Antarctica by Gabrielle Walker Read Free Book Online Page A

about six days before he finally succumbed. It was sad. You wanted to do something like take him back to the hut and put him in a sleeping bag.’
    I found this heartbreaking, but my head told me that even if they want to intervene, even if they could do something to save one of these creatures (which in the case of the pups was doubtful), they couldn’t afford to. Bob and his team were studying what made the difference between life and death out here and any interference would hopelessly skew their results.
    Their current study involved weighing both mothers and pups to see what effect their body size had on their chances of survival. They had brought in a weighing sled, towed behind a skidoo, and they were about to approach the first customer of the day.
    Bob beckoned me over to where a seal was lying on its stomach. Just beyond was a pup so new to the world that its umbilical cord was still attached. It was a soft brown colour, small and slender against the inflated grey bulk of its mother. There were streaks of blood on the snow from the birth, and remnants of a placenta. Large seabirds were hovering nearby, waiting for the opportunity to scavenge this bounty.
    As we approached, the pup moved nervously towards its mother, curling into her like a comma. A couple of researchers came up behind it and grabbed it with ropes. The pup looked tiny and fragile, and at first I couldn’t understand why two of them were having such trouble dragging it over to the weighing sled. But when someone called out the reading I discovered to my astonishment that already it weighed half as much as I do. The mother followed, heaving her bulk clumsily over the ice, lurching on her flippers. She was calling like a wookie, her wails echoing off the cliffs. The pup’s replies sounded distressingly like those of a crying baby.
    And yet, the mother climbed cheerfully enough on to the sled to join her pup and someone called out the reading: she weighed more than a thousand pounds. Then mother and pup clambered off and lay placidly on the ice, just a few feet from the sled. It was astonishing. These gargantuan beasts had no land predators so they had no evolutionary reason to be stressed when they were up here on the ice. And that seemed to be enough to wipe out any memory of what seemed so anguished a moment ago.
    But, then, I shouldn’t be so quick to interpret the sounds Weddells make. They have twenty different vocalisations—everything from a chugging truck noise to high-pitched chittering. I have heard recordings of whistles, booms, gulps and chirrups. They emit alien whooshing electronica, sounds that shouldn’t rightly come from any animal, let alone a furry one. 9 Bob told me that you could hear these sounds in the camp outhouse, resonating eerily up through the hole in the ice.
    As he spoke, I was trying to take notes but my pen was giving me trouble. I scribbled irritatedly, wondering why it had so abruptly run out of ink. Mark glanced over. ‘You’re not using a pen are you?’ he said incredulously. ‘You can’t do that out here—the ink freezes! Here.’ He rummaged in his pocket and handed me a pencil. I noticed belatedly that the people noting down seal weights and dimensions were all using pencils. My issue gear was so warm, I’d forgotten that it was still sub-zero here.
    Chastened, I left the team to their weighing and wandered off among the sparsely scattered colony. Near me, a seal abruptly poked her head through one of the two breathing holes, surrounded by slushy ice crystals. She blinked. Her eyes had a purplish bloom; they seemed to be all pupil, perhaps to help her hunt in the dark. Droplets of water dangled like beads on the ends of her whiskers. For a while she just hung there, inhaling deeply through her nostrils, holding her breath as if savouring the sensation, then releasing it with a snort. Each time she held her breath, I found myself holding mine, and then