His uncle had encouraged him to free-dive to the shallower beds, using a mask, a snorkel and gloves. To begin with he could spend only a few seconds on the seabed, gathering the bivalves within their corrugated, orb-shaped shells in a small net. Even at only twenty or thirty feet below the surface he saw an array of brilliant sea creatures that seemed so different from the pallid illustrations in the reference books in the Mornington public library. It was the scallop-boat trips that set him on the path to the zoology department of Melbourne University, and a B.Sc. in Marine Biology.
He wondered whether his early experience of free-diving for scallops had expanded his young lungs. He could not submerge as the seals could for up to thirty minutes, diving to 600 feet, but after three weeks living in the wild every time he followed them in their dives he found himself able to go deeper and to stay underwater for longer.
It had taken millions of years for seals to evolve from land-based, dog-like creatures and to adapt to life in the oceans. They began their evolutionary journey later than whales and dolphins, and so had not quite shed their land-based ancestry. Whales made their move to the ocean 100 million years ago, and were now, like dolphins, totally sea-based, although still warm-blooded, air-breathing mammals. Seals still returned to land to mate and to whelp.
As he began to dive deeper with the seals, first thirty, then forty feet and more underwater, the fantastic thought occurred to Kemp that he might have become the beneficiary of fast-track evolution. Maybe twenty-first-century time had compressed the whole evolutionary cycle, and he was turning into a seal, just as apes had turned into early man.
Kemp had written a paper on the apparent acceleration of the evolutionary cycle the previous year that had been widely published and well reviewed in the academic press. Fresh invitations to appear on the conference circuit followed. His thesis had been that evolution is happening at a greater speed than ever before, and that it is happening all around us, in front of our very eyes.
As an example, he cited the polar bear, which has had to adapt to the sudden melting of the Arctic pack ice, and thus the disappearance of its traditional hunting grounds. Polar bears were now swimming more, and hunting in the water more frequently. How do we know that? Where he could, Kemp always worked video clips into his conference presentations, and on this occasion he clicked a link to YouTube. The lights lowered, and on the big conference screen a small white object appeared on the surface of the sea, moving slowly towards an ice floe on which a sleeping seal was lying. The floe was hardly bigger than the seal, and the camera drew back to show that the seal was sleeping safely in calm, open water. The ice floe began to rock slightly as ripples from the approaching object reached it.
‘About ten yards from the seal,’ said Kemp, ‘you will see that white thing – which is actually the tip of a polar bear’s snout – vanish beneath the sea. The seal is operating on the basis of knowledge acquired over the millennia. It feels safe from waterborne attack because it knows – or rather it thinks it knows – that it would see a polar bear swimming towards it. But this bear has been swimming almost underwater, and has now dived as it comes in for the kill. The seal is facing a brand-new tactic forced on the bear by the break-up of the pack ice. Polar bears obviously cannot match the speed and skill of a seal in the water. So the seal is half-asleep, one eye cautiously on the sea where normally it would spot an approaching predator. It thinks it is safe.’
The seal was wrong. The polar bear exploded from the water, landed on top of the seal, killed it with dispatch, and swam off with the bloody carcase.
‘That clip shows’, said Leo, ‘how these bears are evolving into marine animals just as their prey, the seals, did before them. In evolutionary time it will not be long before polar bears develop webbed feet, shed their fur and learn how to deep dive. One day, perhaps in a few hundred thousand years, they will be hunting seals in the ocean very much as the orca does today.’
The acceleration of the evolutionary cycle had since become a fashionable topic among scientists, although few remembered that it was Leo Kemp and his YouTube clip that had begun that particular academic paper chase.
Leo told himself he did it as a joke, but he actually found himself checking to see whether he had really been propelled on to the evolutionary fast track by feeling the skin between his toes for any sign of webbing. There was none, of course, but there was no doubt that he could dive deeper and stay underwater longer than at any time since he had been a kid diving from the scallop boats.
He had been a great swimmer in those days, a school champion at 16 when he had done the 100 metres freestyle in 50.2 seconds, at a time when the world record stood at 49.36 seconds.
It was free-diving in the clear warm waters off the coast that had taught him just how quickly the human body reaches its limits underwater. Later he had heard of free dives down to 300 feet, but he had scooped scallops off the seabed at thirty feet, and had only been able to remain at that depth for about a minute.
Both man and his distant cousin the seal require oxygen when submerged; they cannot absorb it as a fish can from the water. So both take the oxygen with them when they dive, stored in lungs and bloodstream. Unlike humans, for whom carbon-monoxide build-up means rapid death after two minutes under water, seals can survive at crushing depths of up to 600 feet for thirty minutes.
The secret, Kemp knew, lay in the heartbeat. Over millions of years the hidden hand of evolution had taken the heart of the seal, which was very like the human heart, and recalibrated it so that seals could lower their heartbeat from 120 beats a minute to about ten when diving. This allows the whole vascular system to contract, so that the oxygenated blood is used only for the brain and the vital organs. While humans only store oxygen in their bloodstream, a seal can also keep reserves of this life force in the myoglobin of its muscles, drawing on its reserves sparingly because millions of years of evolution have taught it to tolerate a high carbon-dioxide concentration.
