Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emmanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

In each issue, we feature in-depth interviews, narrated essays, and stories, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Charles Foster is a writer, barrister, and traveler.

He is the author of more than 20 books, including Being a Beast, Adventures across the Species

Divide, The Sacred Journey, the Ancient Practices, and Wired for God, the biology of spiritual experience.

For this essay, Charles Foster travels to Scotland's Isle of Sky, seeking out a language

beyond the human in the calls of the West Coast Community Killer Whales.

Ecolocation creates an intricate and responsive map of a wild underwater world where sounds

can reach across an expanse of hundreds of miles.

Charles finds a sonic culture that includes rich and symphonic vocalizations primarily used

to build close relationships with their kin.

These impressive creatures are the last eight remaining of their kind.

On a grey January day, I sat slumped in a chair in an overheated library. At midday, I got up,

at a slice of shrink-wrapped pig from a Danish factory, and went back to my desk. That same lunchtime,

after a morning idling and smooching off the coast of the Isle of Mull in northwest Scotland,

the doomed West community of killer whales drowned a grey seal in a sea cave, bit off its head

and divided the body neatly among themselves, from each according to his ability to each according

to his need. Then all eight of them turned northward. They were going, as they discussed en route,

to the Isle of Sky, 120 miles away. They could have gone at 35 miles an hour, but today there was no

hurry.

Through the swirling offshore fog, a fisherman spinning for bass at the tip of Ardenamerican

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