The Tourist Trail

by John Yunker

  She’d wanted to tag this one but did not. This penguin would return to the water as anonymously as it left. No numbers. No names. For so many years she’d managed to keep her emotional distance—and then Diesel had come along, that persistent little bird. Last night, Angela dreamed about him. She’d been swimming underwater, without need for air, and she could see him ahead amid a half-dozen other penguins. She recognized the markings on his belly, a pattern she had memorized long ago. She followed the smudges, the southern cross, until they blurred together and she was floating, lifeless, surrounded by nets, waiting to be pulled in.

  Now, the nameless penguin took a few more tentative steps toward the water’s edge. He looked back at Angela for a moment, like a child waiting for an adult’s approval, then he turned and flopped into the water and was gone.

  Angela looked across the water, hoping to get one more glimpse of him, when she saw the Narwhal pulling into harbor, a large hundred-passenger cruise ship, and an old acquaintance. It was then she knew that she would be returning home soon as well.

  * * *

  Going from the Tern to the Narwhal was like being upgraded to first class. The moment Angela boarded the ship, she became acutely aware of how dirty and ragged her clothes had become; she walked past passengers in jackets so new she expected to see price tags dangling from their sleeves.

  The expedition leader, Glenn, remembered Angela from a cruise she’d worked on years before, and he agreed to return her to Ushuaia in exchange for assisting with landings and nature walks. Making small talk with tourists would be a small price to pay for a trip home. And yet, seated in this room between men in sport jackets and women in silk blouses, so far removed from the battles looming in another part of Antarctica, she felt shortchanged. Mostly, she felt guilty for leaving Aeneas, for slowing his ship’s progress, for choosing one cause over another.

  In the morning, instead of a vegan breakfast, Angela found a buffet of eggs, bacon, sausages, and seafood. She could hear Aeneas’s voice in her head: Animals take only what they need to live, and sometimes less. Humans have buffet lines. She nibbled on fruit and toast.

  The Narwhal dropped anchor just off the Lemaire Channel. Normally, tourists couldn’t get close to an iceberg, but this shallow stretch of water grounded the bergs, providing an opportunity for Zodiac tours. Angela piloted a group of tourists through the labyrinth of ten-story ice sculptures. Two tourists urged her to zoom through a tunnel that cut through the base of one berg, and for a brief moment she actually considered it. She could feel herself back on the Tern, slipping in and out of the icebergs, the friction of ice against steel, the coating of snow on the rear deck. She felt the urge to open up the fuel line, let the engine propel them straight through the tunnel, then another, until the ship was out of sight and they were alone among the sentinels, like a child playing under the table, the joy of being invisible. The voices of the tourists grew louder, urging her to go for it, perhaps anticipating her thoughts.

  She shook her head. “This is as close as we can get, safely,” she said.

  Later, at Aitcho Island, Angela was stationed in the gangway, where the passengers queued with their parkas and life vests buckled. One by one, they stepped into buckets of disinfectant, sterilizing their boots before walking down a short metal stairway to the outstretched arms of the naturalist manning the inflatable.

  On land, Angela led a group of six adults and two teenagers up to a chinstrap colony half a mile up a steep slope. The smell of guano was a welcome reminder of her past visits, and she watched the tourists wrinkle their noses. The penguins in Argentina, by virtue of being widely dispersed and living in burrows with absorbent soil, did not give off the same level of odor—but Angela loved the smell of Antarctic penguins. After one trip, she’d held off washing a pair of cargo pants just so she could remember her time there. When she’d confessed this to Shelly, Shelly had suggested that this was one reason Angela had difficultly meeting men.

  There were no burrows here in Antarctica, only piles of rocks stained red and white by decades of guano. Angela looked around, losing herself for a moment before remembering that she had a job to do. “Why do you think they established their colony way up here?” she asked the group as they stood among the jagged rocks at the top of the hill.

  “To avoid the gentoos?” an older man asked.

