by John Yunker
“You ruined the nest,” she said.
“This place is a mine field.”
“It’s not any easier for the penguins, but they manage. We’re a mile inland, and look at all these nests. It takes a penguin two hours to get here. But they do it all the time, and they don’t complain. And they don’t collapse each others’ nests.”
Aeneas grunted as he pulled himself up. Angela ignored his grimace and his limp as she pulled out a five-meter length of rope, her notebook, and Shelly’s map of the colony. By counting penguins within five-meter circular plots placed twenty meters apart, they’d get a reasonably accurate population estimate. And although Angela had been doing this on her own, finding the edges of a circle was best accomplished with two people. She stood Aeneas in the middle of one of Shelly’s mapped circles, a measured piece of rope in one hand, her notebook in the other, while she walked the perimeter, holding the other end of the rope, calling out what she found: single male, active pair, one egg, two eggs, inactive nest.
“So is the colony growing or shrinking?” he asked.
“Shrinking. Though I can’t say how much. That’s why we’re here.”
“How many of these circles do we have to do?” he asked.
“You have somewhere better to be?”
“I’m just curious.”
“A hundred or so,” Angela said. “I could try calling your ship from our research station.”
“They’ll call me. Fortunately, my satphone is waterproof,” he said. “Are you trying to get rid of me?”
She didn’t answer him. He’d been there for two nights now, and Angela wasn’t sure how long she could keep him hidden from the rest. At least keeping him close to her kept him away from the others. The circles would last for another day or so, and then what? He drank too much. He continued to reach for her, beginning with her shoulder, resting a hand, then two, massaging her neck. She no longer resisted. When he drank he also talked, and she found his stories exciting.
That night, she brought two bottles of Malbec. “To celebrate a hard day’s work,” she said. As they began to pass the first bottle between them, she asked him how he’d gotten his alias.
“When we took our first whaling ship out of commission, I spray-painted Aeneas across the hull,” he said. “I figured it would confuse them. It did, for a period. But the name stuck.”
“Why Aeneas?”
“Because he was fearless. Because he was a man without a country, a man without a port.”
Aeneas stood and looked through the darkness toward the ocean. He looked anxious to return, and Angela felt bad for reminding him that he was not out there. She tried to steer him back toward land.
“Where will you go when the whaling season ends?” she asked.
“I’ll head north. There’s always a hunting season for something somewhere.”
“Don’t you have a home to return to?”
“My home is the ship.”
“But don’t you rest at all?”
“Do you?”
Angela smiled. “No.”
“As long as there are fishermen out there, I’ll be out there. Fishermen don’t fish anymore. They slaughter, obliterate, expunge. They use vacuums, for fuck’s sake. That’s not fishing. That’s extermination. When you raise cattle, you at least feed them. But fishermen don’t feed fish. They just take. They even take the food the fish eat. Sheer avarice. I could kill them all.”
He emptied the bottle.
“How’d you end up here, in Argentina?” Angela asked.
He paused, then reached for the second bottle. “A few weeks ago,” he said, “we came across a fishing trawler poaching in protected waters. I got in a Zodiac and started pulling in their longline. One of my volunteers was helping.” He uncorked the bottle and drank before offering it to Angela. She shook her head.
“She was young, and it was her first season with us,” he continued. “She was all fired up, and stubborn as hell. I had a difficult time saying no to that woman. I should have. I should have left her back on the ship.”
He went silent, and Angela waited. She was learning that he tended to communicate in waves of dialogue, broken up by gaps of wind-blown silence. Initially, the silence made her nervous, and she filled the gaps with penguin trivia. But he wasn’t really listening to her, so she eventually let the silence flow over the both of them. She came to enjoy the intimacy between people who were silent together.
“I was piloting the Zodiac, she was hauling in the line. Dangerous work. Every fifteen feet there’s a razor-sharp hook the size of your index finger. Anyway, the trawler saw what we were doing, and they ran right at us. We should have tossed the line and got out of there. This trawler was huge—about twenty times bigger than us. But I thought I could dodge it and keep on pulling in the line. I cut across the front of their bow, too close.” He took a long drink. “I should have left her on the ship,” he said again.
“Did she drown?”
“No. She got caught up in the long line. Pulled into the water. She was sucked into the props.”
“Oh my God.”
“We never found the body. In all my time doing this sort of thing, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, we’ve never lost a life. Came close plenty of times. But we always were a bit luckier than we deserved. Until that day. I only wish it was me who went into the water.”
“I’m sorry.”
“One wrong move, and I’m no longer an activist,” he said. “I’m a terrorist.”
“What about your crew? Won’t they be arrested?”
“The ship will be boarded, if it hasn’t already happened. But it’s me they want.”
* * *
The next day, they made good time on their circles. Aeneas was a reliable partner, quiet and focused, but always quick to make a joke when the opportunity arose. Angela could see why a woman married him. Yes, he belched and cursed like a sailor, but he also listened like a therapist as she rambled on about oil spills and overfishing. She told him that she hadn’t dated a man in three years and not many men before that. But he didn’t judge her, or if he did, he kept his thoughts to himself. For lunch, they sat on a berm overlooking the beach, not far north from where she first discovered him. They watched the wind blurring the tops of the folding waves, blowing spray into the air.