In that time man has learned to crawl, and then to walk, and has acquired the technical skills to become the master species on the planet. So, thought Leo, I’m actually taking a step back down the evolutionary road.
He fantasised about compressing a million years into as many minutes, and becoming a true seal, able to swim, dive, and sleep at sea as they did. He would roam the seas of the world and maybe one day appear in human form like the selkies of the old myths. He would emerge from the sea on a lonely Scottish island, shed his skin to become a handsome young visitor seeking long-lost relatives, and sweep a blue-eyed Celtic girl off her feet. He would woo her, bed her, wed her and father fine children with her. Then, on the longest night of the year, in the depths of winter, he would shed his thin, milkwhite man skin and slip back into the warm, blubbery cloak of the sea creature he really was, and return to the waves where he belonged.
At night Leo hauled up on beaches, sand spits and rocky promontories, sleeping rough and waking with the sun. Sometimes the pod would sleep close to him, but more often he would wake alone and scan the empty sea knowing that the seals were asleep offshore, just below the waves.
This was usually in calm weather. The seals would lie suspended in the water a few feet below the surface, buoyed by their blubber. Every ten minutes they would make a few strokes with their rear flippers, rise to the surface, breathe in deeply and sink back below the waves – all while sound asleep.
Leo had thought he knew everything about these creatures that he had studied for so long: their mating, eating, birthing habits. But what he had not appreciated was the sheer joy they took in playful behaviour, arching their sleek, glittering bodies out of the water, chasing each other and racing through the waves for no other reason than pure fun. He could not join in, but they accepted him as a spectator and, or so it appeared to him, deliberately swam at his slower speed when moving from one territory to another.
Below water they twisted and turned around him, their grey-black bodies weaving tight circles above and below as he swam. I
t was a game, he realised. They were playing with him.
When he dived below the waves they did too, and when he broke the surface they arced out of the water and slid back beneath the sea in single semi-circular movements, sleek, glistening sea creatures reminding him that they, not he, were the masters of their marine environment.
They never got closer to him than a foot or so, but they never let him get too far away. Occasionally he imagined himself a prisoner, held against his will in a colony of seals, shepherded from shore to shore, guarded against predators but prevented from returning to his own kind.
He warmed to the idea that he was a human hostage held by mammals that his kind had for centuries slaughtered and turned into fur caps and candles. He tested the thesis two or three times by leaving the area where his pod had hauled up and slipped quietly into the water. His plan was to swim strongly out to sea for several hundred yards and then turn up the coast, seeing if he could put a headland between himself and the seals. But each time, within minutes a whiskered head would break the surface a few feet away, never looking at him, and quickly submerging again. He knew they were there, though, below the surface and around him in the water.
He knew too that seals had superb underwater eyesight, their large, light-sensitive eyes giving them emmetropic vision in the low-light conditions below the surface. On land, especially in the glittering whiteness of the polar pack ice, the pupils of a seal narrow to thin slits, allowing it to filter out the glare and see well, but only at short distances.
The seal’s incomplete evolutionary cycle had left it stranded halfway between land and sea, and it was on land that this short-sighted, legless, blubber-rich beast was most vulnerable. It was on the Arctic pack ice that seals had been killed by the million in the last 200 years.
Like the seal pups, which had put on weight and gained a layer of blubber in their first few months of life, Leo was learning the dangers of the warming waters and the new season’s northern migration of fish. He could see seals feeding greedily on the bass, herring and flounder in the shallow waters. They would surround a large shoal, charge in to break it up, and then their dark shapes would follow the silver flash of fish through every twist and turn of their flight. He kept still during these hectic chases, treading water, allowing the fleeing fish to flood past him. Helped by his lengthening fingernails, he began to try to catch his first fish by hand.
But with the rich schools of fish came the predators. Leo realised that the pod had moved to Wellfleet for a reason, and he soon realised what it was. The Cape’s only surfing beach, aptly named White Crest Beach, presented a panorama of waves rolling in from the Atlantic, breaking thunderously in the shallows before expiring in foam along miles of beach. To the human ear the surf was an attractive background murmur of sound. Below the surface, where noise was magnified and travelled great distances, it created a mad, roaring cacophony. And it was in this uproar of noise that seals found safety when their great marine enemy the orca, the killer whale, sought its favoured prey.
Leo’s pod knew that a group of killer whales had arrived in the Wellfleet area. The behaviour of the seals and their refusal to leave the surf told him the same story. There was no other reason why the pod would have left the open sea. He knew too that his seals would be listening to the echo-locating clicks that would bounce back telling the orca the distance, size, speed and direction of the object located. And somehow the seals’ computational brains had worked out that these orca were not looking for fish. In the tumble and roar of the incoming waves they sought sanctuary from whales whose only diet was warm-blooded flesh.
Leo could not see the orcas, but he knew they were there. He could sense the seals’ fear as they remained amid the spray and spume of the waves, allowing themselves to be pushed shoreward and then swimming back through the rollers before turning again to stay in the sheltering surf.
