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.
“I’ll catch up. I needed to talk to you. Privately. You see, I had a rather strange sighting yesterday evening,” he said. “What shall I call this one—a yellow dot?”
Angela spun around. “What did you say?”
“I was looking for you. We finished up early, and I thought you could use a hand with your surveys. When I got about a mile up north I discovered why you didn’t want me tagging along, and how you were able to cover so many circles so quickly.”
“Who have you told?”
“Nobody, yet. Who is he?”
“I can’t say.”
“Why not?”
“I just can’t.”
“You’ll have to report him.”
“There’s no need. He’ll be gone soon.”
“Angela, people know something’s up. And if I don’t say anything and somebody else sees this guy, which is bound to happen, they’re going to think I was in on it, too.”
She could see it in his eyes—he had moved on. He’d found some other naturalist to shadow, and his allegiance would now shift as well, even as he tried to conceal it under that handsome veil of enthusiasm. If he turned Angela in, it would demonstrate his loyalty to the camp, to the penguins. Not to her.
“And there’s no chance you would risk anything on my behalf?” Angela asked.
“It’s not personal, Angela. I’m new here—and I’d like to be invited back next year. If you don’t do it, I will, if for no other reason than to preserve what’s left of our Malbec supply.”
* * *
That day, for the first time, Angela did not visit Aeneas. Instead, she escorted Doug and the others to the South End, where they spent the afternoon weighing and measuring chicks in two dozen flagged nests, nests they’d monitored for more than a decade. She had told Doug that she needed one more day before turning in her companion, and he reluctantly agreed to stay silent. But her one day was passing much too quickly. She needed more time. More time with Aeneas.
“I have to return to camp,” she told Doug, avoiding his eyes. “You work on the nests over by the point.”
Walking the north line, she encountered a penguin dead in his nest. She saw the teeth marks and could tell that a culpeo fox had killed him the night before, not for food but to mark territory. Nothing more than a thrill kill. Bycatch.
Angela looked at the female—sitting on her eggs, eggs that would be abandoned soon, and weaving her head from side to side—and felt herself beginning to cry. She held it in, surprised that she had turned so emotional. The female penguins were never single for long; males in the surrounding bushes were already eying the empty nest. But what Angela had once seen as instinctual head movements she now saw as a creature in mourning.
In the distance, she noticed clouds of dust forming a trail, the sign of a fast-moving vehicle. She made a mental note to remind the guardafauna to post speed-limit signs. Taxis lately had become reckless, trying to squeeze in additional trips before the gate closed. But when Angela mounted the last hill before camp, she saw the source of the dust wasn’t a taxi but a speeding police car, lights flashing.
The police car skidded to a stop at the guardafauna’s gate but only for a second as the guardafauna waved it through. Angela picked up her pace, and then she started running.
The car was going too fast to stop for penguins, and she prayed that none was crossing the road as the car crested the hill. She lost sight of it through the brown dust, but she stayed on the road, dreading the thought of trying to rescue an injured bird, or, worse, having to put one down, which had happened last season.
But either the police were more careful than she thought or the birds more cautious; she didn’t find any injured penguins along the way. Relief turned to fury as she saw the empty police car ahead, its blue lights echoing off tour buses and the darkening hills. Intending to teach the officers a lesson, she began practicing her faded Spanish in her head: Se ponen en peligro los pingüinos. Contacto con sus jefes.
She pushed her way through the crowd. It took her only a moment to ascertain what had happened. There’d been a fight. A tourist, with a bleeding face and hysterical wife, required medical attention. The perpetrator had taken off into the bushes. Police had already begun scouring the colony, disregarding the warning signs and ropes. Penguins on the trail panicked and flapped about.
Angela had a bad feeling, and as the police reviewed tourists’ camcorders, she stood close and watched. She caught a glimpse, on a tiny sun-bleached screen, of man punching man, bloody faces, dust. And one of the men wore a bright yellow jacket.
* * *
She found him on Beacon Hill.
“What the hell happened out there?”
“I was looking for you,” he said. “I thought you might be on the trail.”
“You assaulted a tourist?”
“He nearly stepped on a penguin, Angela. He was completely off the trail, trying to take a close-up photo. I kindly asked him to step back, but he refused. I even said please. But my recidivistic instincts got the better of me.”
“You have to leave.”
“That’s what I was coming to tell you. My ship is on its way. They’re sending a Zodiac. I’ll be gone in an hour.”
She looked out over the water, her mind desperately trying to process everything. The chaos in the camp behind her. This man about to leave her. The anger inside, causing her hands to tremble—or was it fear? She didn’t know what she was feeling anymore.
“Come with me,” he said.
“What?” She turned to face him.
“I said, come with me.”
“Where?”
“To the ship.”
Angela looked into his eyes, wide with excitement, alluring in their depth. She felt her heart stutter as she considered the invitation, the madness of it all. Running away. Freeing herself of Doug. The gossip. The camp. Perhaps it was time to leave it all behind. To start over. To fight a new battle. To have a man in her life instead of more birds.
Then reality sunk in. Penguins in need of counting. A Ph.D. not yet attained. People who depended on her. How could she leave now, after so long? And for this man, this capricious, unreliable drunk of a man?
“We’ll get a new ship,” he said, as if reading her mind, sensing her hesitation. “A ship that patrols only these waters, keeping the trawlers out of the penguin feeding areas. Angela, you’ll do more good for those birds out there than you could ever do counting survivors here.”
“Is that all you think I do, count survivors?”
“Of course not. But at some point you have to ask yourself what’s the good of counting penguins when they’re going extinct.”
“I‘m a scientist. I’m not some warrior.”
“You’re wrong. You are a warrior. And this is a war. Only the battleground has shifted. Those hundred thousand tourists each year are protection enough. If a bus runs over one penguin, you researchers will turn it into a provincial disaster—you said so yourself. Out there, the fishermen kill a thousand penguins a month, and nobody hears a word. You could change all of that. They need someone out there doing what you’ve already accomplished here. Protecting them, instead of counting them. You can’t tell me you’re not weary of diminishing returns.”
“Just leave.”
“I’m going to,” he said.
“I mean now. I don’t care if you swim out of here!”
She was not aware she was shouting, until he got closer to her and she could hear her voice echoing back. For so much of her life she’d kept an emotional distance to prevent exactly these moments—an arm’s length, to prevent getting bitten. She pushed him away, but he resisted. She slapped him, but he kept coming. He grabbed her and hugged her tight until she began to sob. Until she told him about Diesel.
Zero four two two nine.
A number in a log book that would never receive another notation. A number gone dormant, like most of the log book itself, and the story of her life. Numbers upon numbers of birds that one day left shore and never returned. Diesel had grown into so much more than a number. He’d become a husband and a father; he’d remained her friend. And now he was gone, like all the others.
Aeneas listened patiently, until Angela’s face was dry. She stood back, feeling embarrassed.
“Zero four two two nine,” Aeneas said, quietly, almost like an invocation. And she knew that he understood, that his whales were so much more than numbers to him, too—and at the same time she realized she’d found the one person in the world who understood her, who could read her mind, and he was about to leave.
She stepped forward and kissed him before she could talk herself out of it, until he pulled away. She watched him, with blurry eyes, as he limped away, crested the hill and disappeared toward the sea.