“Did you always want to protect penguins?” Aeneas asked.
“I used to think I was going to study the albatross.”
“Makes sense.”
“How so?”
“The albatross keeps to itself.” He stopped, but she knew where he was headed, and she resisted arguing. He was right, after all; she, too, was a loner.
“Actually,” she said, “my vision isn’t all that good, so my professor at the time told me to focus on birds that I could get a bit closer to.”
After lunch, he helped her attach a satellite transmitter to a male penguin. He had an impressive grip that held the bird steady as Angela applied the device.
“Since we started using these transmitters five years ago,” she said, “the penguins have been traveling farther and farther away from the colony. Some travel more than a hundred miles each way.”
“One hell of a commute,” he said.
“It’s because of the fishing trawlers. You know how they operate—they take all the fish close to shore. And we can only measure distance. We can’t measure the fear these penguins feel when the fishing grounds they have known their entire lifetimes disappear overnight. Or the stress a female with its young undergoes because the male must travel farther and farther out. All we can measure are the paths they travel. We need more measurements. We can watch them around the clock when they’re on land, but we know so little about their lives out there. And the more we know about penguins, the more we will know about the oceans. If the ocean is healthy, they are healthy. And if the ocean is dying�
�”
Angela stopped herself. She was rambling, her voice shaking, and she did not want him to see her so upset. She’d finished attaching the transmitter, and she released the penguin and watched him scurry off toward the water. Aeneas was silent. She was thankful until she raised her eyes and realized that he was not watching the penguin but was watching her.
“The Romans used to believe you could tell the future by studying birds,” he said. “They looked for omens, good and bad, in their flight patterns. Wars were waged based on whether or not a particular bird passed by. One might say it was an absurd religion they followed, the leaders relying on augurs to tell them what the flying gods had in store. I don’t agree. Nature is a god. And you, Angela, are its augur.”
She didn’t know what to say and was grateful when he changed the subject. “What’re those?” he asked, pointing toward three rabbit-like creatures in the distance.
“Those are mara. They’re unique to Patagonia.”
“Do you count them too?”
“No. But they could certainly use an advocate because they’re endangered. They’re strictly monogamous. The ranchers used to say that if you kill one mara, you have to kill its mate as well, because it will never breed again.”
“Romantic, in a ruthless sort of way.”
“Penguins are also monogamous, but practical. If they lose a mate, they’ll rebound quickly. Not maras. They mourn for years, some forever.”
“How long will it take you to get over me?” he asked, a smile on his face.
“Why don’t you leave, and we’ll see?”
He laughed so loudly the mara scattered. And she realized how long it had been since she’d made a man laugh out loud.
“You want to switch?” he asked as they stood to return to their census taking.
Angela was pleased, if a little surprised, to see him taking an interest. And so she taught him the difference between quilambay and lyceum bushes, how to guess a penguin’s age by the dark rings in its eyes, how to spot flipper tags from twenty yards. She enjoyed watching him grunt and curse as he crawled on the dirt, straining to see into the burrows. A man of the water, he was far removed from his element, and he lumbered about like the penguins. Earlier, as they’d sat on the rocks of a dry river bed, a harmless snake had made him spill his water bottle.
During the circles, occasionally she would notice him looking eastward, toward the ocean, even if it was hidden behind the hills. She pretended not to notice, feeling a slight ache in her chest. She wanted to read his mind, to know how he felt about her, but men were a species she’d never understood; she had not been with enough men to draw statistically valid findings.
That evening, she took him to a spot she usually visited alone—the edge of a red cliff that looked out over the water. The wind was so loud they just sat there, sandwiches in hand, as the penguins emerged in herds from the water. She took him there because she knew what he wanted, but as he scanned the horizon she hoped there would be no ships today.
She wanted to shave his beard, see his face in full, smooth and warm and up close. Then she caught herself and turned to thoughts of nests to be counted.
Robert
The sun was setting as Robert climbed the ladder to the roof of the harbormaster station, a one-story structure at the foot of the cruise ship pier, where Lynda sat on a folding metal chair behind an air-conditioning unit, binoculars on her lap. From the roof, Robert had a clear view of Puerto Madryn, a modest resort town lining a three-mile crescent of sand and sidewalk. At the far end of the pier was the Tern. Robert wanted it closer, but the other spaces were reserved for the 3,000-passenger ships that kept the town’s economy running. Fortunately, those ships were absent today, giving Robert and Lynda an unobstructed view.
After they’d documented every crew member, searched the ship—again, and with dogs—they’d continued their surveillance in twelve-hour shifts. It was now day two, and Robert knew they couldn’t keep up this pace. While staring at a ship sounded simple enough, fighting boredom and sleep was hard work. Robert’s mind wanted to wander and usually succeeded.