The beach was empty of surfers and bathers, so Leo swam closer to shore, seeking out an inlet or cove. Whatever ability he had acquired to survive in shallow waters with the seals, he was not going to try his luck with an orca. To a killer whale he would just be another echo bouncing back, signalling food – a smaller meal than a seal maybe, an hors d’oeuvre rather than the main course, but food all the same. In theory he could rely on the intelligence of the orca to ignore a blubberless 180-pound human and choose instead the meat-rich and fatty 400-pound option on the menu. But he didn’t want to risk it. Even a killer whale can make a mistake.
He had seen what even a small shark bite can do to a human body, and the sight of a white thigh bone showing through a mass of blood and sinew on Mornington beach had become one of those childhood memories that slot into the recesses of the mind and remain there until dementia or death.
Leo crawled on to some flat rocks backing on to high cliffs, and lay on a bed of seaweed. He could see the heads of fifteen or twenty seals in the surf, mostly adults, but with a few pups among them. A solitary walker with a dog appeared at the far end of the beach, forcing him to retreat from the rocks and scoop out a hollow in the soft sand and chalk of the cliff to stay out of sight.
He stared out to sea, knowing the orcas were out there, trying to get a sight of one of their black dorsal fins. Sunlight bounced off the water, creating momentary shapes and shadows as the big swells moved towards the coast. Two miles out, several fishing boats were visible against the horizon.
Then he saw the fins, each a clear two feet above the water. There were five of the killer whales, about ten yards apart, swimming almost in formation, tacking back and forth towards the beach. Moving fast from their position a mile off the coast, they were preparing to attack. It was late afternoon.
Frustrated by the lack of pinpoint direction, but knowing that their prey were somewhere in the surf, the whales switched from their diagonal tacks when some fifty yards from the shore. Almost in line the five orcas charged straight towards the beach and into the breaking waves, thrashing around for victims.
Just as the surf confused the echo system of the whales, so it reduced the ability of the seals’ radar whiskers to determine hostile movement in water. In the surf the seals could see nothing but white foam, hear nothing but the roar of pounding waves; they could no longer receive the myriad sounds and signals of the ocean which their brain could normally translate into information vital to their survival.
After the first attack the seals fled for the open sea, and then turned back as the orcas pursued them, racing for the safety of the surf again. The deadly game of blind man’s buff ended after only a few minutes, with spreading stains of blood visible on the white surf. In the churn of the waves Leo could see glimpses of the black-and-white upper bodies of the orcas, first one, then two, with seals clamped in their jaws, the great heads shaking back and forth to tighten the grip on their struggling prey while the whales backed into deeper water. He imagined what must have happened below the surface. A terrified seal, knowing the enemy was close, twisting and turning in the white roaring world of the surf. In an instant the curtain of water would have ripped apart as the head and jaws of the orca exploded into view at a speed that made flight impossible.
The whales moved off after the first foray. They had taken three or four seals; not a great victory, but enough to provide food for the pod.
That night the surviving seals moved to a beach up the coast, and hauled up further inland than usual, seeking out a soft incline of sandy beach backing on to dunes which gave way to high cliffs. Leo slept a few yards away among the dune grass. It was a warm night, with a light offshore breeze. The stars were clear in the cloudless sky. He fell asleep dreaming of Gloria Gulliver.
The next morning the seals spent longer than usual hauled up and did not go into the water until well after daybreak. At first only two or three older males swam out about 200 yards from the beach and began diving, flattening out across the ocean bed, staying under for several minutes at a time, working their way into deeper water. They were listening for the tell-tale locator click
s of the orca and using the sensitive antennae of their whiskers to decode the distant vibrations of the sea. On land those whiskers folded back into the head but underwater Leo had seen them standing stiffly out from the seals’ faces. He had seen them move their heads back and forth underwater to ensure that no signal from the depths was missed. Whales can communicate with each other across tens, perhaps hundreds of miles of sea and he saw no reason to suppose seals were any different.
He walked into the sea after the first seals and swam with them, always keeping a few feet of distance from the pod scouts. More than ever he felt that this was where he belonged, here in the water with the same animals he had been with since he had been swept overboard. After half an hour the whole pod was in the sea and moving slowly up the coast about 100 yards from the shore. He could see early-morning walkers clearly on the shore and rationally he told himself that they could see him, although at that distance he guessed he would just be another black head of a seal, worth a look but no more.
His species, Homo sapiens, was a few score yards away, walking, sometimes running, on two legs, and swinging its arms after a breakfast of coffee, orange juice and maybe a croissant. Here he was amid a different species, using legs and arms to propel himself through the water after scooping up some seaweed and a late-nesting plover’s eggs for a meal at the break of day. There the reasoning ended. He perceived no mystery in the life he was leading; saw no contradiction between his physical self, his identity as a human being, and the alliance he had forged with wild sea mammals.
It was simple really, he told himself. He had let himself go, severed every connection with the past and had found a new way to live. His family, Margot, Sam and his father were all there but in the outer orbit of his new existence. Like photographs in a family album he looked at them from time to time, smiled at the memories, and closed the book. The one family portrait he could not find in his book of memories, the face that eluded him, was that of Julian. He needed to find him.
On the Broken Shore Page 13