  “Perhaps,” Angela said. “The colonies don’t interact much with one another. But there’s a more practical reason why these penguins chose this particular slice of hill. And if it were sunny out, it would become more obvious.”

  “No snow,” said one of the teenagers.

  “Exactly. When there is snow on the ground, the penguins cannot incubate their eggs. This piece of land is more exposed to the sun and tends to dry out more quickly than the areas down below.”

  As Angela watched a trio of penguins lean their way up the hill, she realized how much their movements mirrored her own life—a constant, methodical gait, always ending up back where she started. The penguins, of course, knew no better: All they knew was how to eat and reproduce and stay alive. Angela began to wish her own life could be as simple.

  On the Zodiac back to the ship, a penguin porpoised next the boat—a Magellanic. Was it headed home? she wondered. Or was it lost? Even penguins sometimes got lost. A Magellanic was found in a Humboldt colony in Chile one day last year, a thousand miles away from any Magellanic colony, standing alone on the beach, turning its head from side to side. Eventually, Shelly sent a researcher to retrieve it.

  At dinner, Angela sat at a table of passengers, making herself available for questions. But her dining companions talked only of the animals they had not yet seen, pictures not yet taken, to-do lists not yet completed. An overfed man in his sixties who carried a satellite phone on his hip made a stupid joke about the length of the walrus penis.

  “Twenty-eight inches,” he said.

  Twenty-seven inches longer than yours, Angela wanted to say.

  “You’re not having toothfish?” a female passenger asked.

  “I don’t eat fish,” Angela said.

  “You’re missing out,” said the woman’s husband. “You don’t get fresh Patagonian toothfish any day. Plus, they use a sustainable fishery.”

  “Guilt-free,” the woman said, smiling.

  Angela felt her shoulders tighten. “They can say it’s sustainable, but they don’t know for sure.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The toothfish live two thousand feet below the surface,” Angela said. “It takes them seven years to reproduce, and there has never once been a census of any kind conducted. It’s easy to say that these fish are sustainable if nobody can verify that they’re not.”

  “Then why would they tell us that it’s sustainable?” The woman seemed irritated.

  “Because they use a fishery that adheres to certain quotas. But that doesn’t take into account the poachers, the pirates, the ships who frequent the same fishing areas and take whatever they can, longline and all.”

  “What are you saying?” the woman asked. “We can’t eat toothfish anymore?”

  “Excuse me.” Angela stood and made her way to the observation deck. She could picture the woman complaining to Glenn, another door of her career closing behind her. But she didn’t care.

  With everyone inside at dinner, she was alone on the deck, a familiar feeling. And her mind was vacillating in a familiar way as well—a part of her wondering why she’d left Aeneas, another part realizing why. From the moment she’d boarded his ship, she’d been looking for reasons to leave, to go back home. It was safer that way. She couldn’t stand to have another Diesel in her life.

  * * *

  It was late, and the lounge was deserted. The only people awake were in the engine room and on the bridge. As the boat churned its way into the Drake, Angela made her way to the computer room and found it empty. Usually there were lin
es of people waiting to check email or send off photos. But the late hour and the high waves had given her a moment of peace.

  She input the URL, an address she had memorized long ago for a web site hosted by a satellite company, the company from which her research group rented time. She entered her user ID, a password, and then watched the map assemble itself in pieces. It was a map of the South Atlantic Ocean with scattered red dots blinking against a blue background—each dot representing a penguin wearing a transmitter.

  She entered a new number, the number of the transmitter that she carried with her from Punta Verde, the transmitter that she’d activated the night before tucking it away in the upper back pocket of Aeneas’s yellow jacket—a jacket so bogged down with Blow Pops and maps and other gear that he would never notice the extra few ounces, or the small antenna peeking out of the zipper.

  The map redrew itself, filling out the Southern Ocean in blue, outlining the jagged edges of Antarctica. And then it appeared—a pulsing red dot in the Amundsen Sea. Nearly a thousand miles away from her now, with the distance steadily increasing.