The harbormaster had volunteered to help, and while Robert didn’t trust him, he wasn’t going to turn down another set of eyes. For all of Robert’s lobbying, the only help the navy had offered before leaving him and Lynda in the harbor was to leash the Tern to the pier with a three-inch thick chain, which, as Robert could see through the binoculars, still remained intact. Although an arc welder could slice through it in an hour or so, anything that would slow them down was worth using.
Robert had called Gordon and asked him to pull more strings with the Argentines, to get them another boat, but Gordon told him they were out of strings and low on agents. When he added Merry Christmas just before hanging up, Robert remembered that the holiday was just a few days away.
He could smell the harbormaster’s cigar smoke wafting up through the downstairs window as he handed Lynda a soda from the bag he carried. He picked up her binoculars to take a look. “Did I miss anything?” he asked.
“A produce delivery. A few games of Hacky Sack. The chef waved at me a few hours ago. I waved back. Then he brought me a tofu and tomato sandwich. It wasn’t bad.”
“You need some sleep,” he said.
“Easier said than done. I’m covered with bed-bug bites. Is your room as bad as mine?”
“Why do you think I took the night shift?”
Lynda grabbed her binoculars back. Robert was warming up to her, beginning to relax again, to put this mission in perspective. In the end, this was just another job; he was just another government employee. He needed to stay focused on the smallness of his life, even when he suspected the stakes were not quite so small.
“Maybe Aeneas really is gone,” Lynda said.
“No. Here’s around here somewhere. He won’t leave his boat behind. He’s just waiting for the right moment to sneak onboard.”
“Suppose he does sneak onboard, and they torch through the chain and tear ass out of the harbor. Then what? It’s not like we can pull them over.”
“I know that. You know that. But for all they know, the navy is waiting for them just off the coast. I expect them to pull a stunt similar to what they did in Miami. Create a disturbance. Or catch us off guard. Unless, of course, we happen to catch them off guard, which is what I expect to do. Which is why you need to get some sleep.”
“Okay, okay. If you need me, I’ll be at the Ritz.” Lynda grabbed her backpack and descended the ladder. Robert watched her walk along the main street, then turn right at Nuevo de Julio. He welcomed the solitude. Alone, he could let his guard down, enjoy a few hours free of probing questions.
Robert raised his binoculars. The windows of the lower decks glowed, but the bridge remained dark; perhaps they were up there watching him. A part of him wanted to sneak down and unlock the chains, let them slip away, along with the past. Call Gordon and tell him Aeneas had gotten away. It would not be the first time.
* * *
Robert snapped awake to the cool spatter of rain on his face. He blinked the sleep out of his eyes to find a leviathan of a cruise ship towering over him like an office building, blocking his view of the Tern. He stood up too quickly, then fell back onto his chair, his mind hazy.
He glanced at his watch: 6:15 a.m. On the cruise ship’s dock below, crewmembers in light blue jumpsuits were scurrying about, dragging ropes, shouting back and forth in an Asian language; the ship had arrived only moments ago, and he’d slept right through it.
Robert slid down the ladder and sprinted across the concrete embarcadero, bracing himself for a view of an abandoned pier, pieces of chain scattered about. But when he cleared the cruise ship, he saw the Tern anchored at the end of the pier, right where he’d left it.
He stopped and caught his breath. He leaned against a nearby bench but didn’t sit; he couldn’t risk nodding off again. He needed to rem
ain on his feet until sunrise, until Lynda returned. Through his binoculars, the chain that stretched from the Tern to the pier appeared untouched. The windows along the hull and upper decks were dark. Then he noticed a pulse of light on the observation deck above the bridge, and he adjusted his focus. It was the light of a small phone, bathing Lauren’s face in a pale yellow glow. Robert assumed she was talking to Aeneas, based on her animated expressions, the way she paced the deck.
Suddenly conscious of eyes upon him, he gazed up at the white steel ship, with Emperor of the Seas emblazoned across the bow, and noticed silhouetted bodies in windows several stories up. They seemed to be watching him with the same curiosity in which he was watching the Tern.
Angela
For three days Angela and Aeneas circled and counted nests. Long enough to develop routines, long enough for her to begin wishing his ship would never return.
But Shelly would be back any day now, and her arrival would bring Angela’s secret field trips to an end. Other naturalists had started to question why they couldn’t attend to nests up north. People, like penguins, had their territories and rituals, and Angela had disrupted them. Penguins, at least, didn’t nag.
That morning, after sending the teams yet again to the south, Angela returned to the office and pored over spreadsheets of satellite tracking data. Rows and columns of times and transmitter I.D.s and coordinates. She leaned over a large map of the South Atlantic and cross-checked every coordinate, every I.D., hoping for a number out of place, a false positive, a statistical outlier.
Doug entered and hovered over her shoulder.
“Still no sign of Diesel?” he asked.
She wanted to elbow him in the stomach but instead kept her eyes on the charts. “Shouldn’t you be in the South End by now?” she asked.
