On a rainy Saturday in February of this year, a sea otter wandered the near-shore waters of the Pacific, stopping to rest off the rocks of a small Oregon town called Depoe Bay. The otter floated on its back, rubbing his paws over a whiskered face and crossing his flippers in repose. He swam and ate and frolicked in a patch of bull kelp just a few yards from the Oregon State Whale Watching Center, a squat concrete building just off Highway 101.

Morris Grover was there, watching with a pair of binoculars, and he could not believe what he saw. He knew that sea otters, valued for their silky pelts, were officially hunted to extinction in 1906. But the soft-spoken parks employee watched an animal that looked unmistakably sea otter-like.  He went to get a friend who was eating breakfast across the street. They conferred conspiratorially. Could the cavorting animal possibly be a sea otter?

Grover knew that back in the 1970s, scientists had transplanted otters from the Aleutian Islands in Alaska – where they hadn’t been hunted quite to extinction -- to Washington and Oregon. Since then, the animals had reclaimed an astonishing amount of their former range – populations exist from the Aleutians to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and in California, mostly due to the transplantation efforts of scientists. Mysteriously, though, all of Oregon’s transplanted otters disappeared. (Just as mysteriously, Washington’s otters survived.) Grover knew there was no coordinated reintroduction effort afoot in Oregon. This otter he was watching, if it was an otter, had simply appeared, alone, spontaneously. Morris and his friend watched. They didn’t want to rush to conclusions. Plenty of people had reported sightings that turned out to be false.

The pair ended up under the Depoe Bay Bridge, shooting digital photographs of the animal to e-mail to experts. Within a few hours the West Coast's foremost sea otter expert, a professor emeritus at University of California- Santa Cruz named Jim Estes, had confirmed the sighting. When the news was announced that a sea otter had been seen in the waters off Depoe Bay, hundreds of people came to see. People drove from all over the state. Did this mean that an extinct animal had come back, that the troubled ocean was somehow healing itself? Some found succor in the idea; others, according to Morris Grover, made it clear that sea otters, who eat clams, urchins and fish, would not be welcome returnees.

“I had more than one person say, ‘Where’s that sea otter? I’ll shoot it for you,’” Grover says. The debate over the future of sea otters began to build to a loud hum in coastal communities. The sea otter stayed around for a week, and then, just as suddenly as he had appeared, he was gone.

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