  She felt her body relax. She was with him again, and he was still above water. She pictured him with the Blow Pop in his hand, barking out commands as the Tern approached a whaling ship. For six weeks—eight possibly, until the battery died—she would be with him. She wouldn’t have to let go of him, not yet.

  Robert

  Despite the thrill of catching one of the FBI’s more elusive suspects, now that Robert had applied the handcuffs and read Aeneas his rights, he found himself plagued with second thoughts. Once the angst had been released from his body, the feelings buried much deeper began working their way to the top. For a brief moment, after pointing his gun at him, Robert wanted to fall to his knees and beg forgiveness. For so many years he’d craved the opportunity, hoping that the very act of asking for it would ease the pain.

  The crew assembled around the deck. Aeneas looked at his troops and nodded agreeably as he scanned their faces. “Remember, you still have a job to do. You are here for the whales. I do not need rescuing. Forget about me. But don’t forget about them.”

  With his own Zodiac damaged beyond repair, Robert pointed Aeneas into one of the Tern’s Zodiacs, and they were lowered into the water. The boat had been prepped for battle, with a mass of barbed wire in the bow. Aeneas sat to one side; Robert stood holding the engine tiller. Above them on the main deck, the crew members watched silently, as well as Lynda. She would stay with the Tern as Robert transferred Aeneas to the Roca. From there, they would transport him by helicopter to the research base at McMurdo.

  As they bounced across the waves, Aeneas gestured toward the Takanami Maru in the distance. “What is wrong with this picture?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Tell me why they haven’t run? The goddamned Argentine navy is here, and they’re still hanging around, business as usual.”

  Robert could imagine what was going through Aeneas’s mind, but he didn’t want to get lured into looking at the world through his eyes. Empathy was a risk at times like these. It made you indecisive, compassionate, weak. And in those weak moments, you were most vulnerable to your enemy.

  “Let’s go after it,” Aeneas said, with a grin on his face. “You drive, and I’ll toss the prop fouler. Like old times. You can’t tell me you don’t miss this, at least a little bit.”

  Robert resisted the bait and kept his eyes straight ahead.

  “Fair enough,” Aeneas said. A moment later, he added, “But you can’t tell me you don’t miss Noa. For what it’s worth, she misses you too.”

  “Noa’s dead.”

  “Denial isn’t healthy, Jake. But if it’s closure you seek, that is certainly one way to go about it.”

  Robert ignored him, ignored the old name, telling himself that he was being baited, tricked. Aeneas always knew his opponents’ weaknesses, and he knew Robert’s well.

  “You don’t believe me? Then how about this,” Aeneas said. “I tell you where she is, and you let me have one last shot at the Japanese.”

  Robert eased up on the throttle. “Give me one good reason why I should believe you.”

  “She’s still single.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I,” Aeneas said. “I found Noa on the ice that day. It was a miracle that we both didn’t fall through. Turned out she had a radio on her after all. So we survived. As did you.”

  Robert stared at him, wanting to believe him but at the same time knowing he shouldn’t.

  “Perhaps you still feel regret,” Aeneas continued. “Perhaps you’re looking for redemption. The least you could do is find a cause worth defending, something more important than a flag.”

  “By this you mean a whale?”

  “Nature tolerates us like one tolerates a headache. But it will not miss us when we’re gone. Didn’t you learn anything on my ship?”

  “I learned how to fight a losing battle.”

  “Who said anything about losing? Nature is on our side, and she’s patient.”

  Robert sighed. “Don’t make me regret this,” he said.

  Aeneas looked back at the Japanese ship, now diminishing on the horizon, then held up his handcuffed wrists, awaiting the key.

  Robert shook his head. “First you tell me where she is.”

  “There is plenty of time for talk. They’re getting away.”

  Robert unlocked the handcuffs, then cut off a length of thick plastic line from the prop fouler and tossed it at Aeneas’s feet.

