Angela sat in the wood-paneled lounge of the Narwhal as waiters in red vests took drink orders. Glenn, the expedition leader, stood at the front of the room, next to the bar, and foreshadowed the next day’s events. A tour of grounded icebergs. A lecture on the leopard seal. A landing on Aitcho Island to view gentoo and chinstrap penguins.
Angela stared out the window, her mind elsewhere. Earlier that day, she’d stood on the rocky shore near Palmer Station and opened the makeshift penguin carrier. The bird had stepped out gingerly, unsure of his surroundings. He was thoroughly cleaned and ready for reentry, but though the water was only ten feet away, he approached it cautiously. Angela told herself that he would quickly find his way back to his colony, though researchers still had little clue as to how penguins navigated the oceans and returned to their homes year after year. Some speculated that they used the moon and the stars, floating on the surface in the darkness. But what about the Southern Ocean, where the night skies were elusive? These were the questions that Angela asked herself, and even asked the penguins when no one was looking.
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 lines 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.