her husband. For twenty-eight seasons they studied a threatened species of orca called the Chugach transients. Then, in January 2016, at the age of fifty-two, Saulitis died of metastatic breast cancer.