  “What’s this for?”

  “Tie one end to your right ankle and the other end to that hook on the floor.”

  “Do you honestly think I’m going to try to swim away?”

  “Just a little insurance. To make sure you don’t get too carried away out there.”

  Aeneas sat on the edge of the boat and fastened one end to his ankle.

  “You can do better than that,” Robert said.

  Aeneas glanced up, then cinched the rope tight. He leaned over and fastened the other end to the floor. A shiny metal necklace dangled below his collarbone.

  “What’s that?” Robert asked.

  “It’s a penguin tag. Supposed to bring me luck.”

  “Doesn’t seem to be working all that well.”

  “Better to be an optimist who fails than a pessimist who succeeds,” Aeneas said, then grabbed a length of wire. “Into the breach.”

  Robert opened the throttle, and they leapt over the waves toward the Japanese ship. Robert felt a vague rush of adrenaline as they chased the five-story monster, remembering piloting the boat with Noa, watching her hair fly as she held the prop fouler, determined and patient.

  Everything was in motion: the waves, the factory ship in the distance, the clouds above, the icebergs they navigated. Aeneas was right about the Japanese vessel—it demonstrated no fear of confrontation. As they got closer, Robert glimpsed men looking down at them over a railing.

  As they drew alongside and began to approach the bow, sharp blasts of water sprayed down from above, the fire hoses at work. Then a popping noise.

  “They’re firing on us,” Aeneas said.

  Robert followed the noise to a man with a rifle, leaning over the railing. Robert pulled his gun and quickly released three rounds. The man slumped backwards, and Robert could not tell whether it was by fear or by force.

  They were now drawing even with the bow of the ship. Aeneas held the prop fouler in both hands, waiting for Robert to cut across. Robert knew they had to be close enough to the ship so that the line would be consumed by the ship’s natural currents, sliding under the hull and into the propellers. If they deployed too far ahead of the ship, the line could get pushed aside or too far below. Robert pulled ahead, eyes on the ship, preparing to veer across the bow. “You ready?” he asked.

 
But as he glanced at Aeneas, he saw that Aeneas was looking at something else, and Robert followed his eyes to see a Zodiac appearing out of nowhere, bearing down on them. Robert pulled on the tiller, but not in time. The deck beneath him heaved up, and he was in the air, then in the water, freezing water seeping through the cracks of his poorly sealed immersion suit.

  The sky went black, or maybe it was the water and the fact that the hull of the Maru was passing by, blocking the sun. Robert couldn’t think, he could only kick and paddle and pull his body back to the surface. He began to fear blacking out from the shock of the cold and the lack of air.

  The sun returned, and he could see the sky through the water. He struggled for it, broke the surface, and heard himself panting, sucking in the air, then coughing up the water he ingested along the way. The ship? He looked to his left and could see the Maru moving away. Aeneas? He didn’t see anyone else in the water, but he saw the rubbery outline of a Zodiac bobbing in and out of his line of vision, about a dozen yards away. He began swimming toward it, remembering how he’d leashed Aeneas to the boat, hoping now that he wasn’t trapped beneath it.

  But as he neared the Zodiac, he saw that it was upright and empty. He grabbed the outer handle and hung on for a few moments, gathering strength before pulling himself inside. He knelt on his knees and scanned the iceberg-strewn horizon, squinting into the patches of fog that had just begun to pockmark the landscape. He watched the Maru, pursuing another whale, nearly disappear into the mist. Robert could not see the all-white Tern at all. And Aeneas? The other Zodiac? He looked at the water for signs of shredded rubber floating, but amid the high waves and clouds of fog, he detected nothing.

  Then the Maru emerged from the fog, having turned and headed back in Robert’s direction, still in pursuit of its prey. Robert was tempted to fire off a couple more shots—perhaps he could save the whale, if nothing else about this mission—but when he reached for his gun, he realized it was gone, sunk to the bottom of the ocean.