It was the first day of September 2002, and a 13-year-old boy named Howard Nessig was spending

the waning days of summer with his family at their seaside cabin on the Norwegian coast.

They lived most of the year on a farm an hour away, but he loved these summers.

There might be 15 people staying there at any one time, his extended family,

his uncles, aunts and cousins, and there was always something to do, someone to hang out with.

They'd go fishing, biking, swimming. They'd catch crabs right at the shoreline, pulled them from

the traps and boiled him, cracking the shells open against the rock and eating them fresh.

One afternoon, his dad and sister took their small boat to go out fishing, while Howard

stayed behind with his mom.

When his sister and dad came back, Howard could hear them shouting, trying to get his attention.

So we got down on this dock and we just, what's going on?

And then we saw that they had something beside the boat in the ocean there. That something was a killer whale. Howard's dad explained that the beast had

come up beside their little boat just popped up out of the water and yeah, they were scared.

The animal was enormous

but when they tried to get away he followed and not in a menacing way they pointed their boat toward

home and the strange killer whale simply swam alongside calmly like a stray dog just happy for some

company it was c, of course.

By this point, he'd been gone for four weeks,

had made his way from Iceland to this tiny seaside town in Norway without any human help.

And now here he was,

nonchalantly doing just what he'd been trained to do for years,

follow a boat.

...