With her baby-faced smile and long grey braids emerging from a polar-fleece tuque, the 51-year-old Morton doesn’t look like anybody’s idea of a nemesis. So this is the Erin Brockovich of the inlets, the Jane Goodall of the salmonids, the woman who has become the most persistent thorn in the side of British Columbia’s $320-million-a-year salmon-farming industry. (The husky-Lab-retriever, Morton explains, never got her sea legs.) After waving goodbye to the pilot, Alexandra Morton welcomes me into her cabin and introduces me to Ahta, who’s looking a little shaky in the knees. We touch down west of Gilford Island, where a 22-foot-long powerboat called the Blackfish Sound gingerly pulls parallel to our floats. The Broughton Archipelago is one of the richest pockets of biodiversity on the coast it is home to sea otters, killer whales, great blue herons, and, until recently, some of the largest runs of pink salmon on the Pacific coast. Dipping a wing over Knight Inlet, the pilot points to the curved wake of a pod of a dozen Pacific white-sided dolphins, their heads regularly poking above the surface.

As we drop a repairman at East Seymour, where he’ll spend the day fixing the roof of a logging camp trailer, a pair of bald eagles eyes us warily the pilot tells me there were so many of the white-headed raptors last week it looked as if the treetops were covered with snow. At Sullivan Bay, a little community of floating houses, a sea lion spies on us as we unload building supplies. Today, the pilot is taking us on the milk run. Aloft in a Beaver, flying over mountains furrowed with cutblocks, I get my first glimpse of the sparsely populated Broughton Archipelago: a jigsaw puzzle of islands flung over the surface of the sea, with snaking channels and serrated sounds separating its scattered pieces.

A four-hour drive north from Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, past creeks named after forestry-company executives, nature trails sponsored by Weyerhaueser, and miles of “tree farms”-clear-cut hillsides that have been planted with eerily regular rows of Day-Glo green Christmas trees-brings me to Port McNeill, the logging town that is the jump-off point for the mid coast. Keeping a date with Alexandra Morton demands perseverance.

Listening to Whales by Alexandra Morton